Well, the "shakedown trip" is done so to speak. About 180 miles from where we picked it up to home. First hour to hour and a half were tense, until I got used to driving with rear wheel drive again. Been a long time since I made my living driving trucks.
I know some have stated that Forest River products may not be the best, but we got a fairly decent deal in a roundabout way. We're not real happy with what the dealership did, but in the end we are content with what we got. The story:
We went to the Annual RV show in Hershey in early September. We went, looking for a class A that met our minimum requirements. Spacious enough to spend a substantial amount of time in it with room for kids and grandkids for shorter trips. Had to be a short wheelbase because of a tight turn from a single lane private road into our wider driveway. We found one in a Coachmen Pursuit 31BDP. Long story short, we signed to buy the unit that was at the show, even getting a purchase agreement with the VIN# included. We gave them our down payment. They even showed us where the financing was approved.
Over the next week they started asking us for more info as though the financing was not a done deal. If we could not get financing, the deal would be scrapped and we could get our money back, so we weren't too concerned. About the time our down payment check cleared the bank, they informed us that we were not going to get the unit that was at the show, since they had already sold that one. One of the reasons we agreed to purchase the one at the show was that we didn't want to take delivery of a newly built coach in December and have to wait until spring to use it for the first time close to home.
At this point they started to try to make deals on in stock coaches of lesser value, but coaches that would not satisfy our minimum requirements. I suggested they look at coaches that were better and try to give us a good deal, even if we had to pay a little more. Eventually they came up with the Georgetown and offered us 5K lowewr than the show price. We countered and got 5K more taken off. The origibnal contract had the Arbitration clause written into it, which meant, if we wanted to fight to get our initial deposit back we might even have to go to Tennessee to fight it. We might go that route and still end up having to buy a Pursuit at a later date.
All in all, we are happy with the deal we ended up with but not so much in how we got there. This is the first and possibly last time we will go to the Hershey show, due to the tactics employed by the vendor. We might still watch the show on HGTV.