From Hope to Despair

Yesterday was a roller coaster ride for our jack repair. Joel - service manager here at Camping World - called us to inform us that some parts did show up from Lippert Components and he wanted to get our rig back into the service bay to begin work. No problem. We were anxious to get the jacks fixed and to get on our way down to Florida.

It turned out to be false hope. The parts that were delivered yesterday were not the parts that were ordered and they could not be used to complete the repair. So, I was charged the $55 for overnight delivery of parts that took 2 days to get here, and were the wrong parts. You can believe that charge is being disputed. The situation now is that we can wait until Monday, January 3rd, order parts again and pay another overnight fee, or wait the 5-7 business days for UPS Ground delivery of the parts. No way, no how! We are having Joel coordinate a transfer of the paperwork to the Kissimmee Camping World near Orlando and we are heading out today. Our plan to spend some time with Josie's sister has been put on hold since we feel we need to get this problem fixed before it gets worse. Also, I will be able to keep my appointment for the Disney World interview on Tuesday the 4th.

One benefit from yesterday's fiasco with the wrong parts was our discovery of a Costco store, just over the state line in Georgia and about 1 mile from our campground here. We never took the right turn to Georgia (state line is .3 mi from here) when leaving this place as we always went toward downtown Chattanooga for all our activities. The Costco store is brand new - opened in October - and is the only Costco between here and Nashville. It's hard to believe that this store is only 1 mile from us and we never knew it was there because it is too new to be in our GPS and/or phone directory. It was fun walking around the store to kill time while our rig was in service.

Our plan is to stay in Jackson, GA., tonight and we have to call to make sure there is room for us for 1 night. We then will travel to southern GA. and stay in a State Park in Adel, near the Florida border. It isn't our desire to be traveling during the New Year weekend but we have no choice at this point. We just hope that it will be a safe and uneventful trip. More tomorrow...