Breaking news: When I visited Sportsmobile last June they said the plan I presented probably exceeded the load capacity of the Sprinter chassis I had chosen. I went to work trimming weight off the plan, the result of which you see in the "Fulltime Planning" post earlier on this blog. Yesterday, I got up the nerve to email them this revised plan and their response today is that it is okay to build.
This is an important milestone because it means I won't have to make any compromises from this plan, which I actually like better than the one before the revisions. A comparison of the before and after plans and where I saved the weight will be the subject of a future post.
Another piece of information from Sportsmobile is that they're estimating 10 weeks to do the conversion, up from the 6 to 8 weeks quoted on their website. Related to this is the fact that I just found out a relative (the son of my cousin) is getting married on August 2, 2014 in Seattle. It'd be silly to fly there and back if I could travel in the converted van instead, especially since I'd planned for my first trip to be to Washington state anyway. That means the conversion must be finished before the fourth week of July and therefore, started by the second week of May. Receipt of the van after ordering from Mercedes-Benz can take up to five months, so I should place the order early in January.
I expect the litany of various alternative RV choices in recent posts isn't interesting to every reader, but it's serving its purpose in forcing me to think long and hard about why I've chosen Sportsmobile over each one of them. With the deadline looming for placing an order, I want to assure myself that I'm making the right choice.
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