Moving Day--With a Stop to Shop

Today we pulled out of Blue Lake County Park and headed to Grand Rapids to visit the Design Quest Furniture Store. That's the one Romaine had recommended because they handle Stressless chairs. We've been considering replacing our recliners for some time. The ones that came with Venture are heavy and bulky, so they don't fit well in our confined space. Besides, one has a problem with the mechanism, and they're hard to keep clean.

Tim and Rosie, our Excel friends from the Rio Grande Valley, gave the Stressless chairs a really glowing recommendation. So did Romaine. They're definitely pricey, but might be a good long term investment, since we would take them with us when we leave Venture. Today we planned basically to check out the different models and colors, but we had no real intention to buy.

While we were there we became aware that we would be within reasonable travel distance of the store for a month, allowing time for the chairs to be delivered to the store. Also, the Sunrise model we were most interested in was offered at $300 off (regular price $1,995)and with a free PC/personal table accessory (regular price $525). These are factory promotions ending July 5. Ekornes, the maker of Stressless, controls the retail price, so no one can sell them at a discount apart from the factory promotions.

You can probably see where this is going. We decided to order two Sunrise medium Stressless chairs in chocolate Paloma leather with teak stained bases. We'll return to Grand Rapids in two weeks to pick them up.

Getting ready to move this morning was more traumatic than usual. First, Ken ran into the corner of the bedroom slide and poked a rather large hole in his forehead, which bled profusely. One of his first moves was to try to rinse the blood off his Tilley hat (first things first!). We got the bleeding stopped and the wound cleaned up and bandaged.

Next we deviated from our checklist, with potentially serious consequences. As Ken was holding in the button to extend the front jacks and raise the trailer high enough to hitch, we noticed a racheting sound, like gears slipping. The trailer was going up very slowly, and we finally decided that something was wrong and we would have to get out our bottle jacks to raise the front high enough.

That's when Ken noticed that we had not raised the rear stabilizing jacks. No wonder the front jack motor was slipping! Ken raised the rear jacks and we proceded to hitch up, thanking our lucky stars that there was no apparent damage to either the front or the rear jacks. We have been taking recently about how prudent it would be to follow the checklist as we did when we first started out. We've become too complacent....

We are glad to get back in contact with the rest of the world. We haven't been able to post the blog since we've been at Blue Lake. The Verizon signal here is extremely chancy. We have to walk out to the road and hope for a phone signal, and we've only been able to get on the internet at the end of the dock at the cottage. I'll backdate the entries for the last week and get them up soon.