Our start to 2018 included a trip to the home of Tiffin Motor Homes, in Red Bay, Alabama. We needed to get some body work done on the front end of the RV due to a little mishap. There are several local businesses run by former employee’s of Tiffin to do work outside of the very busy service center. I chose McKinney Motor Home Repair (256-356-8634) which is right behind the main manufacturing plant. It is run by Daniel McKinney…
When I was working on our west coast trip planning over a year ago, I knew one of the spots I wanted to see was Crater Lake. I made reservations to stay at the National Park Campground a year in advance to ensure I got a spot since they only had a limited number to handle our 38ft RV. I built the rest of the trip mostly around this particular stop. So we left British Columbia and traveled through the…
We spent a week in Monterey and had a great time, with so much to see I need to break up this post into two parts. First up is the Monterey Aquarium: Next was a tour along the coast down to pebble beach. Talk about drop dead type of scenery, it was breathtaking…. We also had to deal with a major plumbing issue, the fancy motorized toilet had a malfunction and the ball valve would not open which required…
In a previous post I discussed the design of the solar system I was going to put into the RV. This is our Christmas present for the RV this year.The work was done by Greg who runs RV Solar Solutions. We agreed to meet at Lazy L&L campground near Canyon Lake, which is north of San Antonio, just in the start of Texas Hill Country. The closest town is New Braunfels, Tx. The campground sits right on the Guadalupe River and…
While waiting for service, I got a chance to take the Tiffin Manufacturing plant tour where the Motorhomes are produced. Tiffin has been building RV’s since the early 1970’s, they were a building supply company and got into the RV manufacturing after some of the companies they supplied exited the business. Here is a picture of an early model, a gas powered 1976 Allegro. They have come a long way over the 40 plus years. The factory tour is…
So most of the coach controls for lighting, vent fans, shades and such are controlled by several touch panels that are around the RV. Each panel is set to control those things nearby, so the shades control is in the main salon panel. But what if your sitting down and don’t want to get up to change something? Two Tiffin owners got together and created a simple computer to plug into the control system used on the RV to allow…
One of the things we have learned is that when doing the parking lot camping, we were running the generator to keep the batteries charged and to run the AC. The plan in the future is to reduce the AC need by either moving North or gain more altitude when it is so hot we need AC. As for keeping the batteries charged, we have some major electrical draws like the refrigerator that will such down the batteries in a…
So I wanted to find a simple way to display images in a stack so you would not have to scroll down to the bottom of a page to see them all, so here is my first test of the different ways to use a Gallery Plugin: This is the Image Viewer, where you have a stack of pictures and you can click through them: Another way to display then in a Masonry Style Grid and when you click on…
One of the questions was why did I go set up a blog, why use WordPress software and go with a separate domain? I was using Facebook to keep friends and family up to date on the RV plans and such. But there were several things that I didn’t have control over, such as how things were arranged and how they were displayed. Facebook was always changing the way it organizes your news feeds and more and more advertising…
Getting closer to retirement and now that I have hit the magic 99 days, it reminded me of the song “99 bottles of beer on the wall” you take one down and pass it around, 98 beer of bottles on the wall… this is a song we sang while we were growing up and camping as a family, on those long drives, but I don’t remember getting very far on the countdown before we switched to something else. By the…