We had a lot of repairs in the last year of trying to get our Vanleigh Beacon to the point that it should have been when it left the production plant. 2022 was what we previously thought was rough as far as time spent working on the unit – 2023 so far has able to surpass that by far.

We have had some pretty big plans for 2023 but prior to executing on those plans it was necessary to get some repairs done on the Beacon. We anticipated having the ability to knock out the major impacting issues and be free but plans don’t always go… well as planned.

We spent a lot of our early months in repair centers knowing that we had to get our broken welds caused by frame flex corrected we traveled from our winter getaway up to Goshen, Indiana to Affinity RV in February. Affinity knocked it out of the park on addressing our issue and we knew that the major water intrusion that had been swung at several times at each previous service visit needed to get resolved. We had plans on swinging south and then north up through Idaho with a more grand destination.

RV life and flexibility

We left Goshen, Indiana and headed to Red Bay, Alabama to the Tiffin Service Center for our warranty work and to address that water intrusion. All work being completed was items that had occurred as far back as our first day of owning the Beacon and up to the point of the expiration of our warranty and had been reported to Vanleigh / Tiffin prior to our warranty expiration. We ended up spending 54 days in Redbay for a list of issues and a repair cost of over 26k dollars (all covered by warranty).

We then had to travel back up to Goshen, Indiana to Lippert to have our steel frame issues addressed.

In this video we pick up at the completion of our time in service and are headed out to finally do what we had intended to do when we left full time in November of 2021. We however quickly realize that we are time constrained and will have to make our way back to Idaho.

What we didnt cover in this weeks video

• After leaving the Tiffin Service Center several items they corrected had broke during travel – some things we had found werent corrected at all.
• The fireflies at the campground that we stayed at were amazing. You folks from the eastern US are used to seeing these guys. Us being from Idaho were awestruck.
• We had a leaky tire when we left Elkhart and found the problem and solution and will be covered in a future video.
• Our truck got hit by a fellow camper in the Elkhart campground. We have rear damage to the fender, bumper and tail light. Tail swing is a real thing! At the time of this writing 4 months later we are still attempting to get it resolved with the owners insurance.