We made it to Grand Isle and without a reservation we only had a choice of 40 of the 49 sites here. This is not the biggest season on the Gulf. LA 1 bridge may not be the longest in the US but it is clearly the longest in Louisiana. Toll was $9.50 for the coach and car, one way (no return toll). It was built because after Katrina it became clear that the former road would be under water any time there was a major storm, and with rising sea levels it eventually will be under water at high tide. No one in the Louisiana government would attribute this to climate change, that is far too scientific. They are just being practical.

Grand Isle makes Red Bay look like a hotbed of activities. To get anyplace requires a long drive over a two lane road to get to Cutoff, yes that really is the name of the town. There are two parallel roads that run from Larose to the Golden Meadow. One, LA 1, is along the bayou and is lined with small towns and fishing companies and shipyards. The other, LA 3235 a block to the west, is newer and presumably quicker as it doesn’t have traffic lights at every town. We took the old shore road down. What was the hurry? But we will take the newer road north when the time comes, it may be less stressful, with less cross traffic.

Now that we are here it feels restful. Carol is updating her new website almost daily with new pictures. I am doing little projects that somehow have cropped up or been put off because I don;t want to do them.  I have recreated goldberg-online.net  and should be opening it for viewing as soon as I get up the gumption to transfer the domain from Myhosting where it has been since 2002 to BlueHost. Watch for the announcement. In the mean time you can see Carol’s in progress at cgstudio.net (I just asked her permission to post his).

The shore birds are plentiful and I have even gotten some reasonable pictures with the Panasonic DMC -ZS20 20X zoom lens:

 We cannot help but think about the many people we know who are in various stages of fighting for their lives or making adjustments knowing that their time may be near. Just the other day my sister and her husband cancelled a trip to New Zealand and Australia, when her middle son’s mother-in-law was stricken with a burst aneurysm in the brain. That she is still alive and recognizes family seems to be a miracle. May the miracle continue to improve! 

The fog has lifted, it is warm and sunny time to go out and play.

We left Summerdale on Monday the 1st with a plan to stop at Infinity Center at Exit 2 in Mississippi which also encompasses a Welcome Center and Stennis Space Center. We had stopped at this Welcome Center several times passing through and decided that it would be a good time to take time to go on the tour. I also had seen that overnight parking might be possible in a side section of the Welcome Center. We always look for free. The tour got off to an unlikely start as the cash register computer was down and would not reboot to even open the cash drawer. They issued us paid bands and said they hoped the cash register would be working when we came back from the bus tour of the Space Center.

This center was developed in the early ’60’s after Kennedy’s call for landing a man on the moon within the decade. Senator John Stennis saw to it that this site would serve for developing and testing the engines for that project.

 They built a canal to enable the large engines to be transported from there, by barge round Florida to Cape Canaveral – later renamed Cape Kennedy and yet again renamed to Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. The engines were much too large for any other mode of transport and they could not tested in Florida as there was not a large enough buffer area to make it feasible. The tour is worth a stop if you can allow a couple of hours in your travel schedule. It is no where near as exciting as the the Houston Space Center or Kennedy Space Center tours. The Infinity Center would be a fine break for families with younger children on a road trip looking for an educational event during a long day on the road. Also it would be an interesting stop for nearby locals looking for something different. The center today houses 7 different government agencies and several universities’ space and research departments. Just in the “N”s are NOA, NASA, Naval Research Laboratory and Naval Seals.

It turned out that the signage was clear that overnigitht parking was not permitted and the staff at Infinity confirmed that and one remembered there is a Walmart in Waveland, MS about 15 miles back to the east. That is where we spent the night. Mid morning on Tuesday the 2nd we drove about an hour to French Quarter RV Resort located just 2 blocks north of the French Quarter. It is almost unbelievable that such a nice RV Park is located where it is with I 10 just to the north, I can watch traffic without getting out of my seat, and the French Quarter just two “ugly” blocks to the south. We do not walk back late at night as it does not feel safe to walk through a no man’s land of abandoned public buildings and parking lots in the dark. We have not moved the car since our arrival nor will we until we prepare for departure in the morning.

Our special New Orleans treat yesterday was dinner at Commander’s Palace. This is one of the most highly rated restaurants in a town of highly rated restaurants. We had eaten there only once before, a brunch because that was all that was available on short notice (two days) during our visit. This time the notice was even shorter as I called mid morning and was able to get a table for 2 at 7:30 that evening. To make it really memorable we walked to St Charles St and Canal and followed the St Charles Street trolley tracks to the first Car Stop on St Charles where we got a trolley to ride out to Washington Street where the restaurant is located. We arrived within minutes of our reserved time and were seated immediately. The only complaint of the evening was that Carol’s risotto got gummy as the meal progressed. My osso bucco of lamb was delightful, no there are no Foodie pictures, it looked like beautifully presented food! Naturally the shank of the lamb was vertical. A minor cavil, there was no marrow scoop. Not that I have ever seen one other than in a picture as on this page.

A cab brought us back to FQRV and Geewhiz and a good night’s sleep. Wednesday brought us back into the French Quarter and lunch at Stanley’s. Great oyster poorboy for me and Carol had a delightful salad. We stopped by the French Quarter CVS to pick up a prescription and had a long talk with the not very busy pharmacist about  places to eat and places to visit. His lack of “busy” is due to the location and the very short pharmacy hours, 10 AM to 2 PM daily! We continued to walk through many shops and buy nothing and several galleries where we also bought nothing. Back to the coach before dark. we will have dinner on board and watch a movie.

Tomorrow we are planning on moving to Grand Isle, about as far south as you drive into the gulf in Louisiana.  We will stay a few days and Carol will be able to finish the latest updates to her website and I will work at bringing my website out from under the cobwebs and presenting it in a new “dusted off” version and then I will be able to add some new material. I may even move this blog to it. Watch for the news

Updated 12/6 to include image of Engine Test Stand

We are in Summerdale AL, at Rainbow Plantations Escapee Park. We have picked up mail. We have shopped. We have tried to fix the verdamta (badly spelled German) DVD player and failed causing the possibility of yet more work by a skilled technician rather than a somewhat skilled RVer who still thinks he is young and capable of fixing anything. I won’t regale you with all the details unless someone writes and begs, maybe not even then. Suffice it to say we have over the air (OTA) TV, internet TV and satellite TV when the trees are not in the way. Oh yes we also have cable from time to time when a park makes it available for no extra charge. Who needs one more source?

I must say I am grateful that our miseries are so far limited to the lack of a functioning DVD player and the usual ills of people our age. I sleep fine, just not always in bed during the usual sleeping hours. I fell asleep this after noon, you could blame the turkey and wine, sitting upright on a hassock. I might fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, so I know I am getting the prescribed 8 hours, just not contiguous and well

– where was I?

I am great at keeping Carol awake at night so she too takes advantage of the unintended nap while reading late at night.

The thanks I must give and have not done enough is to my late mother for whom family came first. She insisted we take time to get to know family wherever they were. There were times I really wanted to be with friends, but family obligations always had to be considered. So we see family, second cousins in Fairhope AL and stay very close to Ellie who is now alone, when we are in the same city. When we go to New York we gather with our Ornati cousins because that  is what we do. We also stay in touch with the closer cousins by email and phone. Carol too keeps in touch with her many cousins and is always organizing get togethers when we are near.

Thanks Mom! I know you would be overjoyed to know that we shared Thanksgiving with Joy and family

and that, when we pass through New York City on our way to Israel, we will stop over with Molly for an evening. Oh yes,Sandy and I stay in close touch too, although it is more by phone these days as neither of us seems to ever be in the same place.

More immediately I am grateful for the health and well being of our children and grandchildren.

Yes, I am thankful!

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