Rally Specials

One of the nice things about going to an RV rally once in awhile is having various vendors offering slightly reduced prices ready to come to your site.  

On Wednesday we had several windows defogged, and on Thursday morning our Alfa got her annual wash and wax. 



Thursday afternoon we had the holding tanks professionally blasted clean. Now, the SENSORS ARE WORKING. In two and a half years the black tank sensor has never read empty. We will see how long this remains true. We have tried lots of recommended things to keep them clean and unclogged, but despite them the sensors still showed 2/3 full after being emptied. EMPTY is good. The cleaning did cost $180, but that is far less than having the sensors replaced. Now we know they were not malfunctioning.

Throughout the week we have been to a number of seminars. As usual some are just informercials with product to push, but some have been interesting and informative. We have some very smart people in our group who gave talks about some of the systems we all have.

Our favorite repair service guys from Alfateers are here, but we waited too long to get on their work schedule here. We were surprised that we couldn't get in for work at their shop until mid-May. We had unrealistically expected to be able to just drive there next week and get our work done. Not. We are on the list, and if they get a cancellation earlier they will let us know. In the meantime we will drive there, in the car, for a day next week to look at carpet samples and discuss satellite systems and installation of our new front TV. If we order something they do not have in stock it will take a couple of weeks to get there anyway.

With this in mind, we are going to go to the Escapee park, Jojoba Hills, near Aguanga CA. It's about sixty miles from Alfateers' location. It looks very comfortable. A bit on the rustic side, it has been on my list of places I wanted to visit in California. They don't take reservations, but I called and they said they currently had several sites in the rental pool. So we should be able to get in.

I've done my homework, and made the plan for the next drive. We will leave here Sunday morning, meet a friend in Phoenix for brunch and then drive most of the way to the Escapee park. It looks like the last miles are on a narrowish road and we don't want to drive it at the end of the day in the dark. Best to do that Monday morning.

Gee, it's nice to be able to take our time! I checked my "Casino Camping" book and located the Casino in Indio that allows overnight RV parking. So that's where we will stop over Sunday night.

The rally days have zipped by. We have had wonderful dinners each night. I have only had to cook once! They are even going to pass out complimentary "breakfasts in bags" Sunday morning. I think we will save ours for an afternoon snack when we are driving.

So many people have worked very hard and volunteered their time to make this a fun event. I did a little by volunteering to teach a craft class. It was fun. I asked the lady who had showed me how to do plastic-canvas needlepoint last year, if she would join me in leading a class. Between the two of us, we think we have inspired a few of our friends to give it a try, or if they had done it years ago, to give it another look. Leading a class also helped me become "part of the group" and get to know some of the other ladies better.

Everyone has a story, and everyone comes from a different place, but they all enjoy RVing and are part of the Alfa family. We also enjoy the Alfa Rally because is is a lot smaller than the FMCA's. We only had 120 rigs, so it was actually possible to get to know some of the people. 

We may be able to be back next year, or we may not. We will just have to wait and see where the Alfa take us.

Freedom!

Camp Freightlier

First off I want to thank all of you who encouraged us for these many long months.  It was great to read so many celebratory comments.

I'm not really sure what I think about Camp Freightliner. But, I'm glad I went with Craig, so I have heard the same things he did. Two memories are better than one.

When I was a new driver I took what was called a "Powder Puff Mechanics" class. It helped me understand how a good old fashioned car worked and made it possible for me to talk to, and not be bullied by a mechanic. I had no intention of fixing my cars, but I could and did change a tire or two!

A few months after buying the Alfa we took a private RV driving class to help us be better drivers. It was a good investment. If we can remember everything he taught us, this class should also help us do the right things to keep our Alfa in good condition for many miles.

Camp Freightliner is taught by Mike Cody from Freightliner and everyone in our class of 24 has an Alfa, so all of the information was pretty well tailored to our rigs. 

Most of the participants were men. But three other women were there and we all asked plenty of questions. 

Mike was a good instructor, and tried to be sure all questions were answered and no one felt shy about asking anything. 

Each rig got a huge binder of information. 

Mike went thru it page by page and made sure we knew what was included and what did not pertain to our Alfas. Other sessios of Camp Freightliner might be tailored to other brands of motohomes.

We also got a CD of the binder, additional pertinent materials, and instructions on how to find our own answers, part numbers, and lists of maintenance scheduales.  

We all should be able to talk to a service writer and know what we need or do not need. I think the guys who are "do it yourselfers" were given great instruction on identifying parts and problems.  

There was so much information, I got bogged down from time to time, but as my new hat pin says: "I SURVIVED CAMP FREIGHTLINER"

One of the useful bits of money saving information anyone who has a Freightliner Chassis and is a member of FMCA, was to also join the FCOC. The Freightliner Chassis Owners Club is a chapter of the FMCA.  It cost only $10 per year, and you can get 10% off parts and labor at participating Oasis centers. An Oasis center is a Freightliner Service center that works on RVs.  

We have been having a nice time at the rally this week.  Lots of dinners, seminiars, service work being done, and ideas exchanged.

The Palms RV resort is huge: almost 2000 spaces. Many are casitas, and most of the outlying spaces are just gravel with a cement patio and one palm tree each.  The golf course is very pretty, and the activity center is large with many special rooms for crafts, etc.  Nice pool.  I think it is a great place for a rally. We needed a resort that could handle over 100 rigs, with a banquet hall that could hold 300 people. This place has that along with good catering and friendly staff.

We don't know where we are going next week yet.  We have some work we want done on the Alfa, and our favorite company says they can't get to us next week.  We shall see.  No rush, there are plenty of places to explore and we have all the time in the world to do so!

Food, Fun, Friendship

 

No cold has developed. I'm very happy about that. I have never been one to suffer allergies, but I understand that there are things in the desert air that cause irritation.

I started the day with another nice walk around the park while we were waiting for the windshield crew to arrive. I was please to see they were there when I returned, and finished the installation without any problems in a timely way.

The wind had died down and the day quickly warmed up.

At about ten we drove over the Casa Grande National Monument. It was interesting, but it didn't take much time to view and appreciate it.

A very nice saguaro cactus outside the visitor's center

There are many cactus flowers blooming. 

We missed the noon-time ice cream social, but got back to the resort in time to attend a question and answer session with the Alfateers techs. It was interesting in that no one seemed to have any really big problems. One of the more unusual quetions was from a woman who had experienced some electrical outages and now her microwave readout was in Spanish and she couldn't get it to reset in English.

We are getting to feel like we belong to our chapter (club). The Alfa Owners group is divided into six chapters. Ours is one of the smallest. The chapters have informal happy hours every afternoon, and sit together at the dinners. We had another all-rally sit down dinner tonight, and tomorrow morning we are going out to Cracker Barral with our chapter for breakfast, and to a dinner show in the evening.

Food, fun, friendship.  Learning more about our coaches and connecting with vendors. A rally is what you make of it. So far we have learned some new things, and enjoyed the company of other Alfa owners.

Wednesday

On Tuesday evening we went for dinner at the Bedillon House restaurant. The food was very good, and although it was a bit pricy, well worth it. If you are in Casa Grande Arizona and want an exceptionally good meal, this is a good place to consider.

In addition to an interestingly restored old house, it featured an extensive cactus garden.  

Craig choose the right shirt for visiting this garden.  He fit right in.

The early evening shadows made it hard to photograph much of the garden, but these plants were in good light for viewing.

Now on to Wednesday: it was windy!

We have had high winds for the last few days here in Casa Grande. We were lucky on our driving in days to have had calm weather, but find the blasting wind disturbing. Fortunately there is not a lot of dust in the air to blow, but when I went for a two and a half mile walk around the park this morning I had an extreme case of "leaky face". Tears kept pouring down my cheeks and my nose was running profusely. I hate when that happens! But walking felt good and I stopped to chat with a few of the winter residents that were out.  

We had good luck this morning, we were able to get a mobile RV guy to come and look at the fridge. He was able to reset the failure indication.  Although the guy we had look at it yesterday and the Squeeky Clean crew both said their wash had nothing to do with the failure, the guy who fixed it today said the part had probably gotten wet. He knows the guys that did the wash, and said they were usually quit careful and watched out for such things, but this did happen from time to time. We were glad the fix was so simple.

During the day today, Craig and I went separate ways. I attended a very nice Alfa Ladies Lunch and then a two hour Microwave and Convection Cooking class. Craig went to an informative seminar about the battery-charging system given by Vonis Spencer, who is looked at by Alfa owners as almost a saint for the help he provides to others on the Alfa reoair forums. We both feel we learned useful things.

After four we again got together with other members of our club for a happy hour, and then at five thirty went to an outdoor BBQ sponsored by the Alfateers Repair Center. Most of us are their loyal customers, and the key people at Alfateers worked for Alfa before it closed down in 2008.

The BBQ was good, the music was good and so was the company, but we left early along with quite a few others because we were so cold and tired of the wind. I'm afraid I might be catching a cold and feel like a good night sleep may be what I need more than dancing.

A Post

[From Craig] The second night of our trip was in a Walmart parking lot in the Phoenix area. At 3:30 AM I woke up to an amazing noise that sounded like a machine grinding up rocks. Got up and looked out to see a machine that looked like a small truck modified with a pickup head on the bottom and a shredder on the back.


There was another man with a blower who led this contraption to debris that it consumed. The whole operation struck me as about the least efficient way to clean up a parking lot that anyone could imagine. But maybe the objective wasn't to clean the lot -- maybe it was to wake up and annoy people sleeping in the lot, so that they would go away? Is this too paranoid? 

After at least 20 minutes of horrible noise, it moved on to other lots.

[From Merikay] The noise didn't wake me. Free parking is free parking. I consider Walmart allowing RVers to overnight a service to travelers. I don't think they are trying to annoy people, they are just cleaning their property. 

The rest of this post is mostly about RV things, hopefully interesting to other RVers, maybe not so much to non-RVers.

We arrived and checked into the Alfa National Rally with only one problem.

On I-10 before Casa Grande we were hit by a good size rock in the middle of the windshield that left a ding about the size of a half dollar. We had a glass man look at it last night, called the insurance company and will have a new windshield before we leave here. $250 deductible. We have been in touch with Allstate and a glass man and should have a new windshield by the end of the week.

One of our goals for the Rally was to get the Alfa weighed because when we bought new front tires last fall she was weighed, but Craig was not happy with the numbers. We were able to get it done Monday afternoon shortly after we arrived. The weights on the individual wheels were similar to what we got last fall. We are not overweight and have plenty of cargo capacity available, but we are very unbalanced from side to side. I'm not sure what we can do about it. The heavy side has two slides, the couch, the clothes closet, the large cabinet in the bedroom and the large pantry drawers and cabinet. 

We have some serious shifting to do, but I'm not sure we will ever achieve a good balance, but we need to be mindful about where we put heavier things. We managed to shift about 90 pounds from one side to another, but we would need a 500 pound shift to balance.  This is impossible at this point. There is not much else in the heavy side that we can move! 

Four of the crew of five guys washing the Alfa

As I type this, Tuesday morning, there are men on the roof cleaning it. We have had the Alfa for 19 months, and except for a few free washes at Alfateers after repair work, she has not had a bath. We are having her washed, paste waxed, buffed, and given a roof treatment. Some people say buffing is not good, but because she is white, any swirls will be less noticeable. It has been a long winter, and a lot of pine tar has accumulated on the roof and slide topper from being parked under the trees.

This is one job Craig is OK with paying for. He will go up on the roof if he has to, but cleaning pine tar is not a fun job.


It is now a couple of hours later, the Alfa looks great! No swirls. The windows are sparkling, and the roof and slide topper no longer have black gorm on them. They also washed the awning. We are satisfied with the work and cost. About $7 per foot plus the roof treatment.


We were just feeling good about the washing service when the refrigerator started beeping an alarm. We got ahold of the Alfateers Norcold tech, they have a service group here at the Rally,  and he tried to reset it. It seems the Norcold recall fix has failed. After going around with Norcold on the phone, he did a temporary fix and we will be trying to find another recall kit from a dealer in the area tomorrow! The refrigerator is cooling, but we were advised to not run it on propane until it gets fixed.

What a couple of days! On the plus side, although we had to skip the introduction to Pickle Ball lesson this morning, we managed to get over to the pool for an hour or so this afternoon. We also enjoyed a nice happy hour get together with a small group of Alfa Owners from our local club, and a nice welcome dinner with the entire rally group on Monday night. There are almost 100 Alfas here.

We went out to dinner tonight after the happy hour gathering. There was a "paid for separately" Prime Rib dinner tonight, but because I try not to eat much beef we chose to skip it.

Dinner was fantastic. 
Bed time now...

Emerald Desert RV Resort, Palm Desert, CA

The Alfa SeeYa's pre-rally has been held at the Emerald Desert RV Resort in Palm Desert, CA. 


My biggest complaint is the terrible WiFi connection.  I have tried several times to upload a few pictures with this post and have been frustrated! I will wait until Craig gets back and use the WiFi through his Android phone.  It seems to work very well.


Other than that, we've had a great time and have savored the luxury of the event and location, knowing it is probably a bit pricey for our on going budget.  But it sure has been a nice way to get to know some of the other Alfa owners! 


Not cooking has been a real pleasure!  The rally included a very nice catered dinner the first night, a pot luck on the third, and the resort had catered dinners on the second and forth! There was even a wine tasting before one of them.  On Saturday we had a resort sponsored poolside breakfast with Mimosas. The other three mornings the rally provided coffee and pastries.

Our spot is level and spacious compared to the KOA in Pomona. 


 I drove in on Friday, and after taking a look at it, said that if I couldn't park here, I would never be able to park anywhere!   I backed it right in easy as pie.  Several of the ladies who saw me cheered me on!


(From Craig: I'm surprised by how unequal the RV driving is in this group.  Merikay's attitude and outlook seem greatly improved when she gets to drive the rig.  I'm considering letting her do all the driving, for maximum improvement :-)

On Sunday I set up my little table on the "patio" and worked on a bear.  It was a little breezy, but with careful handling of the paper pattern pieces I was able to work without any problems.  The Alfa has electrical outlets right on her side for me to plug into.  I might consider a tent someday but this worked. I really didn't have to work, but I wanted to see if I could.

Craig went on the rally's golf event today, and I joined in a water aerobics class in the slightly heated pool.  It was about 85 degrees.  Plenty warm but not too warm to exercise. What a pleasure!


I could really get to love this kind of life!  No wonder Rick loves the Palm Springs area! Knowing we would be quite busy and wouldn't have a car, I didn't contact him.  Maybe next year Rick!  We will be back.


Tomorrow will be a very early morning.  We are lining up with 25 other Alfas to caravan over to the Indio FMCA rally together at 7:00 A.M.  Although we have been up very early every morning, I still will feel more comfortable if we set an alarm.


Good night all!