Chapter One: A Love at the First Sight
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The customer falls in love with the idea of owning a motorhome and the dream of traveling the country, and in their rush to become an owner, they become emotionally married to the idea and fail to do a proper inspection. — Bill H. Myers, “Buying a Used Motorhome”, page 101
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 Our Discovery parked near Robert F. Panara Theater at National Technical Institute of the Deaf (NTID) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). May 2018.
And there she was.
When we saw her, she was beautiful. A pearly white exterior, slightly faded gray swirls gracing the seventeen-year-old Fleetwood Discovery. She retailed for $155,000 brand-new, an amount out of my reach given my fixed income as a graduate student, occasionally supplemented by teaching Deafhood classes and workshops across the country. She represented my soon-to-be-realized dream of pulling up my roots to travel across the country in style and relative comfort. This Discovery had it all, and I knew it after several months of searching and hopping on and off over 50 Class A diesel pushers on used RV lots. She had beautiful hardwood flooring, a leather loveseat, a leather sofa, and a dining table with chairs. I planned to replace one of the dining room chairs with an expensive Haworth office chair that I had gotten for a bargain at the Haworth company store for employees of which my uncle Scott used to work in Holland, Michigan. That table, with the ergonomic office chair, would serve as my writer’s desk. Not only did she have the hardwood flooring—in actuality, a resilient, heavy floating laminate —but she also had a new queen-sized mattress, a large wardrobe closet, a comfortable and airy shower stall, and even a toilet with a bidet that my son Theo added later. There was also a Corian™ kitchen countertop, double sink, extendable kitchen faucet, and a double-door refrigerator that could run on either electric or liquid propane gas (LP). That meant I could live off-grid, or boondocking, in the RV world with ease. She even had an oven along with a stovetop, and a convection microwave. She smelled clean. She was nothing like some other Class A diesel pushers I had seen—some smelled like fish, mildew, or mold, or had a stuffy weird smell that I couldn’t shake. And get this… she had a washer and dryer—a Splendide 2000 washer and dryer combined unit. A huge convenience, for sure. Basically, she had everything I wanted in a diesel pusher. She measured nearly thirty-eight feet long, and drove like a dream riding over the air bags that typically are available only on the diesel pushers. She also had a few amenities installed by the seller, including side-by-side video cameras, updated window valances and blinds, and so forth. Theo came with me to see the Discovery for sale in the Sterling, Virginia area. It was only an hour’s drive from Gallaudet University where I was attending graduate school. I had been looking for a 1999 to 2002 Fleetwood Discovery for less than $35,000 for quite a while. Some earlier models had a liquid propane (LP) generator that I did not want. I wanted a diesel Onan 7500-watt generator, which that limited my search. I knew exactly what I wanted. The first one I drove was in December 2017 in Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, a 1999 Discovery 36T that looked to be in great condition. I just couldn’t finance a motorhome that old. Most required motorhomes to be 2007 or newer, which meant an $80,000 Discovery and an over-$1,000 monthly payment. No, thanks. One did finance older models but would not finance for full-timers, a term to describe people without a permanent home, who lived in their RVs full time. So I couldn’t buy the $24,900 1999 Discovery 36T that December. I was disappointed, but I kept on looking. In the ensuing five months, it was rare to find a Discovery so close to its NADA Blue Book value. Most were easily tens of thousands above that. Several that looked good were sold within a day or two, and most were from across the country in places like Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, which would have created logistical headaches for me. It was much easier to buy from a dealer, but their asking prices were usually higher than I was willing to pay. I had done a lot of homework. I read Bill H. Myers’ Buying a Used Motorhome on my Kindle and I pored through several other books, including Heath and Alyssa Padgett’s A Beginner’s Guide to Living in an RV. I even copied and pasted the purchase checklist from Myers’ book so I could print it out and bring it along when we inspected a motorhome in person. When I saw an ad, I quickly noticed that it was within an hour’s drive. I immediately emailed the seller and set up a time to go over and check out the RV the same day. It was a 2001.5 Fleetwood Discovery, a mid-year model update with a major change in its engine. The update swapped out the fuel-efficient Cummins ISB 275 hp engine for the more powerful—and pricey to maintain—Caterpillar 330hp. I did not realize the significance of this change until much later. For starters, the Caterpillar 330hp meant it would get an average of seven and a half miles per gallon, as opposed to the 275 hp Cummins at ten to twelve miles per gallon. Later on, I learned that Caterpillar engines are also more expensive to maintain when compared to Cummins. Caterpillar was out of the RV engine business by 2010, and Fleetwood has used Cummins only from that point on. We drove up to his house. There she was, sitting on the street, looking white and clean. We were smitten. I looked at Theo and said, “Wow… she looks good.” Theo nodded slowly, a slow grin crawling across his face. We walked around her and noticed that the rear tires had dry cracks on the sidewalls—a sign that we would need to replace them soon. The front tires were in better shape, as they were newer. When we went inside, the power steps extended automatically when the front door opened, adding a sense of magic to the moment. We immediately loved the hardwood flooring, clean interior, updated blinds and how everything smelled inside—it just smelled clean. The floors were sturdy. The walls were solidly in place. There was no major leak damage except for the shower ceiling. “Oh, that… a tree fell on the Discovery, a branch went through the skylight. This happened before I bought it and the previous owner did an interesting fix on it,” Steve, the seller, said. The previous owner had glued a piece of plexiglass on top of the cracked hole of the dome. “You can find a new replacement dome for about $75 if you want to. For me, that fix did the trick, so it wasn’t a priority,” he said. I wasn’t a fan of this cheap fix, so I told Theo we would replace this as soon as we could. Theo was the handy one, and I required special help when doing repairs. Yet today, more than three years later, that cheap fix is still there. We continued our walk through the inside, oohing and aaahing at the cleanliness of the interior. The space was perfect. The floor plan was brilliant for my purposes. We were overwhelmed, but excited. The inspection checklist I printed out from Bill Myers’ book fell by the wayside because there was too much to look. The microwave seemed to work fine, and the refrigerator was running cold. I was eager to test drive this baby, and we went outside and looked underneath and into the cargo bays. And it was there that we found the first sign of serious concern. |