Current Location: Elkhart County 4-H Fairgrounds, Goshen, Indiana

This morning, we were up at 6:00 am to pack up the trailer to hitch up. We pulled out about 6:45 am and headed right down the street (about 2 miles) to Lippert Components, Inc. and their service department to have our six point leveling system installed. Having it done here during the rally saved about a third of the cost (reduced price and free installation). Plus, we have the assurance that the company that developed the system installed it as well.

Our trailer sitting in Lippert’s service bay.

Once we dropped off the trailer at Lippert, unloaded the stuff from the front compartment into the back of the truck and dropped the spare tire to take with us, we headed on back to the fairgrounds. We attended a couple of the seminars and David napped for a while in the truck.

We got David up late morning and headed into town to find lunch at KFC. After lunch, we stopped at a small tire store and had the tire removed from the spare rim and put on the new aluminum rim we picked up on Tuesday from Heartland. They were nice enough to install the fifth metal valve stem our home tire store gave us and balanced the wheel.

New tire on new wheel.

Back at the fairgrounds, we attended a couple more seminars while David helped with the audio-visual equipment. We headed out about 4:00 to go to Kroger and grab a couple of salads for the pitch-in dinner (chicken provided by the club) and headed toward Lippert to see how much longer it would be before they were done. They called as we were getting ready to turn onto their street, so we dropped on in.

We paid the bill and waited while the service folks finished tidying things up and set the level point on the trailer. Unfortunately, they used the floor inside the front door for the level reference, but it is not level side to side. It is front to back, however. Resetting the level position is a fairly simple task that Malcolm will do sometime tomorrow (takes about 5 minutes).

One of the new jacks.

By the time we were hitched back up at Lippert and got back to the fairgrounds, it was 6:00, which was when the dinner was to start. We just pulled into the field in front of our assigned space and left the truck and trailer there. We grabbed our bikes from in front of our neighbor’s trailer and headed to the seminar hall for dinner. They were still doing announcements, so we dropped off our salads and found a seat.

After dinner, they had a show with an illusionist/hypnotist. I’m sure it was a great show, but we were tired and still had a trailer to park and hook back up. Once backed into the space and the truck unhitched from the trailer, it was one button push and about a minute wait before the system beeped to let us know the trailer was level (or at least where they set “level” at the factory).

We finished hooking everything up and setting everything back out. Malcolm made frozen drinks for all and we relaxed for a while. Malcolm and Val headed outside to visit folks that were coming back from the evening’s entertainment, gave a few tours of the new leveling system and other things we’ve done with the trailer. Then we plopped down after a long day.

All leveled up.

We are pretty much done with trailer mods at this point. Our weighing report from earlier in the week showed that we are right at our trailer’s GVWR of 15,500 lb. which is pushing the limit of the inexpensive hitch our dealer installed in the truck. We will be looking at upgrading that to something with a bit more capacity. We probably won’t do that here, as we’d rather enjoy the rest of the rally rather than sitting around and waiting for any more service visits.