Surprise, Surprise!

Well I am sure some of you very observant readers have noticed I haven't announced our arrival in Florida as planned.  We have been caught up in a totally unexpected issue with our brand new truck.  We finished up our trip to get it as I shared last post and got it back here to Georgia where we were going to mount the roof rack and Rod Vault, repack the new truck and make our way to Florida a couple weeks ago.

We got the truck reloaded and really enjoyed our new multi-function tailgate which made it so much easier.

Weather here has definitely turned cold, so Jan dug out our very last quart of the fantastic seafood stew from the Red Barn in Maine for lunch, yummy.

We had ordered new glasses earlier and got a call that our glasses had come in and were ready for pickup, so we jumped in the truck Monday morning and headed down to Marietta.  On the way we didn't think things were right, the new truck wasn't maintaining speed on cruise control even up the little hills on the interstate and didn't seem to have any snot at all, and this was the truck that startled us how fast it was bringing it back?????  We picked up our glasses, had lunch and talked about what should we do?  We obviously are too far away from the dealer in Louisiana, will it make it to Florida, should we even consider that, were we making things worse, what should we do?

On a whim on the way back we stopped into CDJR of Woodstock, a Ram dealer and told a service person what we had going on, amazingly he said well let's take it for a ride and let me see what's up.  Well, we didn't even get out on the road when he said, wow, something is really wrong, no kidding.  Also, amazingly they took it right in to check several obvious things that could be causing the issue, we waited around a couple hours with them finding no answers, they suggested this should be escalated to the Chrysler engineers, and that I should contact Chrysler Customer Care to get a rental, and no, they said, you should not be driving it like this.  We started a claim, and decided to get a rental at least until we could figure things out.  So we drove back in this little itty bitty POS to get back to the motorhome.  We heard from Chrysler the next day with approval for a rental, so we drove back down and got a larger vehicle, stopped back at the dealer and they had no more info, but they had started going back and forth with the engineers to diagnose the problem.

Meanwhile we met friends, John and Diane, and Ted and Pattie for a nice lunch, then went over to Ted and Pattie's home where they surprised me for my birthday with pie and ice cream.  What a surprise and a wonderful time!

L-R, John, Diane, Jan, Pattie, Ted, and Moi

Happy Birthday to me!

After that we went back to John and Diane's for bourbon, cigars, dinner, and an overnight, a wonderful time was had by all.  We had a late breakfast in the morning, then left to go back, and decided to stop by the dealer, this made one full week.  They still had no answers after doing all kinds of testing.  One full week in with no info we had to make some decisions, we were supposed to be in Florida, so we decided we would extend here for a week, called Florida and told them we would be late arriving, so we had at least a week covered.

We switched rentals again to an even more comfortable vehicle and knew we had to make some serious plans, we sure didn't want to be double paying for a place here in Georgia and also the site in Florida.  So we called and talked to Florida, explained further our problem and the fact we had no estimate of when it would be fixed, and they were so nice.  They let us change our 4 month reservation into 3 months and set our new arrival to the beginning of January.  Then we extended here until the same time.  So at least we had things covered without paying double:-)

With all this down time we found a new to us restaurant in Cartersville, Maine Street Coastal Cuisine, fantastic seafood, great service, really great place.

Grilled catfish with salsa and homemade chips

Grilled haddock, caper butter sauce and grilled corn casserole

But on Wednesday, the phone rang, they found the problem!  It has two turbos and one of them had seized for some reason, now we had something to go on, the engineers had to get the part and they said they would let us know an ETA as soon as they got one.  What a relief, knowing the problem took a lot of the unknown mystery away.

Meanwhile we met John and Diane again for lunch to show them the new restaurant we had found, then after we went next door to a cool cigar bar, Old Havana and had a beer and cigars, and my phone rang, the dealer told me the turbo should arrive Monday or Tuesday, hurray!  This was Friday, two full weeks in.

So on Monday, the dealer called and told us the turbo arrived and was being installed and we should be able to pick up our truck on Tuesday!  What an ordeal, and so unexpected.  We are sure it is a fluke and all will be good from here, and we sure are happy we were able to contend with all this as well as we did, and it didn't happen on the road on the way back, anyway we are much relieved.  Another little silver lining is I have an appointment to have a dental implant the very beginning of January and had planned on driving up from Florida to get it done, now we will still be here for that saving me another round trip.

Anyway, we believe all is well now, quite a process.  See you in Florida.