Sunday, August 2, 2009

Forest City, Iowa and Winnebago

We left Oelwein a day early and drove north to Forest City, Iowa. We are here at the Winnebago factory for some repair work on the motorhome. Our appointment is for Monday, Aug. 3. We had planned to leave early Sunday morning, but changed our mind Saturday afternoon and decided to drive up after lunch. Winnebago sent us a packet of information after we made our appointment. It included a map with directions to their location. We had come here in 2007, so we were familiar with the town already. This is the Customer Service Center and we will check in here at 7:00 am on the 3rd. There is a lounge area inside for waiting and they also let you bring your pets inside, on leash, to wait with you. There would be no place else to put them since your RV will be taken from you after check-in and you won't get it back until after 3:00 pm.

This is the parking lot at the Customer Service location. Winnebago lets you park in their lot and they provide a free 30 amp hook-up. It turned out to be a good plan to get up here on Saturday afternoon as most of these spots were already taken by other motorhomes when we got here. We were able to get into the one last spot at this lot. Behind this asphalt lot, there is a grassy lot with about 7 additional parking spaces with 30 amp. We tried this grass area when we were here in '07 and found most of the spaces to be a little more unlevel than the parking lot.

We went to the local United Methodist Church this morning and then came back and had our lunch. While we are just sitting here cooling our heels until tomorrow morning, we decided to walk into the town and take some pictures.
Forest City was settled in 1855 by Thomas Bearse. He came to set up hunting and fur trapping camps. From what I read, the area really was a huge forest back in the day when Mr. Bearse arrived. Later, the forests were cut down to allow space for the town to be built. From the 1860's to the 1900's Europeans emigrated to Iowa. Many people from Germany, Sweden, and Norway came to Northern Iowa, especially Forest City, because the topography reminded them of their native countries. Today, the town covers 4.2 square miles and has a population of around 5,000 people.

This is Clark Street, which is the main street in the town of Forest City.


Next to the County Courthouse is this memorial to the area's veterans who gave their lives in service to their country. They even have listings for Civil War Veterans who served and then those that lost their lives.

South of the downtown area is this tree lined neighborhood. It has a mixture of homes from many eras. You can see early Victorian styles as well as mid-twentieth century homes.


Here are two examples of the earlier Victorian homes we found on our walking tour of the town.



Over on 6th Street we stopped at the local Hardee's fast food to get a cold drink. It was getting warm outdoors and we still had about 1/2 mile to walk back to the Winnebago lot.
After leaving Hardee's we saw Waldorf College. It is a small Evangelical Lutheran Church institution that serves approximately 700 students a year. They offer Associate and Bachelor degrees.

We are anxious to see what the people at Winnebago can do to help with our "issues". Most of them are simple, but we have one 'biggie' that has us concerned. We discovered on this trip that there was a very strong smell of mold coming from the upper cabinets over our bed which is in the passenger side slide out. It has only gotten stronger to the point that I had to empty those cabinets and they are unusable. There was never any leaking that we detected and nothing inside the RV was ever found to be wet. We talked to a man at a campground a few days ago and he had a similar problem. He thinks the moisture has entered through the slide out locking mechanism and gotten into the exterior wall or siding. Oh, wonderful. Mold is toxic and it remains to be seen what will be done.
As I've been fond of saying for a few years now..."It's always something".
I'll blog again on what the findings will be for repairs. Until next time then....so long for now!



No comments: