"Nobody calls me chicken"

You know in the Back to the Future movies, no matter what the situation, whenever someone calls Marty McFly "chicken" he replies with "nobody calls me chicken" and it sends him wild?

Jenny is exactly the same whenever someone says "sorry, that's our policy, there's nothing I can do". Red rag to a bull.  She has zero tolerance for poor customer service, as demonstrated by her immediate scorching of the Lake Boga Caravan Park for not allowing us to leave a day early.  She is ready and willing to use social media to keep companies honest.

She has used these powers for great good this week.

One the way to Adelaide, one of the vent covers flew off the side of the caravan and into the never never land of the central median strip of the freeway.  By the time we pulled up we were 500m down the road, and at the time we only knew that something rectangular and black seemed to fly off.  We couldn't see anything missing from the van so we assumed that we had just run something over and seen that in the rear view.  It wasn't until later that day when we were picking up our stone protection mat that the guy installing it said, "did you know your upper fridge vent cover is missing?". And indeed it was - there was a large rectangular hole in the side wall of the van.  When we had been examining the van by the side of the freeway, we hadn't looked up.

We called our dealer in Melbourne and they put us in touch with the Adelaide dealership.  I won't bore you with the details but we ended up escalating to New Age themselves (not the dealer) only to be told by their Customer Service Manager that vents are like hub caps and they aren't covered by warranty as they should be checked every trip.  I pointed out that a) the caravan is only in it's 4th week of real use b)  the vent not being attached properly is an installation issue c) no-one told us to check it when they ran through the pre-trip checklist and d) we don't carry around a ladder with us to get up that high every time we drive.

That was when he foolishly replied "I'm sorry but that's the policy.  My hands are tied and I can't do anything about it."

Jenny kicked into action with posts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well as a call to Consumer Affairs.  Within 20 minutes the guy called back and told us that he'd pulled some strings and would 'just on this occasion' foot the bill for a new vent cover.  Nice.  He must have sensed that Jenny was also work-shopping the idea to picket the New Age display at the Adelaide Caravan Show that is currently running.

Unfortunately, upon getting up close to the vent, we discovered that the vent cover had not randomly blown off because we hadn't checked it.  The clip on the wall mount had snapped and the entire vent bracket would need replacing.  This certainly does qualify as a warranty issue and New Age have overnight shipped the part to the Adelaide dealership, who will replace it for us (they need to pull bits off the wall and reseal the new unit in place).

We were planning to leave Adelaide on Saturday morning but if the caravan guys can't do the repair on Saturday it looks like we might need to wait until Monday.  We will be really bummed because we just want to get going; but where we are staying is awesome so if we have to be stuck somewhere for an extra few days, this is the place to be stuck.

<NOTE: We have removed "Playgrounds of Australia" due to the excessive overhead of keeping it up to date.  We are visiting too many playgrounds and would spend half the trip blogging about them if we wanted to maintain that page. >