We’ve learned (the hard way) that it’s best to have our rig serviced by the folks who made it. As a result, we’ve been arranging our travels so as to pass by Spartan and Entegra at least every couple of years for maintenance.

From Kalamazoo, we made the short jaunt to the Spartan factory service facility in Charlotte. This was our second time here, the first was about 18 months ago. We were so pleased with the process, we made an appointment on the spot for this date! Their service is so popular, booking a year out or more isn’t unusual.

Spartan builds the chassis for motorhome makers such as Entegra and Newmar. As we pulled into their facility, we joined a row of high end coaches. They have quite a nice area for overnight parking, including 50 amp electrical, a dump station, covered pavilion with gas grill and picnic tables, and a grassy area for dog walking. My only minor quibble is that many of the parking spaces are quite unlevel. Since the lot wasn’t full, we were able to pick a decently level place to park.

Bright and early the next morning (7 am!), the service tech came out to pull our baby into the shop. In these COVID days, the offices and customer lounge were completely closed to us. All conversations with our service writer were done entirely over the phone. We were given the option of waiting in our coach (inside the service bay), but we opted to take off to tour nearby Lansing.

To kill time, we grabbed breakfast and drove around the city. We stumbled across a park that accessed a beautiful river trail. We saw a couple of deer! I had a noon work conference call, so we found a local mall to explore. Jeff “malled” while I took the call in the truck. We wandered back toward Charlotte, and hung out back in the bus while our service tech finished up. By around 3 pm, everything was done!

Servicing our giant chassis ain’t cheap. They did a complete inspection (everything looked good), lubed the chassis, and changed all fluids and filters for a price tag of around $1800. It’s worth it, though, to have it all done properly. We’ve had hit or miss service in the past, and typical truck service shops don’t cover the same scope of preventative maintenance. Our tech even said that he could tell by looking that a coach had been serviced elsewhere! I have no doubt.

We stayed in the lot one more night before heading on. Before we left, we had already booked our next service appointment here. It pays to come back to the service experts.

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