As per our arrangement with GXV we arrived in Nixa, MO on Wed 12th for what was planned as a week of fixes, and upgrades to the camper. But before making it to the GXV factory we paid the mandatory visit to the Springfield BassPro shop. This is the original and first BassPro store and boy is it impressive. To give a sense of its popularity, the town of Springfield and surrounds has a population of about 400,000 people yet this BassPro store gets approximately 4,000,000 visitors per year. We have been to this store on previous visits but it was only on this occasion that I noticed the ceiling of the store - it has been decorated to portray the underside of the surface of a lake. So as one sits in the cafe looking up one gets a good view of the underside of some ducks, among other things.
Our visit with GXV turned out to be very successful. We had quite a list of things we wanted, a few things simply needed fixing (like the Microwave and the kitchen faucet), some things did not work the way we wanted them to (is that a fix or an upgrade) and we had a couple of significant upgrades (3rd fuel tank and a FLEXnet - a device for monitoring electrical usage) planned. Some detail of these items can be found here.
We were delighted that the entire list was completed in the scheduled 5 working days and frankly that all the work except the fuel tank and FLEXnet was treated as warranty work exceeded our expectations.
We spent most of the 5 working days in the workshop giving the GXV team the benefit of our advice and saw clearly that from Mike, Rene and Roger on down the focus was on getting it right or make the customer happy. We left with no doubt that we will get first class support from GXV for our planned travels.
The hospitality of the GXV team blew us away. They made time in their busy schedule to have dinner with us a couple of times, Roger and his wife Chris entertained us on their house boat on Table Rock Lake, and they made their house boat available to us for two nights while the truck was in the shop and throughout our entire stay one of the shop vehicles was available for our use.