We had a break after the Express Bay and didn’t have to have the coach back in a bay until Monday. This project required removing the quarter round fiberglass cap that runs the length of the roof on each side and replacing it with an aluminum cap. It is a solid day’s work for the crew in the bay and there are two of these bays side by side. If you are more interested in what we did that day you should read Carol’s Message in a Minute.

The interesting thing about being here is the reactions of people to the stress of waiting and not really knowing how long the wait will be as well as whether there will be a resolution of the issues they have come in with at the end of the wait. There are really a couple of basic reactions. Many retirees whose schedule, like ours, is relatively open, are okay with the wait and the most interesting comment seems to be, “We have to be someplace and this is someplace”. People with remnants of their type A days find the waiting a source of great vexation even though they knew it would be long before they arrived here. People with real work or family schedules aren’t here for the most part or have made other arrangements to get the work done.

We have been in prettier locations and also in much worse locations for a night or two. The nose of the coach is against a former general aviation runway, the markings are still faintly visible. Just behind us is a huge facility with 49 service bays and offices and warehouse to provide the service needs of Tiffin coach owners. Some of the bays are specialty bays with lifts or scaffolds or cranes others are general service bays.  Wanda devotes her time to scheduling the work into these bays. We check in with her every day or so to see what the next step in our progress will be.  It is amazing she can keep her cool given that there are about 120 coaches in the yard awaiting some kind of service and not everyone is pleased with the scheduling as it impacts them. Today we learned that the paint shop here at Tiffin won’t even see our paperwork until everything else is done. That means we don;t even get on the list to paint the new cap rails until Friday. This is good news because it seems we can get our body work well along without an interruption for paint. We will wait tomorrow while that work is pursued and then we will wait for the call to have the slideout room floor fixed. I do not want to be around to have Thanksgiving Turkey Dinner at the Steakhouse.

The fun is meeting many Tiffin owners and sharing our life stories. Maybe we will come out of this with some more RV friends to meet along the way.  That is the part of the life that Carol and I have enjoyed a lot. It is amazing how many people we get to know from wildly divergent backgrounds. The thing we all seem to have in common is ability to not have, or at least not be at, permanent moorings for extended periods of time. Of course the people we do not get to spend much time with are those who travel from northern homes to southern fixed locations with minimum time spent in the travel. That too is an RV lifestyle as is the avid fan of football or NASCAR who travels from event to event tailgating. The people we get on with best are the wanderers who avoid the Interstates and enjoy a slow crawl on a back road.