With our Liquidspring repair and refresh in our rear view window, it was time to head back to Red Bay, AL for some repairs that had to be postponed back in January due to service delays brought on by unexpected winter weather and an unusually heavy amount of visitors for that time of year.
After 3 straight days of driving 300 or so miles per day from Florida to just north of Indianapolis, we stopped for a couple of days at Dad's Bluegrass Campground in Franklin, KY to give some leg pains that had been developing a chance to rest up and relax (more on that later), and to let our upcoming appointments with third parties in Red Bay get a bit closer. The folks at Dad's are always very nice, and have good pull-through sites available for people like us who just need a couple of days.
Franklin is just about 30 minutes down the road from where the classic America car – the Corvette – is made, and they have a really nice Corvette museum there to celebrate the history of this uniquely American sports car. There are some really clunky designs in the early years of the Corvette before the classic Stingray was introduced, and some really bland designs from the 1980's to see, but the number and condition of the cars is impressive to even someone like me who isn't a car guy.
A short drive southward gets us into Red Bay on a Sunday afternoon, and we're sitting in our usual place to stay – Convenient Campground – for 2 weeks. Sign up with Tiffin for some Express Bay service, hopefully in the first week, and then have a couple of third parties coming by on the second week. We park ourselves in Site #1, next to a pile of campground – stuff – waiting for it's owner to bring their unit back from some Sunday service.
Come to find out, our neighbors have been nicknamed “The Hoarders”. They have picked up a used early 2000's Tiffin Zephyr and have been putting more than $20k in repairs into it to get it road ready, but they are – different – to say the least. They are traveling with 6 – SIX! - adult cats (one of which loves to escape when they open their door), and at least 3 kittens! He's older than her, and is either on some sort of medication or has been socially stunted since birth. The – stuff - taking up space between our site and theirs is apparently the contents of at least 2 storage bays, and they don't appear to have any urgency to put it back in the bays, as it sits outside for the 12 days we're parked next to him. One day, I'm walking Grover and see water pouring out of their Zephyr onto the ground. I put Grover back in our home and knock on their door. I tell him about the water, a cat escapes, and he ambles around back to shut off the water he was over-filling his fresh tank with. Goes back inside without a word of thanks. And now more – stuff – has to come out of a couple of storage bays in order to dry out. Needless to say, we were very happy to see them packing up and leaving.
We did meet some new friends in the campground - Lynn and Ray Lindsey. Really great people. Proud owners of an Open Road 34PA, they were in town getting a few things fixed. I like to stop by and say "Hi" to fellow gasser owners in campgrounds, so we chatted, made plans to take them to some local eateries, and generally had a great time sharing stories. We hope to see them later this year after they move to the Cleveland, OH area.
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| A farewell picture before Lynn and Ray hit the road |
We ended up having our first
unsatisfactory service experience with Tiffin in more than 4 years.
The guy who was doing our service in Bay 15 was finally able to get my rear basement bay door
adjusted to close properly after being replaced a few years ago
following an accident, but his efforts to replace some floor tiles
along the length of our main slide fell far short of expectations.
Due to some extremely high winds, we ended up bringing our main slide
in and back out earlier than planned, and found his tile work popping
back up when the slide rolled over it. It was a good thing the bad
weather had come in, as we likely would not have caught this problem
until the day we had to leave to head back to Georgia, so it gave us,
and Tiffin, a chance to get it fixed right. Which they did in another service bay for free.
So it's now week two, and we're waiting for the nice folks at Lindsey and Winchester to repair a couple of shade rollers whose internals had broken, and Dillon Massey to replace a washer door seal, and the pain in my right leg which had appeared off and on following long travel days over the past year suddenly reappears – without any driving days! I had been using a walking stick to help me get around, but it seemed as if it wasn't getting any better even though we were stationary, so it was time to get me to the hospital while Barbara held down the fort waiting for our repaired shades to be reinstalled and Dillon to do his stuff (plus she needed to keep Grover company).
As hospitals go, Red Bay Hospital is small, but they have a very nice staff and a small 5-bay Emergency Room. What's nice about the small size is that they have all the equipment and departments needed to help diagnose my problem, without the wait times found in larger hospitals. Vitals were taken, blood was drawn, and I await the lone ER doctor to get to me so that he can order my CT scan with contrast and an ultrasound taken of my leg. They are concerned about possible clots being the cause of my pain. Scans come back negative for clots, but I do have some minor arthritis in the ankle and foot joint, but they don't think that's the problem.
Seems their diagnosis is that I suffer from tenosynovitis, which is an inflammation of the tendon and the sheath surrounding the tendon. What's interesting is that repetitive movement is usually the cause of tenosynovitis, but in my case it's after a day of driving where my leg actually DOESN'T move very much. So now that I'm back in Georgia I'll have my primary care physician at the VA take a look at it and see if she concurs, or has another diagnosis.
Needless to say, Barbara and I are concerned that this might impact future travel plans in the RV. Could this condition spell doom for Parental Parolees and the lifestyle we have come to love? Tune it to see what happens next.
