The weekend was low key. On Saturday, Donna felt jet-lagged and had a rough feeling in her throat. She’s still feeling the effects of something she picked up on her trip to Vieques – a cold or some virus.
We managed to get out for a while on the Spyder to start looking for our next place to stay. February is probably the busiest month of year for RV parks in Mesa, Arizona. Things start thinning out in mid-March. We went to Val Vista Villages first – this is a huge park with somewhere around 1600 sites and lots of pull-throughs. The pull-through sites are 100 feet long.
Unfortunately, they wouldn’t have a pull-through site available until March 17th. They didn’t have anything for us unless we wanted to make a few moves over the next month. This park is part of the Cal-Am family of RV parks. They told us not to bother stopping at a couple of their other parks in the area as they are all full.
So we went east on University Drive about seven miles to Viewpoint RV Resort. This is another huge place with a golf course, pickleball courts, tennis and a bar and restaurant on site. The regular rates there are high, but with our Thousand Trails membership, we qualified for their Encore rate. I booked two months there starting tomorrow, leaving on April 14th. The total bill is $1375 ($687.50/month) plus electricity.
On Sunday, we ventured out to visit our friends, Dave and Stilla Hobden. They’re fellow Alpine Coach owners who recently bought a home here in Mesa. They were on the road full-time, but decided to set up a home base and also provide affordable housing for their single-parent daughter and grandson. We had a nice visit and toured their new digs. Stilla has been under the weather and is staying home while Dave heads out to Lake Havasu for the Winter Blast Alpine Coach rally today. We were with them there at this time last year.
We’re assuming we’ll be done at RV Renovators by the end of the day today or late morning tomorrow. Over the weekend, Steve the painter came by. On Saturday, he spent some time doing touch-up on the paint but couldn’t stay long due to family commitments – he’s a single parent. He came by again on Sunday and sprayed clear coat. He wanted to seal the paint job with a layer of clear as there was rain in the forecast and it looked like it could start raining at any moment.
Today he needs to do a little sanding and finish the touch-up work. Then he’ll apply two more layers of clear coat. This will be followed with final sanding and buffing. Then all we need is to have the slide topper re-installed. I had a seam on the topper repaired while it was off.
Another job I had them do while we were here was repainting the front lower valance. Some people call this the front bumper area, but I don’t think I would ever want to bump anything with it. A while ago, I talked to Levi about painting the lower area where there were large stone chips and some peeling paint. He said he would have a guy sand it, put down a layer of texture coat and then paint it since we already had the paint. It would be a minor job.
This job was assigned to John. He worked on it last Thursday while Steve was painting the slide out wall.
Lower valance sanded and primed
Texture coat added
John told me he thought having the lower valance painted in the dark brown color wasn’t right. He thought it should be the light pewter color to better match the coach. I agreed with him and told him to go ahead and change the color. You can see the brown on the lower valance in the header photo.
By the end of the day on Thursday, he had it sprayed. He actually used two colors – the color we discussed and the silver 1/4″ trim color. I thought it looked good until I looked closely. There’s a light brown strip above the 1/4″ trim. I could see splotchy areas where the paint was coming off. John saw me looking at it and said the paint peeled when he pulled the masking tape.
So on Friday morning, John masked the front again and applied light brown above the newly painted area. Now we have a three-color job on what was supposed to be a simple sand, texture and shoot job. John was two days into it. I talked to our service advisor, Jim. I told him how the front paint job transpired. He told me John had already told him about it. He said he instructed John to do whatever takes to make the job right and he would only bill me for the simple job we originally agreed on. Nice!
New paint on front
When the generator compartment is completely closed, the paint colors will align
Our stay at the RV Renovators workshop is about to come to a close. We’ll be happy to settle in to a real RV resort with full hook-ups and the slides out. Donna joked that she’ll miss the banter, the singing and noise of the workers here.
The rain came last night along with lightning, thunder and high winds. This morning, we have mostly cloudy skies which are supposed to move out east. The forecast looks good for the rest of the week.