Still Love Nu-Wa, Manufacturer of HitchHiker

Don't miss my post previous to this one on Kansas City. If it is not visible, click Older Post at the bottom. This post will be of most interest to our RVing friends but read along anyway if you want. We arrived in Chanute early enough to take the RV to the factory for a couple hours on Thursday which shortened our time on Friday. We spent the night in the Santa Fe park about a half mile from there for free. Two nights free, $10 a night after that for up to 15 days. It's usually filled with Nu-Wa products but anyone can use it.

We were back at the factory at 7 a.m. Once unhitched we went to do our laundry then returned to the Customer Service Lounge where we met Mike Mitchell who is the owner of Nu-Wa. Ted has corresponded with him on the Owners Forum but this was his first time to meet him in person. Such a nice fellow. He said he would see us at the rally in October.

At 10:30 our rig was ready. When Ted asked for the bill he was told it was all done under warranty because we hadn't owned the rig for a year. It was never titled to anyone but the Vacation Station dealer who ordered it, but it is two years old. Needless to say we were once again impressed with the service Nu-Wa provides.

We had a list of about 15 items. A few were just us needing to understand the bells and whistles, others were minor cosmetic things and a couple items were replaced with new components.

We headed out and drove to Guthrie, OK. We're a day ahead of schedule since we didn't need to spend a second night in Chanute so we're moving on to Thackerville on the TX/OK border today and will spend the night at the Winstar Casino campground. They have a promotion this summer - first night free with your gambling card. We just have to find our card among the MANY we have from all our travels. We'll do church at 4:00, have dinner and MAYBE give back the money we don't spend on our camping fee.

I've been keeping track this year again and we came in at a little over $24 on average for nightly camping fees. This hasn't changed since we started being gone all summer five years ago. We could have spent another two weeks in Cincinnati for free (15 days costs the same as one month) and another two days in Lake Linden (5 days costs the same as 7) for a lower average but our schedule didn't permit it. We spent $3.05 for diesel one time in the U.P. of Michigan but other than that it was always under $3.00. We'll be gone 77 days and have gone probably about 5,000 miles. That's way short of the 11,000 miles we did last year! But it's been fun and I'm already looking at our route for next year. If all goes as planned, we're heading to the Pacific Northwest.