We have been having a small issue with François. The sensor in the gray water tank has gone bad. We had it worked on in Krakow, they cleaned it and the tank and for a couple of days it was ok, and then started to malfunction again. It is not a big problem as the sensor is only there to tell you when the gray water tank is approaching 100% of capacity, that is never a problem for us, and in 6 years we never allowed it to get too full. The problem is that the way it tells you it is full is by an annoying beep. Over the length of the trip it has been falsely telling us the tank is full once or twice per day by beeping at us. We had decided to ignore it until we could schedule François into a service center a the end of the trip, or the beginning of the next one and had learned how to sleep thru a single stray beep in the middle of the night.
But last night it started to go off over and over. Around 3 am it began beeping every 15 minutes or so keeping us both from sleeping. I finally got up and looked for a service place in Riga, but I could not find one. I then looked in Talinn Estonia and found a place. Around 5 am with the alarm still beeping every 15 minutes or so, I sent them an email and explained the problem and told them we were on the way. We were on the road by 7am and arrived after an easy drive on quiet roads in Talinn at 11:30.
I discussed the problem with the service manager of the dealer, and said if he could not fix the sensor, could he at least silence the alarm so we could sleep at night. Then we asked him where we could get lunch as we had skipped breakfast to get on the road. He told us about a local restaurant nearby and told us to be back in 2 hours.
The restaurant he recommended was a small cafeteria in an office building. The food was good and inexpensive. After an hour and a half he emailed and told us the fix was done. When we arrived he said he did not have the part so he turned off the alarm. We were more than pleased, and headed happily down the road to a very nice campground in the country near Talinn.
We then both settled in for a nap for a couple of hours. Tomorrow we will be back in tourist mode and there will be pictures for the blog.