We don’t quite know what we will do with ourselves now that we no longer have to wait. All day I checked the UPS tracking for the last piece of the puzzle and all day it was “out for delivery”. I think the last time I checked was at 2:30 at which point I gave up on leaving as the guys go off work at 3:00. As I was relaxing in the coach, practicing patience and waiting, I heard or maybe felt a strange vibration, like some  was driving a screw into the coach wall! Peering out the door I spotted the entire work force gathered on a platform ladder with something that looked remarkably like a topper awning.

At 3:00 I went to the office to pay the bill and found that Mrs McKinney had gone to town without her phone. I elected to leave the insurance check and my own check for the deductible on her desk and beat it out of town. When i got to the coach it was closed up and almost ready to roll, Carol was still trying to put stuff away as I started the engine. We got mostly clear and I backed out very slowly and carefully and we set up to connect the car for the first time on a month. By 3:30 we were on the highway headed south.

We are often asked how quickly we can get underway from a standing start. I can now answer the question unequivocally; less than 30 minutes. I took us about 2 hours south in Mississippi to Columbus in a Walmart that was not warm and friendly about parking overnight. We shall see if they bother us.

The big excitement on Saturday was a 30 minute drive to Russellville WalMart to restock the refrigerator and pantry. We spent an hour reveling in the process of shopping. This was too much excitement for one day so we returned to the coach and stowed the proceeds of the trip and resumed waiting. Carol was working on her new website, which may or may not be up depending on how you access the web. If through Verizon, not so much, we need to wait for them to flush their cache (whatever that means and it sounds worse then it is). On other providers it may already be up as cgstudio.net. you can tell if it is the new one because the top bar is a sunset image and it is different from the old one with the black header. Sunday was far more relaxed, it rained all day, the only variation being really really hard or just very hard. I may have opened the door a time or two out of sheer need to move. I did not exit into the rain.

We did watch a movie, sort of by accident, I was desperate for something besides football to make noise while we prepared dinner – okay while Carol prepared dinner. I found an old Clint Eastwood movie “Space Cowboys” how bad could that be. With judicious use of the DVR we trimmed it down from three hours to 1 and a half hours of actual movie (you ask, “do I exaggerate?” maybe but not by much). I’ll answer the first question, although we had never seen it we were predicting the plot line after the first 15 minutes. We did sit through to the end for some reason. Oh yes we are waiting.

Monday the 17th found us at the service bay entrance for McKinney at 6:50 AM so we could begin waiting early.  Here is the view out the windshield. I’ll spare you the views in the other directions.

Somehow I had this idea that we would be out of Red Bay by Wednesday, Nov 12. A couple of days to paint and a half day to install the awnings that were waiting for us in McKinney RV Service. I had no idea how long it would take to tape the coach to get the swirls and lines to match up. It was a full day and then after they put one color on they had to redo the tape for the next. We couldn’t take the coach out of the bay Monday night because it was all taped for paint and slideouts were partially extended to make it work. We stayed in it in the bay. Tuesday night we were still in the bay waiting for the clear coat to dry well enough for them to buff out some runs and drips. Finally Wednesday afternoon we made it back to our camp site after learning that the repair bay where the awnings were to be replaced wouldn’t be available until Thursday.

It should take two, maybe three hours to install the awnings, we were told. I had visions of driving south Thursday afternoon stopping at a Corp of Engineers campground about halfway to Summerdale AL. The first thing we learned  was that the rear awning topper that had come in was the wrong size! How strange after two weeks they just found that out. The next thing we learned was the top shield for the forward awning topper had gotten dented either in shipping or in the warehouse. Naturally neither of these parts were available here in Red Bay. There are plenty in the factory, but those all have coach numbers on them and are most likely different in some way from ours. After all they are building 2015 models now.

While they were installing the patio awning, the rear leg got loose and naturally scratched the new paint in a couple of places. So while waiting for the parts we have been in the paint bay again. But first we had to wait for Daniel to charge the batteries in the coach he had parked in the driveway which had died in the cold. So we waited in the driveway from 8 AM until 11 AM. Fortunately we had no place else we had to be since the parts have not come in yet, that I know of.

We are waiting for the paint to dry, I have been watching it dry, that is excitement around here. We will go back to our campsite after we top off the propane tank and the water tank and we will wait for Monday. Watch this space for more exciting waiting.

After a week of daily trips to service bays at 7 AM we were planning on having Saturday and Sunday off to do some touring out of the immediate area. There is indeed very little to do in Red Bay within a few minutes of the Service Center. Then we got a call from Daniel McKinney who is doing the body repair, “can you bring it in at 9 tomorrow?” Sure, why else are we here in Red Bay if not to get on with it. Daniel assured us we did not need to hang around. When he was finished he would put it back on our site for us.

Off we went to finally do a serious day of touring. About an hour north is the four city grouping of Tuscumbia, Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and just across the Tennessee River Florence. Tuscumbia has several claims to fame, the most well known is that is was the birthplace of Helen Keller. The family home where she was born and where Annie Sullivan taught her to communicate is maintained as a museum and memorial. It is clear that the Kellers were well off in a lovely 1820 house that sat on 640 acres, much reduced today but still very spacious.

We took the house tour and walked next door to the cottage her parents were living in when she was born. Her grandparents occupied the main house at that time. After the tour we wandered through Tuscumbia and came across Spring Park which is built around the water source that made the town possible. The town served as a way station on the Trail of Tears. Many Cherokee were brought by train and transferred to steam boats to continue there trail to Oklahoma.

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.

Cruel first: Yesterday we drove to the nearest WalMart in Fulton MS. While there I went looking for the beer section having only one bottle left in the refrigerator. There was no apparent beer or wine section. I asked a helpful Walmart employee who informed me we were in a dry county, but they were voting that very day to declare the city wet. Lot of good that would do me. Ah well, tomorrow is another day. It turns out that about half of Alabama is also dry, who knew? Of course Franklin County where Red Bay is located is dry. No beer today. The next county north is wet so I guess we go to Muscle Shoals in the next day or so to restock. At least we are not in Mississippi where it is illegal to bring alcoholic beverages into most dry counties! Prohibition continues!

Wonderful: This morning I got tired of waiting for a return phone call from Daniel McKinney at McKinney Body and Paint. I drove over to the shop to speak with him and he and a sidekick followed me back to the coach where they spoke in an accent I had a hard time understanding, deep south with a mouthful of mush. After a bit of a palaver Daniel said to bring it over on Monday morning at 8. I said “sure presuming we did not have to go to the service bay” for our 3 hours of glory, er express service.

We were thinking about lunch and Carol was preparing to bake a loaf of bread when her phone rang. They wanted us in service bay 9, NOW! We looked at each other for 15 seconds and said of course. 15 minutes later I shut the engine down in the service bay. I think that was a record for an unplanned departure from a camp site. For the tsunami on the CA coast we had an hours warning. They started work at 1 PM, unfortunately they close at 3 so we will get to go back in tomorrow at 7 AM. They called over a cabinet maker to do a minor repair on the counter top extension. Meanwhile they ordered a replacement shower door and a a replacement inflatable mattress section for the bed. They also lubricated the leveling jacks. At 3 PM the shower door was installed but not quite complete. The bladder for the mattress that was delivered was shopworn and stained, not usable and Tiffin no longer uses that brand. Choices, Tempur-pedic Mattress or Sleep Number. I guess we will go with the Sleep Number, but they couldn’t install it in the time remaining so one more night on the original SovaQuest knock off. So back we go at 7 AM for the last hour of our Three Hours in Express Bay.

Given all this by 8 AM tomorrow we will have completed all the work we planned on when we set Red Bay as our destination. We have been sort of promised that in the next week we will get the recall work done AND the self inflicted body work.  If I had to guess we will not be leaving before the 15th, but you never know.

I seem to be titling my posts with place names for some reason. Maybe I’m just getting lazy or lacking in creativity. Or maybe it is because these are not places you would find on most peoples bucket list.  We are set up in site 65 with a view of the service bays to our rear and a seemingly endless array of Tiffin motorhomes in every other direction. We are all waiting for service. While we were waiting to get in here we were camping across the street at McKinney RV Sales and Service and the first thing we experienced was a visit from an inspection crew checking to see if we needed service for any of the “big three” service recalls. Indeed we do. The cap rails need to be replaced. These are the curved rails that make up the edge of the roof for the length of the coach on either side. They are fiberglass. They will be replaced with aluminum. The other one is even more frightening. The floor of the living room slide out behind the driver was made of plywood and it is delaminating. To replace that they will remove the slide out box lay it on its side and remove and replace the floor then replace the box in the coach. They say this all takes about a half day! They have a lot of practice doing it. I would guess it will take us longer to unload and restow the cabinets since everything must be empty for the job.

We have a schedule for 3 hours in the Express bay with two technicians to take care of the minor stuff that brought us here and I have a check in hand from Progressive Insurance for the body damage we caused by brushing against the cliff at highway speeds.

Carol has not been drinking, maybe the bridge has

The original entrance to the canyon

There are other places to visit and I am sure we will have time to get to most of them. Watch for

Confusing; in Rochester the beach area on Lake Ontario is spelled Charlotte, emphasis on the last syllable. That is how I have always pronounced it. Now we are in Charlotte NC, emphasis on the first syllable. How am I supposed to remember which is which? This should be my worst problem.

We drove down here (assuming you hold the map with North up, we drove “down” the page) on Saturday and setup camp at Carowinds Wilderness Resort. I guess lots of kids of all ages running around makes it a wilderness, it sure felt wild when we arrived on a warm Saturday afternoon. The adjacent amusement park adds to the wild feeling, otherwise it is a nice enough campground with paved pull through spots with functioning utilities, not even too pricey, a surprise given the location.

Our plan was to see Leigh and Pat Rainwater who moved here a couple of months ago and to see their new home, and visit with Hazel (but you would have had to follow her travels from Austin on Facebook to get the point). She has yet to make an appearance for us, other than the typical cat lump under the bedspread in the guest room. As we were traveling here we realized that David Lovenheim’s daughter, Greta and her husband Earl also live nearby. We made contact, email is great, and arranged to have them join us for dinner at 5 Church, conveniently located at the corner of 5th and Church. But I get ahead of myself.

Saturday we had cocktails at Vestry Place, the Rainwater’s home and then dinner at Ilios Noce  followed by desert and . . . back at Vestry. Sunday, after lolling around the coach for the morning we set off for down/uptown Charlotte (they have this thing about whether it is Downtown or Uptown because it is on a ridge) where our first stop was at Levine Museum of the New South. The “new” is post civil war. It is quite a journey from a crossroads community of 5,000 to the major banking center of today. After the museum we strolled to the Betchler Museum of Modern Art where we had tickets for a performance of British music from Purcell to Britten to go with their exhibit of British Art. From there we went to the dinner described above and had a wonderful time with Greta and Earl as well as Leigh and Pat.

Monday was a lazy day and we went to the Rainwater’s for a light dinner,salad by Leigh and soup by Carol and then home to get on the road to Red Bay. I worked over the route more than usual since the straightforward route goes through Atlanta and is lots of Interstates. We ended up taking a mountain road that I had been warned against. My failure to heed the warning will cost some time and money as a rock wall encroached on the roadway at one point and even with Carol keeping the the left wheels near the center line we made contact to the tune of some grinding noises, removing parts of our awnings and some paint. We are unscathed and the coach can be made whole, so it is merely another experience for us to laugh about when we look back.  As I write we are in Murphy NC along US 64 with about 5 hours of driving ahead of us tomorrow to get to Red Bay (or as Tiffin Owners Forum members call it “Camp Red Bay” immediately shortened to CRB). I must say the route was absolutely gorgeous. The mountains are magnificent and the Fall colors are at absolute peak in this area. Many of  the local campgrounds are full so our plan to stay at WalMart was a good idea.

Couldn’t help myself! After the last post – Neither Here nor There – this just seemed inevitable even if it doesn’t really mean anything, unless it does.

We have actually done pretty much what I said we would in the previous post. Our trip to NOTL was about as straight forward as it gets. The Whirlpool Street Bridge was closed so we had to use the Rainbow Bridge and wait about 30 minutes to get through customs, no Nexus there. We had plenty of time for lunch at Epicurean in the heart of town, this is our favorite lunch spot in the town and has been there many years. We shopped a bit and then went  to the Courthouse to see A Charity that Began at Home by Hankin. It was wonderfully well done and provided plenty of the expected laughs. Just think about a British country home filled with people invited not because you want to invite them but because nobody else will invite them. It is not a happy prospect except for the audience, my sides ached as we left.

Dinner at Zee after checking in at the Old Bank House. Both rate high marks for service and comfort. The restaurant is very well located and the service was impeccable as was the food. After dinner we enjoyed the modern version of GB Shaw’s Philanderer. The B&B is bigger than we used to like with something like 9 rooms, but everyone was friendly and interesting. We walked down to the lake shore before breakfast and found this scene. The two gentlemen in

costume were actors with the man flying the drone with camera as they were preparing a marketing video for the town’s anniversary coming up next year. Carol and I were both taken with the apparent anachronism in our face. This was shot with the camera on my tablet as that was all I had with me for the walk.

We needed to get back to Rochester by 12:15 for an appointment, but it was not to happen. I could not figure out how to get to the Nexus lanes on the Lewiston Bridge and we spent a miserable hour or more waiting for our turn at the border booth. The appointment got rescheduled. How was I to know that the Nexus lanes were in the lane marked commercial trucks only? I’ll know the next time.

Yom Kippur occupied Saturday and Sunday we actually stayed home and in the evening we watched Chef, a movie we had heard about and we took the time to see it on TWCable On Demand. We don’t have our Roku here, I left it on the coach. We really enjoyed the movie and would recommend it to most anyone.

Enough with the hour by hour and minute by minute. We have been fussing with doing things that need to be done in Rochester before we depart on Monday not to return until late May or early June. Also we need to put in place the last minute details for going to Israel with all eleven of us departing December 22. Everyone now has a current passport and I have all the numbers except for Josh’s. The tickets are paid for, the trip will have been paid for on my birthday and the travel insurance is in place. Just need to get all of us to JFK by 8 PM on the 22nd and those plans are all made as well.

For those interested in our actual road plans just in case we might cross paths here are the known way points. Rochester to Charlottesville by car on Monday Oct 13. Charlottesville to Charlotte NC on Oct 18. Time in Charlotte is at least through morning of the 20th. This is subject to extension. Next stop is Red Bay AL (if you don’t know don’t ask) with plan to arrive Thursday or Friday. Duration there is unknown as it depends on how fast we can get Tiffin and other vendors to attend to our service needs. From Red Bay we head for Rainbows End in Livingston TX with plan to arrive December 15. Upon return from Israel we will pick up the coach and depart on January 15. The next way point is Escapade (a national gathering of Escapee members) March 8 to 13 in Tucson. That’s it for now. I have no idea when or how we will eventually get to LA and that is because I refuse to look that far ahead, today.

We are in Rochester, in our apartment until October 13 – Here! The coach is in Covesville, VA, Malena and Dan’s yard – There! This is strange state of affairs for us. We have been separated from the coach only by international travel, for the most part in the past several years. We drove the Jeep through from Covesville to the apartment in a total of under nine hours stopping only for fuel, three times, and to eat our lunch which we had packed. The audio book, A Monstrous Regiment of Women: A Novel of Suspense by Laurie R. King, swept us along the highway so the time and miles passed almost unnoticed. This is the second novel in the series about Sherlock Holmes and his new, young assistant/partner Mary Russell. We started it in August and listened in bits and pieces as our road time permitted. This run was uninterrupted Interstate time and the spell did not end until we were making the turn into Pleasant St where the entrance to the parking lot is. We listened to the closing credits as we were shutting down the engine. Perfect timing.

Our time in Covesville was jam packed with farm life activities and celebrating Rosh HaShana. We did not get out to see people as we had hoped because we were busy spending wonderful time with Malena and Dan and especially with Alex and Corey. I had forgotten how to play Hearts in the interim since graduating from Brown, but I certainly have not lost my ability at Backgammon.  I refused to accept a challenge to play Scrabble, they play constantly and I fear I have lost my edge there too.

We have booked a whirlwind of activities for our time in Rochester including a day at Niagara-on-the-Lake to see two plays and stay the night in a B & B. That started because we have to go to Niagara Falls to complete the process of renewing Carol’s Nexus card which includes Trusted Traveler and Global Entry, both very important for our travel plans this December and January. So while we were already going to be in the Falls, it seemed just a short hop to N-O-T-L and a play or two and who wants to start a 90 minute plus drive back to Rochester after an 11 PM curtain.  We used to do such things, but . . .

Doctors, Dentists and friends and oh yes Book of Mormon another play will occupy us in the time not taken by Yom Kippur and the Goldberg Lecture in Neurology. Then back to Covesville on the wings of another audio book, to be selected.