![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cowlesmountain.com\/Travels\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/Fairbanks-2019-001.jpg\")
<\/a>The campground was right on the Chena River,\u00a0 a slow moving and fairly deep looking river.\u00a0 Occasional canoes, kayaks, rafters, paddle boards, and power boats cruised up and down it. \u00a0 There was a few riverboats around the corner maybe 1,000 yards, but none of them appeared to be able to get under the road bridges built over it. \u00a0 \u00a0 Seems like every river we have seen on our trip so far were very fast moving, so this was a nice change of pace.<\/p>\nWe had our entrance steps break after leaving Whitehorse, so all the way to Dawson City I was researching what it would take to get them working again.\u00a0 Once we arrived in Dawson, I got out my rubber mats for working under the coach and checked out to see what happened down there.<\/p>\n
Turns out, way back when I first brought the coach home from buying it in Tucson,\u00a0 I auto-leveled it\u00a0 in front of our house, not knowing that when you press that auto-level button, it\u00a0 immediately dumps all the air from the airbags, lowering the coach toward the\u00a0 ground pretty quickly prior to the jacks deploying.\u00a0 I hadn’t understood that and our steps were out, and unfortunately they were over the street’s curb in front of the house.\u00a0 I realized what was going to happen as soon as heard the air escaping.\u00a0\u00a0 Thankfully they only bent up about an inch at the front of the steps.\u00a0 From then on I could see them bent up, reminding me of what I did each day I looked at them.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At the time it happened,\u00a0 I crawled underneath but wasn’t able to determine where it was bent.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to now and I could see what had happened at the time.\u00a0\u00a0 There is a pivot hole with a bushing and hardened shaft going thru it.\u00a0 The bending occurred at that weakest point and had actually stretched the steel about a sixteenth of an inch on both sides of the top step right at the bottom of the hole.\u00a0 If that hole had been centered on the steel bar, it may have not stretched as much; but the hole had been drilled too close to the bottom of the steps’ side steel bar and it finally broke there 31 months later.<\/p>\n
Now that I know it wasn’t just a bolt breaking or something else that might have been an easy fix, I thought I would find a welder to sister in another piece of steel there.\u00a0\u00a0 That wasn’t happening though.\u00a0 The welders in Dawson City were even working Sunday and said they were backed up for three weeks.<\/p>\n
I called the coach’s manufacturer and got a quote on replacement steps.\u00a0\u00a0 The price was reasonable but the ground shipping was over $220 and would take at least two weeks to get to Alaska from Alabama.<\/p>\n
I did some more research and they were by far the best price when considering the cost of the steps with shipping.\u00a0\u00a0 The next day I went online to their website and pretended to place an order, where I found that if I picked 2-day air freight, the shipping was $60 less than ground.\u00a0 Very odd, but great for me.<\/p>\n
So I figured out where I would be the next week (Fairbanks) and then called and made one of the few reservations of the trip so I would have somewhere to ship them.\u00a0 I got their shipping address and proceeded to order the steps.\u00a0 \u00a0I was assuming that 2-day shipping to Alaska would take a week.<\/p>\n
The next day I got the tracking number and they were already in Memphis, the FedEx Air hub, and scheduled to be delivered the next day on Friday;\u00a0 but I wasn’t scheduled to be in Fairbanks till Monday.\u00a0\u00a0 I went back to the FedEx site to find out where to call to have the shipment held at the FedEx warehouse.\u00a0 Turns out you can do that right on the website and I did.\u00a0 The next day I got a message from FedEx that my package was waiting for me at their facility in Fairbanks.\u00a0 Just amazing!<\/p>\n
On Monday morning I went over and picked them up and drove the car over to an RV facility that a friend mentioned he had been able to buy a part for his furnace from the week prior.\u00a0 \u00a0 I went in and talked to the service manager, and he told me he had a couple of no-shows and that he could get me in today if I could bring the coach over right away.<\/p>\n
I jumped in the car, called Kathy to start putting everything away while I drove back there so I could close it up and drive over to the service center post haste.<\/p>\n
I was only there for about an hour when the mechanic came for the keys, and 35 minutes later it was done and I was on my way back to the campground with level steps again.\u00a0 Not sure if we will ever get used to having level steps now!!<\/p>\n
There was one unfortunate occurrence in my rush to get over to the repair place that I noticed when I drove the coach back into the site.\u00a0 \u00a0I hadn’t moved our portable step stool we had been using to prop up the broken steps far enough out of the way and 10 tons of RV had crushed it into the gravel as I made the tight turn onto the small roadway to leave the site.\u00a0 Oh, well,\u00a0 maybe I can hammer them back into being usable again.\u00a0\u00a0 But I may need a press to do that as they are pretty sturdily built.<\/p>\n We deployed the coach back into living mode as we had 4 more nights there on the river.\u00a0 Kathy had been mentioning the state maps other RV’s had on them since the first time she noticed one; so while I was at the RV repair shop, I saw a set that included Canadian Provinces too, so I added that to the bill.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We arrived in Fairbanks on Sunday afternoon.\u00a0 The road from Tok was all paved but rough in a lot of places.\u00a0 Mostly just dodging potholes and dips.\u00a0\u00a0 In Canada almost every road problem was well marked with orange flags and orange signs warning of what’s to come.\u00a0 Now back in the US, most road issues … <\/p>\n<\/a>Wow,\u00a0 steps are installed, pretty incredible when you consider every RV place seems to be weeks behind in the summer everywhere when you need service, and I got ours fixed the same day and it was two days before the 4th of July holiday weekend.\u00a0\u00a0 I really should be buying lottery tickets!<\/p>\n<\/a>That night we decided to celebrate an early birthday <\/a>dinner along with a celebration of the steps getting fixed at the Pump House restaurant on the Chena River.<\/p>\n<\/a>We spent the next afternoon putting it on.\u00a0 I spent the time it took to mark lines on the slide so we could center the decal background correctly.\u00a0 Then we put the background stencils <\/a>on and it was done.\u00a0 Kathy put all the decals on, only consulting me a few times to determine if we had been somewhere.\u00a0 She didn’t ask about Hawaii, but I noticed that was filled in like we camped there.\u00a0 I am pretty sure we only spent time in hotels there, but maybe I am mis-remembering our honeymoon…\u00a0 It was a long time ago.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n