I had to know which RV was best. We talked with the closest expert available, who happened to be the person in charge of pulling out our slide and doing a 2-day repair-- Carlos Armando Alonso. Carlos is the son of the owners of America Choice RV (repair) Armando and Miram Alonso. They'd been in business since 1979, and Carlos has 18 years of working experience. He summarized everything he'd learned after seeing and working on thousands of RVs over the years. I was an eager listener, since all of my brain-files were empty on the subject. (It had just never been a matter of interest since I'd never wanted to give up working...and certainly never wanted to live in an RV.) Carlos explained that the answer to my question was online...for anyone to see. You just type in the name of the model or manufacturer you are interested in and read as much as you want to, including reviews. I told him I'd seen more Winnebago products than any other type in his shop. I had two hypotheses: I figured they weren't as reliable as they used to be, or they were so popular that they make up a large percentage of units in use. Carlos said it was the latter, that there are more faithful owners of Winnies than any other make.
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| We had a sad-bad room during the repair |
Carlos said there really isn't a problem in the industry with any company producing lemons. "They are all moving houses with lots of mechanical parts, and they all need repair at some point." He said the big mistake owners make is they tend to park them and forget them....not knowing that they are nullifying their warranty. I knew that all Four Winds have a warning in the owner's manual that you have to do a
maintenance check at least once every 6 months. Carlos said if you don't go around your RV and check the seals and roof and the integrity of all of the parts, your warranty will not go beyond one year...even if it is a 6-year warranty (which is what we have): no maintenance = no guarantees. I think he could see I was a bit upset. I mentioned the fact that the back corner must have separated along the roof line of our RV because I could see light from the outside when I looked up to the roof from inside my clothes closet. Ouch! I wanted to know what kind of sealant to use, but instead of telling me, he said when we came back from our (wretched) motel stay (necessary since our RV was going to be on the rack for 2 days), that he'd walk around the 31K with me and give me maintenance suggestions. Whew. That did put me at ease....somewhat.
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| Rv Earthquake Mess |
Why does a brand-new RV need maintenance? The major reason is
each time you drive your home down the road it experiences at least a magnitude 5 earthquake. I know if you lie down on our bed in the back while traveling, your tailbone is going to slam (hard) into the wooden bed platform. Ouch! And we all know how cans love to fall out of cupboards. Bob is fearless when it comes to the type of roads we travel, so we've experienced some news-worthy earthquakes in our time. Once he went straight up a dirt road that went over a mountain divide. It was on an impulse, as we had no idea where it went. The road had no switchbacks. It just angled up into the sky! Within minutes my bike had bounced up and off of the rack and was drug along until the tread was ground off of its tires. I became a witch about "no more dirt roads"...and our manual for our new RV actually states: "no unpaved roads". So there's multiple ways you can void your warranty. One way, that I'm still amazed at, was demonstrated by an owner of a nice RV who backed down a boat ramp, right into the water, over his tail pipe...just to get his boat in the water. Crazy.... Crazy about fishing, that it.
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| Sunliner's Provincial |
I still thought there was one RV manufacturer that was the best. Carlos liked Thor and said he'd never seen the problems our own Four Winds was having... but then he took some time to sift through all of his experiences and admitted that
the BEST manufacturer (of all time) had to be Sunliner. He said he had looked and looked but had never found any weaknesses in it. He raved about its reliability to the point that I had to ask another mechanic if he felt the same way, and he said
Sunliner was the best. All of the mechanics I've talked with say
there is no perfect RV...but Sunliner comes close. If you go to their site, they definitely have a different approach and novel construction techniques. Leave it to the Aussies, but Carlos said they went out of business. Quality perhaps hurts the bottom line too much.....???
I asked a mechanic if my conclusion might be correct: "If all RVs were made by Sunliner, then repair garages would be out of business." He didn't hesitate to say, "That would be true."
I tried to take a photo of each of the places where our children played long ago...as I could still seem to hear their giggles in the breeze. I was clicking away when I was surprised by a flock of "pterodactyls" flying overhead. Memory jog! Our son, Nathan, had hit the ground as soon as he first left the safety of our old station wagon upon our arrival in 1984. Why? Bob had yelled "Pterodactyls!" as a flock of giant blue herons flew closely overhead! Below is the much-changed 2011 beach and playground, but the picnic pavilion where our youngest was "married" (at age 3) to another young camper is much the same.
