Sorry for this late post, and its out-of-order status..
This year we are trying a few different RV club rallys, Freightliner, FMCA and Escapee’s. This event was put on by the Freightliner Custom Chassis Club. There were lots of seminars on chassis information but fewer vendors than I expected. We were all parked together in a large hard-packed gravel lot with full hookups at the Pima County Fairgrounds. The weather was nice, not too warm and even a couple of cooler days mixed in. There was even a horse show going on over the weekend we were there. I especially liked the jumping ring, Dusty liked all of it. He got to growl and bark at the horses, especially when they were coming directly at him.
Each night there was a dinner and each morning a breakfast provided by the rally. There were 50/50 raffles, where half went to the local Ronald McDonald House. Hopefully Kathy remembers to write up those donations for a tax break next year.
There were vendors hawking all sorts of goods for our RVs and a group touring company that explained their RV tours to Alaska. We have our sights set on Alaska for next summer (2019) and we just found out a lot about travel up there from the tour folks. Even heard about a mod to keep rocks from making holes in the radiator.
But the real reason I decided to go to Tucson was to take a two-day Camp Freightliner class that goes into detail on how to maintain my chassis. It was held the week prior to the rally. It wasn’t as detailed as I wanted/expected, but I learned a lot.
We met a lot of new friends while there from around the US. Hopefully we will get to see them again on our travels. It’s a really big country, so that may be more difficult than we know.
While we were there, we had our coach weighed on the 4 corners. To my surprise, we were heavy on the right rear by about 1,000 lbs. compared to the left rear. I spent the next evening moving about 500 lbs. from the right rear to the left rear and offloaded all the extra clean water I loaded for the weighing. (they suggested having a full tank of water) Now we should be very close to even on the rear.
I did purchase a battery watering system that is very nice. What sets it apart from the others I have seen is little white floats built into each cap. Now I only have to open the battery door and I can see the water level for each cell in a few seconds, and the best part, without crawling on the ground and opening each cap and peering around with a flashlight.
All in all it was a very good trip!