So this blog post won’t be about our travels, but instead, about the trials and tribulations of owning a motorhome.

Today should be the first day of a week-long trip to Green Lakes State Park near Syracuse NY…but the motorhome gods aren’t having it. We canceled last week thanks to a safety recall that makes it unsafe to drive RoVer right now.

The recall is related to the hydraulic lines that are responsible for power brake fluid and power steering fluid…they could leak and burst and we would lose power brakes and power steering. Um, no thank you. We had been notified of the recall by Ford (who built the chassis of our Thor Motorhome), and Mark took it to the only Ford dealer locally that has the type of lift needed to work on a vehicle that size. They ran some tests and confirmed that our vehicle is indeed affected by the recall and needs replacement parts. But, the service manager said he could not figure out how to actually get to the parts that need replacing. Thor apparently left such a small access port to the engine that they can’t get to this area. Oh, and the service manager said the lines aren’t leaking currently, but the ‘vehicle isn’t safe to drive’ since they could fail at any time. This would be a short trip to/from Syracuse, and the risk is probably pretty low, but we decided not to take any chances…better safe than sorry!

So the service manager made some phone calls and Mark made some phone calls to figure out how to get this fixed. Apparently, there is no one in the Rochester area that knows how to fix this! Sounds like we have a couple of options…

• The dealership in Rochester can take guidance from someone over the phone on how to ‘drop the engine’ to get to the affected parts
• RoVer can be towed to Indiana, home of the only Ford dealer that is authorized to do this kind of repair

Gee, neither of those sounds too appealing…

But, conveniently, Indiana is adjacent to Illinois, our new home as of this October. And we’re guessing the dealer is in Elkhart, which is the RV capital of the world where most RVs are manufactured. That’s only two hours away from our new address. So, we’re thinking we will tell them to tow it to Indiana, fix it, and we’ll pick it up around November 1^st (once we’re somewhat settled in Illinois, we’ll make the two-hour drive to pick RoVer up).

We’re hoping to get confirmation this week that Ford will arrange for all of this (at their cost, of course, since it’s a safety recall), and then we’ll switch up our moving plans a bit to accommodate this (maybe use a PODS-type service for most of our stuff, and rent a small U-Haul and drive that (towing our car behind it) with the rest of our things, since we won’t have to worry about getting RoVer to Chicago.

We’re still heading to Syracuse for a couple of days later this week, to go a few places that we had on our list and see some friends! We’ll just have to stay in a hotel instead of at a campground! Our 2022 camping season is over…very glad we spent so much time with RoVer back in February and March, since we haven’t had much opportunity to camp since then! And here’s a picture from a past trip to Green Lakes State Park, since I can’t have a blog post without a photo!