Forest City, Iowa
Week of October 9
Our plan to stay one step of the snow didn’t work out too well. We were in Forest City, Iowa at the Winnebago factory to get a few relatively minor warranty items fixed, some routine maintenance performed and to get our cracked coach windshield replaced (thanks to a subsonic Canadian rock tossed up by a passing truck.) The weather started out here being very pleasant (in the low 80s) but then it turned cold, blowing 20-35 mph and it snowed. Last week the propane furnaces ran longer and more frequently since we owned the coach but we haven’t used the coach in 23 degree weather before.
Fortunately we had the Jeep windshield replaced earlier in the week while it was still relatively warm – it is strange not looking through the “L” shaped cracks in the windshield which became a regular part of the car. John was so tired of hauling around the huge spare tire for the coach that has been living on the Jeep’s roof rack, he was ready to take almost any offer for it to make it disappear. No Winnebago service customers were interested in buying it so he drove to the only tire shop in town and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. John’s investment schema is to buy high and sell low; this worked out exactly in character by losing about $300 over the purchase price vs. sell price. It is a good thing that we have a professional financial manager for our investments.
Kelly, our service technician, did a great job and was very interested in making sure that we were happy with the work performed. We enjoy coming here and eating in the nice little restaurants we have discovered on previous trips and saying hi to folks we know here. Forest City is a nice little town with only two stop lights, a nice grocery store and for John’s shopping pleasure, a well-stocked hardware store.
We left Saturday morning to head south – the correct direction for October! We have a day or two stop planned for Amarillo, Texas to visit friends, then it is on to Kerrville for a Datastorm Rally (or the “geek gathering” as John calls it); the Datastorm is what the equipment is called for our mobile Internet satellite access.