The voice of Karen Carpenter was singing from the Journey’s CD player as we pulled out of the Winnebago Visitors Center this morning. No rush, it was 11 am but we don’t have a particular time to be anywhere at the moment. It felt good. Too often we’re traveling under a deadline to get somewhere, but this trip is different. We’ll get to Marti’s sister’s house in Ohio when we get there.
While we were getting the Journey and the Element hooked up and ready to go, we watched an convoy of about six Class C Minnie Winnies head out, some of the 600 purchased by an Alaskan RV Rental company. Each rig had an older couple driving it, we wondered how long the adventure would take to deliver each motorhome. It must be quite a trip, and getting paid to do it, too must be icing on the cake.
The day was beautiful, sunny, warm and of course windy, but that didn’t bother us as we tooled along.
We availed ourselves of a nice feature the Iowa rest stops have, free dump stations. Sure beats paying five bucks to dump at a Flying J. That water you see is from the rinse hose, not somebody missing the dump hole.
We decided to stop for the night at a Walmart off I-80 (198 miles driven). We needed to restock the cupboards and they said it was okay to stay overnight, so it’s a win-win for us. We’re here in a huge parking lot with a half dozen other RVs.
Across the street is a Steak and Shake. Hmm, this may be an even better stop than we originally thought. ;c)
Now that the Journey has been serviced and all the repairs and little odds and ends items have been made right, Murphy just can’t resist a perfectly working RV. One of the day-night shade’s string broke, so I took it down, I need to see out of that window when pulling out on the highway. I have a restringing repair kit in my spare parts stock so we’ll be correcting the broken parts when we have a picnic table to work on.
I know many folks have upgraded to the MCD shades, while they are nice (and expensive!), some new string and an hour of my time is worth it to me to repair the shade. It hung in there (pun intended) for seven years so I’m not complaining.
It just wouldn’t be RVing without something to tinker with! :c)
Thanks for visiting and feel free to leave a comment.
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Never had a string break but the little plastic thing on the bottom has broken on a few. Enjoy your leisurely journey and smell some roses.
ReplyDeleteI think we had to restring four shades in the six years we had the Meridian. The View has the MCD shades and I love them:)
ReplyDeleteOooh I tried and tried to restring ours in the old Coachmen rig we had. Finally I called a home furnishing store that carried Levelor blinds to ask them what to do. They put me in touch with a retired gent who used to work for Levelor and would do "side jobs" for them for cash. I called him and brought our rig to his house for an "overnight" in his driveway. He had such fun hanging out in our rig and restrung them all for us! ($20 a blind, included the cord) his wife was dying of cancer and they would never have a change to travel in an RV ... so they played in ours and ate lunch and watched tv and assured us they didnt sleep in it or use the toilet! haha how cute! But he said after seeing ours, he would consider renting one now from the local RV dealer for a weekend with his wife while she could do a short trip... How wonderful they considered doing that before it's too late.
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Karen and Steve
(Blog) RVing: The USA Is Our Big Backyard
http://kareninthewoods-kareninthewoods.blogspot.com
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Ha! Your short day would be a long one for me. David has gotten really good at restringing. At 9 two of Winnona's broke so now we carry extra string for the same reason you do. It really doesn't take all that long once you know how. I did get MCDs for the bedroom though since I like it pitch black in there. Safe travels.
ReplyDeleteWhere do we sign up for taking a Minnie Winnie to Alaska. I wish I had thought of that. Yes, you would be bored with nothing to fix.
ReplyDeleteSteak and Shake, Walmart, and a free dump station, all in Iowa! It sure doesn't get much better than that! :)
ReplyDeleteSounds like you definitely have it made at Walmart. It's amazing how RV life has taught us to appreciate the little things. We've talked about replacing our shades but figure there's no rush to that. We'll wait until one of our strings break probably before we talk about it again. No sense in fixing something that doesn't need fixing.
ReplyDeleteI have restrung all 6 of our blinds, a couple of them twice, Even have done a half dozen for fellow rv'ers too. Really not that hard, just take your time, we are fulltime, we do have the time.
ReplyDeleteI had no patience for re-stringing blinds. When strings broke on the suncruiser we just replaced them with cellular blinds from Lowes.
ReplyDeleteI'm impressed. Under 200 miles!
ReplyDeleteOur day/night shades had seen much better days and we replaced all of them with MCDs in Feb. We saved a lot of $ by installing them ourselves. LOVE them!
Tell me more about driving a Minnie Winnie to Alaska. That sounds pretty interesting.
Glad those colds are doing better and you were able to head on down the road.
ReplyDeleteI looked at restringing blinds on our old 5'er and gave up before I even started. Good luck with yours.
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