December finds us back in Blairsville waiting for the end of the month and retirement. The weather in Blairsville has not been to cold so far this season. The park is almost empty. Many days only the park managers, Chuck and MaryLou and Libby and I are resident at Nottely RV park. There have been several mornings with frost and I have put a light bulb in the water inlet compartment to help keep the water pump from freezing. The first week of December can be rainy and cold in North Georgia, but our week was cold in the morning and not too bad by mid afternoon. However, it did get down to 16 degrees one morning.
December 5, we loaded up the Discovery and headed for Gaffney, SC to the Freightliner assembly plant. The motorhome has a little over 6,000 miles on it and it is time to have the initial transmission fluid changed. We decided to take the rig to Gaffney in order to have this work done so we could see the assembly plant where the Freightliner chassis is put together.
We arrived at Gaffney about 4 pm on Sunday. There was another Discovery already parked in the four spot overnight area Freightliner provides. Before dark, two more rigs, a Tradewinds and a Diplomat were parked along side us.
While it was very nice of Freightliner to provide us with a parking spot for the night, there was a constant parade of trucks coming in the gate just a few feet from our parking spot. We were also close to the ubiquitous railroad track which seems to ever present near any campground.
At 8 am we rolled through the gate, past the loading barn where Freightliner folks used an overhead crane to lift and stack several chassis onto flat bed semis for transport to wherever they were going. We moved on to the service bays, four camping spots, four bays, what a coincidence. In any case, they took us in right on time and gave me a checklist of things that could or should be done at the 6k mark on the odometer. I decided for a hundred bucks to let them go ahead and change the oil and also to do the rest of the items on the checklist with the exception of changing the two fuel filters. While the oil change interval is 15,000 miles on the Cummins ISB engine, it makes some sense to get the initial oil out a little early. We won't change the oil again until about 20,000 miles. Freightliner did quite a bit of maintenance work, keeping the rig in the shop for a little over four hours.
While all of this was going on we were given a tour of the assembly plant. It was quite interesting and we learned that the rails for all of the chassis that Freightliner puts together come from Mexico. Nothing is manufactured at the Gaffney plant. They use just in time inventory and assemble all the RV chassis, school bus chassis and utility truck chassis at this location. There are two line running on two shifts. One line is dedicated to RVs.
After doing a lot of preventive maintenance work and fixing the one problem we had, a leak in the rear air suspension system, we moved out of the service bay just after noon and $388 dollars lighter in our bank account. All in all, I thought the service was very reasonable. The tranny fluid change and filters was over $170 and the engine oil change was $107, so the rest of the work cost us a little over $100. They gave me a tour of the underside of the rig, showing me where to vent the air dryer systems. Fleetwood cuts off the wires that are put on the chassis to be able to do this easily. In order to do this maintenance, one now has to crawl under the coach at regular intervals and pull three valves open to see if any moisture has accumulated in the air dryer system.
Since our priority mail from the USPS had not reached us by Saturday, we needed to go back to Blairsville to pick up our last weeks mail. One would think if one is paying for Priority Mail, it ought to make it from Texas to Georgia faster than 5 days, but maybe the Christmas rush is just too much for our PO to handle. In any case, we made a detour of about 100 miles to go back to Blairsville and get this mail. We stayed overnight at Nottely RV Park again and then on Tuesday met some friends for lunch. After lunch, we headed down the four lane toward Atlanta.
We went around the west side of Atlanta and headed west on I 20 to Birmingham. I needed to attend the last Product Team meeting of 1999 in Birmingham on Wednesday the 8th. We pulled in to the Birmingham South KOA Tuesday afternoon and paid for two days. The cost was almost $50 for two nights. While this is a nice park it is certainly not worth $25 a night, especially in winter (ok, late fall), but it was close to the office. Of course this park is bounded by two sides by I 65 and a railroad track. I went to the meeting on Wednesday, and on Thursday we headed south on I 65.
We had tentative plans to meet Dick and Phyllis Davis in Montgomery on the way south, but I had some work to complete that required a phone line, so we just rolled on down to the gulf coast and pulled into the Escapees Rainbow Plantation park in Summerdale, Alabama in the late afternoon.
We stayed at Rainbow Plantation for 18 days. The cost was $8 per day plus electric. Our total cost came out to about $11 per day. The park was very nice, the lots were large and level for the most part. We met lots of interesting folks, including a 74 year old single lady who did not start to fulltime until she was 69. She was driving a mini Winnie Warrior with no toad. A neat lady with lots of good RV stories. She has been to Alaska 5 times, once by herself.
There are several Hams who live at the Plantation permanently, including Gene W4PIV. Gene sometimes runs the RV service net which meets on 7.233.3 MHZ each day between 7 and 9 a.m. eastern time. I check into this net almost everyday. Its a good way to keep up with old friends and meet new ones.
One of the really nice features of Rainbow Plantation is the work barn. They have a covered area with a cement floor that is large enough to pull a big motorhome in for minor repair work you might want to perform. They even have a drain pan large enough to handle the 16 quarts of oil our diesel holds and a place to dispose of it in an environmentally safe manor. The work area is free, but it costs $.25 per quart to dispose of used oil. This is a great feature for fulltimers who want to do some maintenance on their rigs. One of the rows at the Plantation has phone hookups for long term residents who want to have the local phone company run a line for them. They also have two telephone rooms with a coin phone and a credit card phone with a modem jack. Unfortunately, too few phones are available for the masses since many if not most of us carry computers for email access. I spent many hours waiting for the one phone with a modem jack to become free so I could log into our personal and company email. An 80 plus site campground should have more than one modem access point. I would certainly be willing to pay extra for phone service to the site, or even donate to a fund to keep more than one line available for modem access.
While at the Plantation, we met our new friends Willie and Sanda Horeis. They have been fulltiming for several years and traded their 96 Discovery MH for a 2000 Holiday Rambler while we were all in Summerdale. We also got reacquainted with Jim and Betty Roughton again. We had met this couple of long term fulltimers at the Goshen Escapade in September. They have a permanent lot at Rainbow Plantation where they were spending several months. We also met two Ron's, Lois and Ron Cousins and Ginny and Ron Norton. I am not sure how long Lois and Ron had been on the road, but Ginny and Ron were relatively new at it. They were getting ready to take their fiver down to Naples, Florida for several months to avoid cold weather.
Christmas rolled around while we were at the Plantation, so just like in Livingston, we had Christmas with about 150 of our close friends. The dinner was great. The park supplied ham for $1 each and we all brought the rest. Of course, once again, we had far too much food.
The night before Christmas the park put on a Christmas party. Lots of songs, skits, story telling etc, ensued. It was a wonderful time.
Summerdale, Alabama was an interesting place to roost for a few weeks. We managed to find a few places to eat out (everyday). One of our favorites was the Lambert's Cafe in Foley, Alabama. This is the home of the throwed roll. Yes, they really throw dinner rolls at you. In the larger rooms of this eating establishments, those rolls can take a long flight, but we never saw anyone drop one. We also ate a nice buffet in Fairhope, Alabama and one of our favorite little places to eat was the old tyme drug store in Foley. Libby and I had a sandwich, coke and chocolate milkshake for $6. (guess who had the milkshake?). We also can attest to the quality of the Dairy Queen in Foley.
After Christmas we decided it was getting too cold to stay in LA (lower Alabama,) so we pulled up the anchor and rolled down to Crystal River, Florida.
Crystal River is an old stomping ground for Libby. Her aunt and uncle used to run a motel there, so her family vacationed there quite often when she was a child. In fact, she actually met Elvis there when he was filming Follow That Dream. He sat in her parents car and kissed both Libby and her girlfriend on the cheek. Of course, they vowed to never wash their faces again and fought over who was going to sit on the same part of the seat as the King.
We stayed at Crystal Isles Resort for three days and then moved on down to Sefner to sneak a quick visit with the grandtwins before embarking on our round Florida trip to visit officially with our three offspring and their wives, husbands and children.
We spent New Years at our daughters house and then moved to DisneyWorld, where we watched the National Championship College football game with one of our two FSU alums. He was quite pleased.