By the time we arrived home from Arizona and thought about our planned trip to Alaska, it became clear that it was time to replace Speedy. I had 155,000+ miles on it and is 15 years old. It was a hard decision as we had put quite a bit into it in the past couple of years and we'd finally gotten the steering and handling straightened out.
But the next trip is to Alaska and back and it is going to be a long one. We wanted to minimize the chance of another surprise on the road. We also wanted a bit more room inside.
We'd been looking at other Class B RV vans for a while and a couple, like the Safari Condo XL Flex and the new Hymer (ex-Roadtrek) Activ would have been our first choices, the prices (over $100K) and availability (next year), were non-starters. We boiled the other choices down to a Sprinter-based van, either a Roadtrek Adventurous or a Winnebago Era.
We wanted a van with a full-width bed in the rear that could be left made up, which meant seating and a table up forward. We also wanted a more private toilet and shower. Basically, we wanted a somewhat larger Speedy. Both the Adventurous and some models of the Era met the criteria.
We searched all over online and even made a trip to Maine to look at a 2008 Adventurous, with no luck. Most of what we could find were either too pricey or had too many miles. One afternoon, after visiting Ellen's brother in Plympton, we decided to swing by the Campers Inn in Raynham and talk to Cheryl, the person who sold us Speedy five years ago. We had kept in touch and they are still Roadtrek dealers.
When we walked in, she exclaimed that she was just thinking of us. Typical salesperson talk, I thought. We'd been by last spring looking at what might be available. But she wasn't kidding. She had just taken a 2006 Roadtrek Adventurous RS in trade and it had only 46,000 miles on it. It was to be delivered to Campers Inn that evening. We came back the next morning, looked it over (in the rain), and made an offer which was accepted.
It was time to put Speedy on the market. We started by emptying everything out of it and giving it a good cleaning (the cleaning was on the agenda anyway), then taking lots of photos. After looking at lots of RV ads, good photos that show all of the features are important. We then took advantage of a new Adobe site, called Adobe Slate, to build a one-page web site that would be the basis of our presentation of Speedy
(It can still be seen at https://slate.adobe.com/cp/SSFt8/).
We figured that we would start with free advertising online. Probably the best site for Roadtreks is the FMCA Roadtrek International chapter. They have a large listing site of Roadtreks for sale. The second place was the local Craigslist. To that we added the Adventure Rider, Expedition Portal and Class-B forums. They each have classified ad sub-forums. We posted a description os Speedy and some photos on each one with a link to the Adobe Slate page and we were off.
Surprisingly, it didn't take long to get responses. We had our first response within a day, our first visitor within a couple of days and the second person to come by bought it on the spot. Fours days on the market and it was sold. By that time we had received about 10 inquiries. We hadn't realized that an older Roadtrek Popular would be that Popular.
Our new Roadtrek (still un-named) was supposed to be ready on April 28th, so we arranged to deliver Speedy to its new owners the previous week, giving us just enough time to transfer the registration to the new Roadtrek, rather than registering it separately.
On April 22nd, I drove the van up to Westford (followed by Ellen in the Subaru), accepted a reasonably sizable check, gave a pretty thorough walk-through of all of its features and we left Speedy behind.
We were now without an RV, but we had the new one to look forward to....and we are still looking.
Did we sell Speedy too soon?
April 27th arrived, along with a call from Cheryl. There had been a couple of items that had to be taken care of before we accepted the new van, one was a recurring low coolant light. They hadn't been able to solve that problem and had to send it off to a Mercedes mechanic. He wouldn't be able to look at it until this past week. Well, he did and diagnosed the problem as a leaking oil cooler. The oil is pumped through a cooler through which coolant also flows (in supposedly separate channels) and there is a leak in it. The part has been ordered and is supposed to be in Monday, May 9th. Maybe we will get it this coming week.
We are waiting and holding our breath, since we had many plans for upgrades to be done, like adding shelves, building a new cabinet, adding solar panels, probably some new lighting, making screens for the doors and front windows.......
We are planning to leave for the West and Alaska on June 15th, so time is getting shorter and shorter. Is this deja vu all over again? We had similar delays when we bought Speedy.
More news when it happens.
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