On Tuesday, after tearful farewells to our lovely cousins we set off to the motorhome rental company to pick up the motorhome in which we were planning to spend the next ten days. We were very excited when we saw it and after being shown how everything worked, we set off for our first stop, Santa Barbara.
However our enchantment with the motorhome, or RV as it is called in the US, was short lived. We soon noticed water running across the floor and realised that there must be a leak. It got even wetter when we switched on the water heater. We called Cruise America’s Travelers Assist and they arranged for us to take it the next day to a repair shop which was on the way to our next stop, Morro Bay. We duly went to Sky River repair shop the next day only to discover no appointment had been made and they were really busy. However we waited a while and they managed to squeeze us in.
The bad news was that after doing a thorough check, the manager of the Sky River, which is a specialist RV repair shop, announced that in his professional opinion it was not safe to continue in the vehicle because it had a serious black mould problem. He said it had clearly been leaking for a long time. Also, he was concerned about the state of the vehicle generally. By this time we had noticed lots of problems – electric sockets which either didn’t work or were broken and not safe to use, lots of panelling coming away, rust inside the microwave…to name but a few.
After lots of phone calls back and forth Cruise America agreed to replace the RV but refused to deliver it to us. We either had to drive back to Los Angeles or drive on to San Francisco,so we opted to drive on. By the time we picked up the replacement vehicle, which was in a much better condition and had a considerably lower mileage, we had lost three days so we decided to cut our losses and not try to resume our trip by driving down to Morro Bay and then on to San Simeon but instead spend longer in Monterey. All was fine with the replacement vehicle, but we would definitely not use Cruise America again and would not recommend them to anyone.