May 14 - Delivered from Pender

Considering my mental burden, I was able to get a reasonable night's sleep, but was up for the day by 5am... reading over all the documentation I had on these problematic Atwood levelers. Before 7am, I called Newmar to get the location of the Atwood control module... the controller... for the leveling system. There are electronic gizmos scattered all over the place in this motorhome and, since I wasn't sure of it's location, a little help in narrowing down my search could be helpful before I start crawling around in the "basement" playing hide and seek with a little black box.

Newmar says it could be here... or it could be there... and with those two possibilities, it didn't take long for me to find it and make a positive ID. Now it was time for a call to Atwood... and I was dreading the likelihood that I'd get less-than-stellar assistance... a customer service rep named Rajij in Bombay reading from a script... someone who didn't have the knowledge to understand my problem, much less help me. Without the chassis air suspension inflated we were unable to move... we were stranded in Pender. And as nice as Pender is, there was probably no one in town who ever saw an Atwood Levelegs leveling system before... much less having the knowledge to get me on the road again. Without some real assistance from Atwood, my last best hope, there was, in my mind, the real possibility that we might become inadvertent long-term residents of Pender. Our traveling lifestyle might end right here.

But assistance was delivered to this aging stranded man-in-need... this reluctant new Penderite. And that assistance came to me in the form of a guy named Mark... who, while sitting at his desk in Elkhart Indiana with a Levelegs controller just like mine in his hands, gave me the magic formula to get our air suspension re-inflated and deliver us from exile in northeast Nebraska. Unplug this... unplug that... start the motorhome engine... with a short piece of wire as a "jumper", energize the black wire in the first position of plug A... which will energize the relay which will allow the suspension to reinflate. The sound of that relay closing was music to my ears. We were on the road a short time later, clawing at the miles between Pender and Cedar Falls. It was turning out to be a very good day.