Timing is everything. We had just returned from the Hershey RV Show and Pleasure-Way Rally where we looked at “B+” RVs to address our desire for more space and storage. We were enamored with the new Pleasure-Way Plateau XLTS, and spent a lot of time reviewing the new features and chatting with Pleasure-Way Factory Representative, Doug Michasiw, while sitting comfortably in the Plateau.

Once at home, we started looking for reviews of the Plateau XLTS on YouTube. We had resigned ourselves to having to pre-order a new van for delivery in the Spring since only a dozen or so had been built as of yet. Imagine our surprise to see a video, made a few weeks prior, of a walk-through of the new Plateau at the Quartzsite, Arizona RV show and noticing a much lower “discounted show price” than we were offered at the Hershey show for the same RV. This made us curious and we started internet sleuthing. We found an early production 2024 Plateau XLTS – actually the second one made by Pleasure-Way – at Vogt RV in Fort Worth, TX. We reached out to the dealer and began negotiations. At that point, it was just a week before we were to leave for a two-week trip to a Pleasure-Way Rally in Branson, MO.

We left for Ohio on Monday without a finalized deal with Vogt RV. However, by late morning on Monday, as we were passing by Harrisburg, we achieved a deal over the phone while driving 70 mph.

It was early Tuesday morning as we were driving into Ohio when Macy, the Vogt RV finance person, called and asked if we were planning to finance the purchase. We said no, that we had planned to pay cash and were bringing a personal check (we had previously asked Mike about personal checks but he never responded. We had no problem purchasing our previous RV in Ohio using a personal check and expected to do the same with this dealer.) Macy told us that Vogt no longer accepted out-of-state checks and suggested that we contact our bank for a cashier’s check or a bank draft.

We reached Columbus, OH on Tuesday afternoon, had lunch with Sue’s Uncle Jack (96 years young!) and we canceled our reservations in Indianapolis and St. Louis and planned to head straight to Fort Worth. We had to cover 1,065 miles (16 hours of driving) in order to reach Fort Worth by Thursday evening. We had a 9 AM appointment at Vogt RV on Friday morning and that is when we started running into a few unexpected “bumps in the road”.

We contacted Citizens Bank about payment options and they told us that all we needed to do was go to a branch to get a cashier’s check. Unfortunately, we were now hundreds of miles from a Citizens Bank branch as there were no longer any in Columbus (all branches had closed), and none on our route to Fort Worth. Since Citizens Bank does not provide bank drafts and required us to be in person to receive a cashier’s check, there was no way for us to make a payment remotely. Oh dear, we wanted to buy this Plateau XLTS, but there appeared to be no way for us to pay for it.

The only possibility left was to wire the money to the dealer. Success-phew! The cash was sitting in our checking account so we thought certainly this would work. We received the wire transfer information from Macy and on Wednesday evening we carefully typed in the bank name, dealership name and routing number into our banking app (checking and rechecking multiple times). Once in the app, we discovered that Citizens limits wire transfers to $25,000 a day with a maximum of $100,000 in a month. (We needed just over.) It was now Wednesday and there was no way to send enough money by Friday to make the purchase! We had the price we wanted for the RV but no way to provide funds to the dealership before the weekend. We went ahead and made two wire transfers, one on Wednesday a second one on Thursday.

We spent our last night in our Ontour 2.2 on September 27, 2023 in the parking lot of Saint Luke’s Lutheran Church in Cordova, TN.

As we enjoyed “camping” in the church parking lot, we discussed how we could pay for the vehicle. If we delayed taking possession of the vehicle until the following Monday, we could pay for the RV using wire transfers since Monday was the start of a new month. However we didn’t want to spend the entire weekend in Fort Worth waiting to purchase the new RV. It was then we recalled that the RV dealership offered simple financing. We would only pay interest on the balance of the payment until it was paid off. So we decided to finance the balance of the loan on Friday, September 29. We eagerly arrived at Vogt RV at 9AM.

It took us 7 hours at the dealership to complete the sale and loan paperwork, get an orientation to our new vehicle, and transfer the contents from our Ontour 2.2 into the Plateau. All in 96 degree temps with high humidity! Needless to say, we were exhausted by the time we drove off the lot at 4:40 PM.

We spent 3 nights at the KOA Dallas/Arlington enduring high humidity and temperatures in the mid 90’s and verifying that all the RV systems worked. (The area had experienced a record 67 days with temperatures over 100 so we considered ourselves lucky to have highs in the mid-90s.) We had scheduled a service appointment for Monday with Vogt in case we ran into any problems over the weekend. Fortunately, we had no serious issues so we departed the campground on Monday morning for the two-day drive to Branson, MO.

As we headed north to Branson, we stopped by award-winning, Robertson’s Hams in Seminole, OK, for lunch. We had a ham and cheese sandwich, of course. We also purchased beef jerky which is so much better than the jerky sold on the east coast. Quite tasty!

While enjoying our lunch, we called the bank and got the loan pay off information. We spent the night at Native Spirits Winery in Norman, OK.

Tuesday morning, we headed to the Norman post office to send a check via Priority Mail to pay off our loan, which ended up costing us $174 dollars in interest. Not ideal but unavoidable as we had not been told to arrange for payment prior to leaving home.

Next week, first impressions of the new RV and how we became the most talked about couple at the Pleasure-Way Rally in Branson.

*Footnote: Reference to Wimpy’s catchphrase from Popeye cartoons