We had three different stops in Indiana. The first was just one night as we traveled north from the Mammoth Cave area in Kentucky up to the top of Indiana where the MORryde factory is located. Our appointment was at the end of our second week there, so we stayed at a KOA for the first week and then moved over to the MORryde factory for service and stayed in an Airbnb while getting our upgrades. While here we drove out to hike around the Indiana Dunes National Park and tour Journeyman Distillery.
Unfortunately on the way up, we had two vehicle issues. Since Arkansas we had been having issues with our kitchen slide. This slide has two bars with teeth that connect to the edge of the slide and move it in and out via a hydraulic pump turning a gear. These bars are supposed to be in sync but ours had somehow gotten out of sync. One side (the non-powered, connected follow bar) didn’t go out fully so we had about a 2″ gap between the slide wall and the rest of the wall. These are supposed to be flush when the slide is fully extended. We had two mobile technicians take a look at it. The first was in Arkansas when we first noticed the issue and that tech tightened some bolts and tried to adjust it for us. That ended up with us having a bent bracket and the bracket ripping away from the bar that was holding up the slide.
Scott contacted Grand Design to try to get us an appointment at their factory when we were in Indiana but they said they were booked unless we were part of their rally (we weren’t). We limped along, each travel day we worried the slide would either break or not fully retract. We finally stressed it enough to break a tooth on the follow gear and that just made it even more out of whack. That was when we called the second mobile tech. He came out and looked at it and said he couldn’t do anything for us. We needed a Lippert tech (the slide part was manufactured by Lippert) or someone who could weld. He contacted Lippert for us to see if they had any mobile techs who could service us while we were near their factory. They were also all booked up with their own rallies but I did start talking to a person at Lippert trying to find a time or place we could get someone out to us. We had a lot of quick travel planned after we left Indiana but once we landed in Colorado we were going to be there for a month. There was a Lippert technician who lived in Fort Collins, a two hour drive from where we’d be staying, but it was better than some of the other options. This mobile tech covered Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, so he was used to traveling long distances. Lippert asked us for a lot of photos of the issue we were having so the technician would be prepared. We made it through four more travel days without additional damage. TJ, the Lippert technician, was wonderful. He came out one time to assess and take more pictures, then he had to go to Utah and North Dakota for two more jobs before he could return and fix our issue.
The above photo shows the bracket had ripped away from the metal bar on both sides. The initial problem that caused all this was the bracket the tooth gear runs through. It had cracked and caused that gear to jump teeth while the other was stuck in position and thus caused the misalignment issue which then caused the bent bracket and broken gear.
In the left-most photo you can see the crack in the tube around the gear arm, starting in the top right corner of that piece. The middle photo is that gear arm attached to the room bar and on the right you can see how the bracket on the follow gear arm had pulled away from that room bar.
A week before we planned to leave Colorado, TJ returned, replaced the whole bar connecting the slide to the gear bars (it had failed, not the welds of the bracket to the bar), got us new brackets, new gears, soldered extra support on the gear bar casings, and then realigned the whole thing (as you can see in the above photos). Now it runs smoothly and quietly.
The other vehicle issue struck while we were driving up to the MORryde factory. Around 30 miles from our destination, our center console turned off along with the air conditioning and power windows. We were able to open the sun roof and back window for ventilation and air, very glad the outside temperature was only about 80 degrees instead of the typical 90 we had been dealing with. We had been dealing with a crack in the tail light on the passenger side. The truck had been telling us for a while that it was not working, but every time we checked, it was in fact working. There was a crack in it and it had been filling up with rain. We figured the rain had eventually corroded the connections and just needed to be drained. We took the truck to a dealer and they tracked the console failure back to the tail light shorting out the whole system. They weren’t able to get the tail light ordered before we left the state in two weeks but somehow we were able to order it directly from the supply company and get it two days before we planned to leave. The dealer replaced the tail light and that fixed the console, A/C, and power windows.
I suppose I should add that our upgrade went smoothly and quickly. The MorRyde factory allowed us to come in the day before our appointment to get measured (our official height is 13′ 6″). They backed us in to the bay and told us we were welcome to come back for their factory tour the next day at 10am. We declined. We went over to the AirBnb and met the owner who was retired and hosting for fun. There were snacks in the fridge and except for the fact that we were the only ones staying there it felt more like an actual Bed and Breakfast than an AirBnb. When we returned to the MorRyde factory, they were done and we were all set.
While in the northern part of Indiana we took a day trip over to the Indiana Dunes National Park. The area had forest, wetlands, dunes, and beach. The area we had hiked to was isolated but we could see a lot of people at the more accessible beach down the shore.
Once again we saw lots of wildlife
The hike ended at Lake Michigan. In the distance you can just see Chicago across the lake (below).
On our way back we stopped in Three Oaks Michigan to see Journeyman Distillery. We first heard of them in Tucson when I tried a rye whiskey from them called “Not a King” which they made once a year on President’s Day / Washington’s Birthday to honor President George Washington (who declared he was not going to be a king). Journeyman distillery is small and they mainly make small batches of Whiskey and some Gin. They made a series of whiskeys in honor of the United States 250 birthday, the “Freedom Series”. I purchased two of their rye whiskeys, Not a King, and Modernization from the Freedom Series.
We drove through a beautiful sunset on the way home.
