Focht Family Blog

I figured I better update since I realize that looking at the blog we are still in Indiana somewhere. :)

So we left Ft. Wayne. Connecting mom’s trailer it was 8 degrees outside! We headed to the CB shop that was at someone’s house. Thankfully he had a long driveway so we didn’t get stuck. He was very helpful and didn’t charge us that much. The CB was still working. The extra antennae that Nathan had installed was NOT working but we found out at Newmar and also at the CB shop that we had a CB antennae already installed on the RV. I guess we didn’t need to pay the dealership we bought from to install an extra one. The original Newmar installed antennae is now hooked into the CB and it is working once again.

After the CB shop we drove to Warsaw where mom’s trailer was made. The service manager came out and looked at her trailer and agreed it should not be doing what it is. He also put a level on the ceiling and confirmed that it is bowing. They said they would probably need to remove the roof and put a new one on. They do service at the factory but not until April. We were planning on bringing it back in April and having the factory do the work (we just love Indiana) but once we got to Atlanta we have now developed more issues (explain later) so it needs to be fixed before April.

Next was Newmar again. I dumped and filled the water while Nathan paid for the table and brought it out to the RV. We then drove over to the Martins lot and took care of lunch, laundry and groceries. This is one of my favorite shopping centers because everything is there in one place. There is Pizza Hut for Nathan, McDonald’s for the kids and Subway for me. Then of course there is Martins for the groceries and a wonderful laundromat to do the laundry at. I discovered a wonderful new treat at Martins this trip. It is Pomegranate Teas, pomegranate juice mixed with teas and other juices. I love them. The Pomegranate Peach White Tea is one of my favorites.

Anyways… we decided to get on the road and we ended up driving until about 11:00 and made it just shy of Kentucky. Spent the night at Walmart.

Well… unfortunately for me Nathan had an appointment Tuesday morning. He had one of the people he was meeting with pick him up. Why was this unfortunate for me? It left me with the task of getting 3 kids and 2 large duffel bags of stuff across an icy road with snow banks on each side. My mom came over with one of the duffels so I could put all of the bags of toys we brought with us to the hotel in it. She had both of the boys, I had Samantha and the duffels. We stopped at the desk and checked out. Next we had to wade through snow through the parking lot. Only Timmy had his snow boots so the rest of us were trudging through snow that was past my ankles in sneakers. I got Samantha across the street, dropped the duffels in the snow and then went back to carry Josh because mom was having trouble getting both of them through the snow. I carried Josh to the trailer and then went back for the duffels.

Next we got the brilliant idea to walk to the corner at lunchtime to a diner that was there for lunch. I went back into the RV and grabbed the rest of the snow boots. I have learned the hard way that mine are not water proof. I think I need to throw them out and buy some duck boots to keep in the RV. That would help in puddles while hooking up in rain as well. I managed to carry Josh most of the way but couldn’t make it all of the way. Samantha helped me by taking one of his hands while I had the other and we manged to get to the diner with only falling once or twice. Lunch was delicious and although the waitress offered to drive us back we chose to walk again. I stopped in to get an update and it was a good thing. They had been trying to call Nathan because they didn’t know how to bring in the slide and needed to drive it to make sure all of the leaks were solved.

While we were walking the dogs after lunch I decided to take a picture of them in the snow. Here are Misty and Punch. Misty doesn’t care for this cold too much but mom seems to think Punch enjoys it.

The RV was finally returned to us at 4:00 and then we headed to the mall again for dinner. We are enjoying being back in our home. Nathan had to sleep with Samantha last night and she slept fitfully so he didn’t get much sleep and Josh was restless last night as well so I didn’t get much rest either sleeping with him and Timmy. Tomorrow we are heading to a CB shop to have them diagnose what the problem is with ours. Nathan has now replaced every part of the CB and it still doesn’t work. It was working fine until it was driven into a short building at Newmar in October. They took off the antennae. We replaced the antennae, then the wiring and finally the actual CB. Not sure what happened when the antennae came off to mess everything up. Next we are going to R-Vision. They are the company that made mom’s trailer. When we got to Newmar the kitchen counter and cabinets had come away from the wall of the trailer. Nathan fixed it but then he also noticed that the TV cabinet is trying to come down from the ceiling. When he looked it looks like the ceiling is warping so we want to make sure the trailer isn’t going to break in half. They said they would look at it and see what they could do.

Next we will be heading back to Newmar. Nathan has decided he wants to replace the small folding table with a dinette table. He called on Monday and they made us a dinette table that matches are interior so we are going to go pick it up. We also need to do laundry so I think we may end up spending the night at Newmar although Nathan said something about getting on the road even if he only makes it to Indianapolis and stays at Camping World. I know mom would prefer Newmar because she can plug in. Either way Thursday we will be heading south again. We will be back in Statesboro probably by the weekend. Then we have a week at Disney starting Saturday, March 8 followed by The Rally in Perry. Not sure where we will head from there…

Monday morning we took the kids to the trailer while they looked at the oil leak. Cummins decided that the oil pan wasn’t sealed right so it needed a new oil pan. Yes, we had a new oil pan put in at Christmas. They had the oil pan in stock so it looked like it would be a quick fix. However, when he looked more closely he noticed that the metal that is between the engine and the oil pan was dented. The dent was most likely caused by the engine explosion and was keeping the seal from setting right. He also noticed that the oil pick up was hanging from a loose bolt so they also fixed that.

The downside to this is that they didn’t have some of the parts in stock. So because the oil pan was off we ended up at the hotel across the street. We thought it would be fun for the kids. This was an old Holidome (Holiday Inn destination). It is now a Quality Inn. It had an indoor playground, a pool, a jacuzzi and a sauna. However, everything was quite old and they are still in the process of renewing everything. The kids chose not to climb up into the playground equipment but they did run off some steam in the playground area. I brought their swimsuits but inside the dome was a little chilly and the pool was heated but wasn’t warm enough to justify the chills. The jacuzzi was warmer than the pool but again not warm enough to justify the chills getting back to the room and the sauna did not appear to be working.

After the kids ran off some energy we went back to the room for pool-time. In other words they played and splashed in the tub. They enjoyed it because they don’t usually get the luxury of a bathtub. I took three hot baths before calling it a night too because I was enjoying soaking in the hot water. :) Mom and I walked down the street to McDonald’s and Subway for lunch and brought it back. It was cold, windy and snowy. Needless to say we had dinner delivered! :) So… on to the big adventure!

At about 8:30 or so we sent the kids into the bathroom to brush their teeth for bed. We didn’t think anything of it… until we heard the thump. Timmy and Samantha had already finished. Apparently Josh was climbing on the toilet to get to the counter-top to rinse his mouth. He does this all the time in the RV but the toilet is a lot closer to the counter in the RV than it was at the hotel. Josh must have slipped off the counter. He fell (the thump) and then he immediately started crying. Samantha was in the hallway and starts screaming that Josh is bleeding. We come in and sure enough he is gushing blood everywhere. It took us a few minutes of rinsing to figure out where the blood was coming from. He split his lip on the inside and it was gaping quite a bit. We called the front desk and had them call an ambulance. We were figuring it would be at least a couple of stitches. Josh was crying the whole time until the ambulance got there and then he got very quiet. We weren’t sure if he was going into shock or just scared.

I bought myself a new camera so I had it with me. Here is Josh sitting on Nathan’s lap in the ambulance. You can’t see how bad the cut is from the angle. It only shows the top part of the cut.

Yes, that is blood on his shirt. We got into a room right away. Nathan had brought a washcloth for Josh and showed him how to apply pressure. Here is Josh trying to keep the pressure on while waiting for the doctor.

The doctor came in and checked him out. She said that if it were her child she would leave it be. That because it is in the inside of his mouth, the scar won’t show. She said that because it is in the mouth it should heal within three days. Nathan has a problem with playing with things in hospitals. He will annoy you with raising and lowering the bed and changing channels. SO…. he decided to cheer Joshua up by teaching him how to play with the bed.

Joshua was feeling better and the doctor brought him a 7-up to drink. She said to keep him on soft foods for three days because his front teeth took a shot. It looks like his top front teeth were what made the cut so if he eats hard things if his teeth were loose it could pop them out. We asked the nurse to call us a cab. She said the social worker was coming to talk to us about the cab. We thought maybe they thought we were homeless or something. Apparently they pay for cab rides through social services. When we figured this out we told them we didn’t need them to pay for it, just needed them to call since we had no way to get back to the hotel. By now, it was snowing hard. They were supposed to get 5 inches that night. We chose to wait for the cab outside rather than take our chances in the warm lobby with all of the flu victims.

Amazingly with all of the flu victims around here we managed to make it back to the hotel by 10:30. I think that is one of the quickest visits to the ER we have ever had.

We decided to leave Newmar on Friday morning. The snow had let up and we called Cummins and they said it was fine if we came in early and stayed in their lot. Newmar is amazing. They pulled mom’s trailer into their shop and made a new tray for her batteries so she now has two of our old batteries instead of her one battery that came with the trailer. I don’t remember if I put it in the last post or not but they also came out to the trailer in the parking lot and installed a fan to force warm air onto the pipes so they don’t freeze as easily. I am sure they wouldn’t have done either of these things in the summer when they are busy but they certainly didn’t need to do them for us now considering they did not build the trailer.

Anyways… once we got to Fort Wayne we took the kids to the mall so they could have a Chick-Fil-A. They have a very neat food court. There are four apple tables for children with regular tables near them for the adults. The kids had a lot of fun sitting at the apple eating their dinners.

After dinner we went on a ride on a two story carousel.

Samantha chose to ride on a horse on the second story.

Joshua chose a zebra on the second story.

Timmy said he wanted to ride the dragon that was on the first floor. However when I went downstairs to take his picture I found that he was making grandma ride in a spinning cup.

The cup spins by itself but Timmy got it spinning a bit faster than he was expecting it to. His eyes were getting bigger and bigger as he was spinning.

The kids enjoyed the day out.

I cannot say enough nice things about the service department at Newmar. The level of service you receive here is well worth the drive to Indiana, even in the snow :)

Now, that being said I really didn’t want to get up this morning and take the kids outside since it was in negative numbers with the wind chill. The RV is renewed. We added an automatic generator starter that will make the generator turn on if the batteries get down to a certain level or if the RV gets too warm so the AC can run. The generator will automatically start and will run long enough to charge the batteries or cool down the RV and then it will turn off again. We took a picture of our new controller.

We also had them replace the wet batteries with gel batteries. Because of how much electricity we use on a regular basis we were being very hard on the wet batteries and we were already getting some corrosion in our battery compartment. The gel batteries do not have water levels to check so they are good for ignoring. Nathan is very happy with his new toys. Here is a picture of the new batteries.

We also looked at new brochures while here. We are seriously looking at floorplans for what our next RV will be. We love the versatility of the All-Star line. We found a new floorplan that has what is planned as an office space where the garage would be on a toy hauler. We are looking at this as an option and making the office area into a second bedroom. This way we could have Newmar install triple bunks so each child would have their own bed. We won’t be buying for another year or two but it is nice to look ahead.

We are staying here until Sunday morning and then we will head to Cummins in Ft. Wayne, IN to have the oil leak looked at.