Shake Down Cruise

We left Olalla Monday morning to take a four-night Olympic Peninsula shake-down cruise in the new 5th wheel “Arctic Fox”. The plan is to spend two nights at Mora campground near Rialto Beach, one night on the Elwha near Port Angeles and the final night at Staircase near Hoodsport, all of which are in Olympic National Park. Monday we drove about 225 miles, and the 5th wheel handled very well, however we have verified that moving a “house” is not the key to good gas mileage! We got about 10 miles per gallon on this first leg. The brake controller for the trailer (the mechanism that applies braking to the trailer whenever the brake pedal in the pickup truck is applied) didn’t seem to be working properly, so Bob called the 1-800 phone number for Prodigy and a tech named Dan diagnosed the problem in about 2 minutes. Sumner RV had used the wrong wiring harness when they installed it. They had obviously also failed to test its proper operation! Dan was able to give us the name, address and telephone number of a Prodigy dealer in Port Angeles, about 10 blocks away from where we were parked next to the road when we made the call. We called them and they told us to come on in, and they would take a look, which we did just as we ended the phone call! About 10 minutes after we pulled into Mobuilt RV, the tech came out, moved a wire to the proper location, and off we went! Nice to have our first on-road problem so easily solved.