Return to Red Bay – We're Outta Here!

After 4 ½ weeks in the destination town known as Red Bay, Alabama, we're finally leaving tomorrow morning!

Got our silicone done the day after Diamond Shield was reapplied, and waited rather impatiently for Bay 39 in Mechanical to open up so that they could diagnose and hopefully fix our weird thumping noise when we are on jacks for more than a day. Got the call Monday morning to be in Bay 39 (again) to see what was going on. The thumping noise had been present each and every day we were sitting in our site over the weekend.

Wouldn't you know, when we set up in Bay 39, not a sound was heard. Couldn't recreate it.

A bit miffed with their “You have to re-level most days after you first set up” excuse, I decided that we would set up in our site, wait to hear the thump when we moved around, and re-level the next morning if it happened. Twelve hours after setting up in our site, the thump returned. Re-leveled in the morning, and it went away – until the next night. I had also told them that if it came back again after the first night, they were coming to our coach to check it out instead of bringing everything in and heading to their bay.

Next night, thumping noise as before. Get up in the morning, ready to head over to Bay 39 to collect a couple of technicians, and suddenly there was silence . . .

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!!!!!!!

Barbara and I looked at each other and said, “We give up”. We're done.

So I went over to process our paperwork in order to check out (6 pages of work done and a $0 bill), had them make a notation in our file that it wasn't fixed, and we're finally getting back on the road again.

Wait! Is that our RV parked by the Service Center office? Nope! It's Byron and Lynn Hill's Tiffin 34PA. They liked our custom paint job so much, they kindly asked if they could use it for theirs. Looks great! Kinda weird seeing both custom coaches in the same place at the same time.

Our time here has been filled with highs and lows. Met some great people who we hope we'll get to see somewhere down the road, got lots of things repaired (some of which we didn't even know needed repairing), but also kept hitting a wall on this darn thumping noise when we're parked for more than a night. Most of our Tiffin techs have been very good to great, with the exception of Mechanical. I just get the sense that they're going through the motions; doing the absolute minimum required of them, and nothing further. There is just no determination to get to the bottom of things in mechanical as far as I am concerned. It's just not up to the Tiffin quality we've come to expect.

Oh, and we got our motor home and Mini South Dakota registrations done by mail and received our brand new U.S. Passports, all thanks to the great people at Americas Mailbox!

But tomorrow, it's slides in, jacks up, reacquaint ourselves with our tow dolly, and we're headed to Gunter Hill COE outside of Montgomery, Alabama over the Labor Day weekend. It will mark our one year anniversary of full-time retirement RV living, and be a good test for our newly-installed Weboost cell signal booster.

We're really looking forward to this.