Two for the price of one & Tiffin Service Red Bay, AL

This blog will be for the last two days and during that time we traveled from Arlington, TX to Red Bay, AL.  Why, you may ask.  We need some work to be done on the kitchen slide out and want it to be performed at the Tiffin Factory in Red Bay, AL.  But, lets not get ahead of ourselves.

We had a great time visiting with Judy & Herb the last few days, but we adhere to the old saying:  "fish and visitors begin to smell after 3 days" and our time was up.  We left early Sunday morning and merged into the busy traffic on I-20 E from Arlington.  Right after we got on the interstate Gerry grabbed her camera and got this nice shot of the Texas flag.

 

  We had an uneventful drive to Vicksburg, MS

and crossed the Mississippi River and saw it at flood stage.  One of the casinos on the riverbank was close to having the grounds underwater.  It's the buildings on the photo above.  Thankfully, that wasn't the casino we were heading for.  We pulled into the Ameristar Casino RV park late in the afternoon.  The RV park was built 14 years ago and didn't take into consideration the size of RVs of today.  The sites were difficult to pull into and very narrow.  Our RV just barely fit on the pad and the car was off but very near the road.

We grabbed a bite to eat and then headed over to the casino to try and win our fortune.  I wish I could say we did, but after about an hour of losing constantly we thought it wasn't going to be our night and we returned to the RV.  The park and adjacent hotel provide free shuttle service to and from the casino.  The return trip was right to our front door rather than the office where we started our trek.

Monday morning saw us up bright and early once again for the 300+ mile drive to Red Bay, AL.  We decided to take the Natchez Parkway for a bit and got on it just west of Jackson, MS.  It didn't take long for us to think that over again.  The Parkway is very narrow and on-coming cars were pulling off to their right like they thought we were going to run over them.  The road also was very bouncy and we decided that 150 miles of that would kill us.  So, after about 30 miles we got off the Natchez Parkway and took I-55 north and then cut over in steps until we got to Red Bay around 5:30 pm.

Natchez Trace Parkway

Obelisk along side of I-55

MS State U in Starkville, MS

Check out the wheels on this car.

    We finally arrived in Red Bay after driving on progressively worse roads.  The last few miles were on narrow, country roads without any shoulder.  Thankfully it was only for a few miles.

We arrived at the Tiffin Factory and went to the campground office to find out they were full and we would be in a dry camping area.  No problem, we have a genset and get along fine without a hookup.  Wrong!.  The breaker on the genset had tripped and it took me a while to figure out what was wrong.  Once it was reset, we were back on the air.  We only get one tv channel, so I guess it will be movies and radio to entertain us.

The facility here is huge and there must be over 100 RVs here waiting for service.  In addition, there are around 50 RVs where the service is complete and waiting to be picked up.  Most Tiffin owners prefer to have the service work done here rather than at a dealer.  We may be here a long time waiting our turn and they don't work on the weekend.   Here are some of the RVs waiting for service.

  
A few years ago Tiffin RV bought an old airfield and the building on it to convert to their service center.  Many of the RVs are lined up along side of the old airport runway with just enough room to have your slide out.  They don't want to make it too comfortable for anyone so they don't hang around for long after the work is finished.  They assigned us a site right on the old runway and it's a level site.  It's marked by US in the center of the picture below.  The site further along the runway are sloped downhill and are closer together, so we lucked out. 

There are around 50 or more service bays and they all are full.  In addition, they are building more bays onto the end of the service building.  I think they could double them and still have a hard time keeping up with all the work.

We will know more about our fate tomorrow sometime when the technician comes out to our RV and runs down the list of things that need to be done.  Hopefully most of it will be covered under our extended warranty insurance and maybe some covered by Tiffin making some repairs for which they take responsibilty.  We shall see.

Now it's time to hit the hay since they could come by the RV as early as 7am.  I wonder if the sun is up then.

That was our last couple days, how were yours?