Once again it was an early start to the day. We had to be road-ready by a little after 7:00 am and the tanks needed to be dumped. After sitting in this parking lot for a week, the tanks are holding all they were designed to hold. Luckily, New Horizons has a 'tap' in their sewer line, all we had to do was negotiate between buildings and do some long backing, about two-and-a-half times the 60' length of the rig. But we snaked in and got the tanks empty.
We arrived at the alignment shop in Salina, KS about five minutes ahead of our appointment. This place is rough, figuratively and literally. It was a long, tall metal building that ran the depth of the lot. The frontage on the road was just barely wide enough to get in. While the building was on a slab the parking lot was nothing but dirt with large and deep mud-holes. The shop guys started out having me try to back into the garage/building but once I got close to the door it was obvious that the door was too short to get in. Plan B. Now they had me backing up parallel to the building on a little concrete apron in front of all the garage doors, it was just barely as wide as the trailer but we wiggled up on it so they could work their alignment magic.
The needed change in alignment turned out to be no small task. It was out on all six wheels and the middle ones, the one that had the worse wear, required a 5' long pry bar with two guys pulling on it hard to coax the wheels into their proper relationship. After a couple hours the three guys working on the alignment crawled out from under the rig dripping wet with sweat but a smile on their face because they got everything the way it should be.
Now we had to hot-foot it the 40 miles back the way we came. Dan and Tony had a couple more items to finish. Tony still needed to get our door lock where it could be actuated manually and Dan was going to go round 2 on the clothes washing machine. His board install yesterday ended with the washing machine being more broken than when he started. But today he got the machine out of the cabinet again and we called the Splendide factory help line. The Splendide technician walked Dan through the hooking up of the connectors to the board, there were lots of them, and this time success. We are back in the in-rig laundry business. Cyndee is really happy about this. She likes her washing machine, it is almost like a pet and she was glad to have it back from the veterinary.
It is all done now, we are going to spend one more night at Camp New Horizon and then hit the road for Colorado. There have been three rigs sitting side-by-side here at the repair facility all week. We have gotten to know each other and decided to have a bon voyage dinner tonight as two of us are leaving tomorrow. Poor Roy is going to be here awhile longer, he has some more long days in the customer lounge before they are done with him.
I snagged a Passport America campground (a half-price membership program) just off I-70 about an hour inside the Colorado border. We'll lay over there one night and then make the short trip the rest of the way into Colorado Springs on Sunday.
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