Inger and Jeff Latreille
Our Red Lab
~Monday, November 16, 2020~
Day 155
O.k. it’s official. Sadie is no longer a yellow lab. She’s an adorable, furry red lab.

Does she mind? Since she’s opting for the powdery dirt instead of the nice outdoor rug we’ve laid out for her, I think not. And our light gray duvet cover also has a lovely pinkish hue to it now. Oh well. The views from our campsite are outstanding, even though we had to pay the price with light scratches on our new trailer getting into our cozy spot. We’ll be doing a little research on how to tackle buffing most of them out. If anyone has any tips….please let us know.
Today, we opted for taking care of a few business items and enjoying some chill time at our site. One of the items was finding out if Ford gave us the premium extended warranty plan they promised us after the 3-week transmission headache in Bakersfield. Found out the extended warranty they added to our vin # only covered up to 5 years instead of the 7-year, 75,000 mile warranty they promised. It takes hours and A LOT of patience working with Ford Corporate. So here we go again to set the record straight.
Lance admitted they’d made a mistake on not ordering a new shelf for us over a month ago as they should have. Somewhere the “ball” got dropped. Finally, it’s approved. For those of you who don’t know the background story on the “shelf”, when they manufactured our trailer, they put in an already warped shelf. Unbeknownst to us, it was not noticeable, other than seeing a slight curve, but we thought that was part of the design. Obviously when we bought it, it was attached. But when the trailer got on the road with all the vibration and the fact it was actually bowed, there was no way it would stay anchored into the ceiling. Their first solution was to double up on the support brackets which we drove back to California a few months ago, to have repaired. Just a day after we drove away assuming it was repaired, the shelf detached from the ceiling again leaving even bigger holes than before. After leaving several messages 🤨 and no returned calls for weeks now, Jeff tried again today and finally got ahold of THE guy (the National Service Manager for Lance). Richardson’s should be getting it within a few weeks. Yes, that’s right…..we’re driving back to California in December to get the shelf and a list of some other repairs done. It certainly gives us an opportunity to see the grandkids and Hannah & Devin again for a few days before heading southeast for the winter. So I guess we can say we ARE spending the holidays together after all.
The other piece of good news is we got the full reimbursement on our out of pocket expenses from Ford after the transmission debacle in Bakersfield. It pays to be persistent to the point of absolute annoyance!
My late afternoon was spent coordinating with my sister who is an account specialist for Pinterest. She is trying to drive more people to our FootprintsOnWheels website with “boards” and “pins”. We really appreciate her expertise in setting this up for us. You can click on the Pinterest social media icon on our website to check out what it looks like so far. Stay tuned as it is still in development. I’ve certainly learned a great deal about the social media world since embarking on this trip. I was not a participant in the least prior to this road excursion. No clue at how a “pin”, “hashtag”, or “impression” worked. Nice that these are no longer foreign concepts, but wish keeping these posts/photos/videos updated, didn’t take so much time. Trying to stay relevant and interesting takes effort. But I’m really proud of our website and enjoy sharing our daily stories with everyone, some mundane, some intriguing. And it’s nice networking with fellow RVer’s and having such wonderful support from our family and friends. We have a good amount of helpful information on our site (not just in the blog posts), so please pass along the word of FootprintsOnWheels 👣 to anyone who might find it informative, but most of all entertaining.
Ended the night to amazing star gazing and listening to the content coyotes near our campsite (at least it sounded close).