Emeril’s Table 10 in Las Vegas is not the typical restaurant Irene and I would eat in. We are far too frugal for that, but this one time it seemed like a good idea. We hadn’t eaten at all, lunch time was long past, and we had played indoor pickleball in the morning at the Dula Center, walked the whole of the bizarre and camp-ily covered Fremont Street several times watching the characters with too much money suck up perfumed oxygen while getting their heads  massaged with unsanitary-looking battery-operated mutli-pronged stimulators and the other characters with no money at all discussing if a trashed then scrounged plastic bottle had a redemption value, looked for – with no success at all – a multi-way penny slot-machine ready to pay for our trip, had coffee at the dirtiest Starbucks we’ve ever seen this side of Bejing and generally needed nourishment and some positive reinforcement.  This indirectly led us to Table 10.

The experience itself was worth the $50 lunch tab, I suppose. It wasn’t so much the food itself – described quickly the food was ordinary; Calamari as an appetizer and Mahi-Mahi sandwiches with cole-slaw. But, and I suppose this is Emeril’s genius – BAM! – it was all a bit different and (dare I say it?) better than its less-pricey competitors. The Mahi-Mahi in particular was (at the time at least) the best I’ve ever eaten…a small sandwich on a home-made roll but with a thick and perfectly-done tender fish steak nestled gently in a pineapple-tomato relish that somehow worked very well. Plus, like I said, going in we were starving and coming out we weren’t so you chalk up the experience to being an experience and thus allow yourself the extravagant mid-day meal. Plus – and, hey, my “I hate people” attitude aside, I am a people-person in some ways, or at least I’m a waiter-person, and I LIKED Julio, who probably didn’t take any more special care of us than anyone else, at least his patter with them seemed identical to his patter to us, but he made good eye contact and shared his own personal views of the dishes and he wouldn’t have steered us wrong, right? So it was all good….

Until, two hours later, in our motor-home, Spyro walked, K.C. the Kit scratched, me laying down for just a moment to “rest my eyes”….my stomach began doing an old and remarkably familiar dance that I thought I had left behind when I stopped drinking 25 years ago, and one thing led to another, which led to a brief bout with the porcelain pony….I will spare you details here….

…and this in turn led to a relatively short-lived series of fairly profound (for me) thoughts, of which I share a small selection here.

1.  Is the experience of eating good food made less by the experience of throwing it up afterward?

2.  We all know, and I don’t need to belabor, how food is processed and what eventually happens to it. So perhaps we should short-cut the whole process and only eat minimum amounts of food and only as fuel? Perhaps the whole thing of “enjoying” the food we eat is an artificial creation, an emotional overlay that we add to a process that isn’t worthy of the effort anyway, given that it all comes out in the end (so to speak)?

3.   Does Emeril, in this case, owe me anything? Like my money back, an apology, a signed copy of his most recent cookbook? Or did he already give me what I paid for, and what I did with it was (somehow) my decision?

Obviously this type of mental masturbation does nobody any good. But, from the perspective of the range of alternatives presented to one when on their knees in the very tight confines of a motor-home water-closet, it’s better to think about those things than what is right in front of your face, as it were.

Or, in my usual fashion, did I miss the whole Zen-point…again?

This excepts State Parks, naturally. State Parks very wildly, so much that it’s almost comical. You can have parks that have nothing at all in facilities, parks whose most attractive feature is that they are there and nothing more. And you can have places like the one we went to last year in West Virginia that had terraced sites a million miles apart from each other, sites so long you could land jets in them, so level they could have been pool tables, high above a lake pretty as a postcard, across from a golf course as green as the fruit of a ripe Kiwi. A beautiful park, if somewhat orderly in its beauty.

Soaring high above even that nice park is this one, Henry’s Lake near Last Chance, Idaho. Not that it’s the fanciest ornament on the tree; it’s not. It’s rather plain and on a plain as well, a high-desert plain with a mountain range over 10,000 feet rising behind it. The sites are large and well-spaced and level enough for government work, but what this park has is surprises of the natural kind. Last time we were here, a year ago I think, I almost feel over a cow moose and we released at least six magnificent Cut-Bows, an unusual hybrid between a Cutthroat and a Rainbow Trout that can reproduce and grow like crazy…the six we caught were at all at least 20 and mostly 22-23 inches, making them all between 3 + and 5 pounds, good fish for any fly-fisher and the highlight of last year’s Western States swing. But so far our visit here has equaled last year by the simple unexpected arrival of two magnificent bald eagles….one of which was promptly chased and scared away by two very aggresive seaguls; the second of which cruised our site repeatedly looking for something….a dead rabbit? A small Cairn Terrier?….and in the doing making us feel as if we were, just for a moment, part of his life, and it’s a nice feeling, being part of the life of an eagle.

I’ll trade off full-hookups for an eagle any time.

I have to say, though, that at the end of the day I am often glad I am still an RVer. We, too, have the same backyards as these guys, the same sunsets, the same access to superior Missoula services. And if our neighbors get pesty or that red-tailed hawk is too noisy eating his magpie dinner, we can change our backyard by the next day. I’d like to see Steve (the bigger-than-yours guy) try that trick.

Yes, I know what she means, hard to miss her meaning accompanied as it were by hand-gestures signifying, if not mountains, then at least large mounds. But seeing big steaming piles of moose evidence is not the same as seeing a moose. When I was last in Alaska I had been out running (outside of Anchorage if I remember correctly) and was on a dirt road pretty far outside the city limits, doing a run of maybe ten miles. I was more or less at the end of the run as dictated by my stop watch and was thinking about turning. I decided “just a bit further”, went up and over a rise, and came within five feet of running broadside into a cow moose, thankfully without calf (or otherwise I might not be here talking about the story), and she simply looked at me disdainfully, put her nose back into the underbrush and continued filling her belly. I back-pedaled as fast as I could, reversing nearly in mid-stride as I did so, perhaps looking more like Michael Jackson doing a moon-walk than the middle-aged jogger I was, and beat my time out by ten minutes getting back.

Wisconsin, our current stop, doesn’t have the same claim to fame as the town in Michigan (in fact we’re told you’d need to go to Canada from here to see a moose) but it, too, has its attractions. For instance, Woodruff, the place right around the bend from the Hiawatha RV Park where we are staying, claims to have the World’s Biggest Penny. This was a strange enough fame-claim to inspire Irene and I to go looking for it. Turns out it is simply a painting of a big penny, although all the banners in town proclaim “world’s largest penny” and why they think that seeing a PAINTING of a big penny is the same as seeing a big ‘ol COPPER penny is beyond me, any more than I understood, in Michigan, how seeing the evidence of a moose can be considered the same as a moose or how you can have the U.S. Moose Capital without having a visible moose.  Heck, I don’t know…I just go where we are pointed half the time, looking for something to write home to mother about, or in the advent of her not being available, I gladly settle for you, especially in that your expectations are so low, knowing us as you do.

That may be all the word on Wisconsin I have to share at the moment. We have not fished here at all, alth0ugh the small-mouth bass water nearby looks invitingly rocky albeit a bit low. Also we have NOT eaten a Pastie (Pass-tee), the famous meat pot pie. We have not eaten any fried cheese curds, nor have we attended any of the many Friday all-you-can-eat fish fries sponsored by everyone from Elk’s Lodges to boy scout trouts, generally, it seems, followed by blackout bingo. St. Germaine, down the street from us about ten miles, also has a Monday flea market of some size and fame, which we missed coming in, and a very large farmer’s market on Wednesdays, which interests us Local-vores quite a bit although we will miss that as well on the flip-side as we drivers say, leaving at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning as we are to visit good friends Tom and Jean in Minnesota, where I intend to beat Tom’s butt in pickleball….once again, and this time with the expectation he will bawl like the baby he is.

In the meantime, I need to get us ready, so I’d better get on it. I have a drawer face that’s pulled off, a toilet seat that’s loose, a sewer tank that needs to be flushed, etc. etc. It’s hard to roll when pieces are falling off here and there, personally and otherwise, but a screwdriver can take care of the coach. Actually, overall it’s tough out here but it’d be tougher anywhere else in these perilous times and we are making the best of it. No sense your feeling sorry for us, if you were.

Anyway those of us who are crotchety older full-timers, and here I do refer to you or at least the people we prefer to hang with (”hang with” being a younger person’s phrase typically but among geezers still appropriate while taking on a whole new and admittedly unfortunate connotation) dislike KOAs because they are loud and always have some organized activity going on that we wouldn’t participate in if it meant the return to health of our 401Ks. OK, that last is an exaggeration; if it meant money we WOULD participate, but it never does and so we don’t. Speaking of money, KOAs are also amazingly expensive and we always feel that we aren’t getting value as we don’t participate, this becoming something of a Catch-22 for those few of us who are driven by logic, but excluding Irene the rest of us aren’t so we only recognize overt high prices, coupled with the fact that they, more than almost any other campground chain, will raise their prices tremendously during peak seasons, and since those seasons define as “That period of time when Irene and AJ are nearby”, we always wind up paying more for what we perceive as less….and having just come from the Tiffin factory and several dog hospitals, where, disregarding the fact that in both cases we were getting something we wanted out of it,  people lined up starting at dawn to get what’s left of our money…yes, disregarding this, or perhaps in spite of it or because of it we have none to spare.

This lengthy preamble, of course, only forcasts the obvious….that I’m writing these golden sentences from the comfort of our coach parked reasonably comfortably inside…wait for it….the Lexington, VA., KOA. Why? Because it’s the only place in town that’s worth a damn, the profanity becoming obviously appropriate in just a moment if you’d please wait. I swear you have the patience of a ferret.

Anyway, the last two days we’ve been driving, driving, driving…up at dawn, animals fed, animals walked, throw ‘em into the coach, roll up the sewer hose, unhook power, hook up toad, check for road kill, toss into coach for later Zone-favorable meal (mostly just kidding), head out, rawhide (stirring music and lowing cattle in background)… up from Alabama through Georgia, down the road across South Carolina, up through North Carolina, across a tiny piece of Tennessee and into Virginia, it’s all good, nice roads, blue mountains, lush meadows everywhere, nice stuff, but it’s a long way and we switch Sirius channels endlessly, going from PBS to Bloomberg to CNN to FOX and back again. Way too much time, way too much talk, too much nonsense passing for news….too many issues by far, and certainly too few solutions. It’s clear that the forces of darkness are fast approaching and I doubt that even Obama will be able to turn the tide. It’s a bad day in Black Rock when the best I can look forward to is that I won’t be here long enough to worry about it, a bad day made worse by Irene’s struggle, as we drive, to find suitable campgrounds where we can overnight and also hopefully go see something in the few daylight hours she allows me.

Generally, when it comes to approaches for considering this particular problem of where to overnight, I prefer worry. Worry is easy; it’s something of a way of life for me. In fact it’s always been so for me, and as much as I’d like to believe that somehow time will magically change this, a condition like this that’s successfully fought off the miracles of multiple talk therapies, anti-anxiety diets, lung-busting exercise regimenes, mucho Internet research, a library of books, an almost-infinite number of most-prescription drugs and near-endless whining, well, it probably won’t. But as I worry I’m reminded of the paranoid’s lament…”Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to get me!”. Likewise, just because I’m certifiably neurotic doesn’t mean there isn’t anything I should worry about. Today alone I found the following worthy topics for extreme worry while driving:

1.  In the far-right lane,  how far to the right can I drive our big rig without hitting traffic signs or getting the back four wheels stuck in a rut or a ditch…either of which circumstances would most certainly result in the coach  flipping onto its back like a huge, multi-colored turtle?

2.  If I do flip the coach over, will my insurance pay? They’ve been wonderful to deal with thus far for stuff like answering questions, but I’ve never put in a claim. Insurance companies, I’ve heard, don’t like claims, seeing them as anti-profit.

3.   If the insurance company doesn’t pay, I won’t be able to repair the coach. Will I then have to give up RVing? Where would we live? What would we live IN? Living in a cardboard box has always idled along beneath my seeming placid exterior, probably because it’s so close to my old fav., living on a park bench, covered with newspapers. A worrier’s aside; if we DID go for the cardboard box option, where would we find a box big enough for ourselves and our dogs?

Granted, the things I’m worry about here, while possibilities, are basically mental masturbation and not likely to come to pass, and as such eventually I would probably let them go. And when Irene announced that, like it or not, we were staying at a KOA outside Lexington and I could just shut my yap because she didn’t want to hear about it, I did as she requested but changed the focus of my worry instantly. After all, based on many experiences, I now had something more real to worry about. And my worry suddenly had more focus. It wasn’t whether or not we would be inundated with kids, it would be which group of kids…the mewling, pewling, toddlers or the skateboarders who would do jumps through our yard, nearly taking out poor Jake in the process? It wouldn’t be whether or not we would be subjected to unworldy amounts of noise at all hours, it would be where would it come from, and what, if anything, could we do about it? I’ve been known, at KOAs, to go visiting the neighbors in the early-morning hours when the drunks were in full throat. I’ve also been known to take Rocky the Girl-Dog with me, back in the day when her very appearance garnered respect…rest her good-natured soul, she never intended a minute’s harm to anyone but there were at least two groups that quieted instantly when she showed up. What would I do now? Could Jake put the fear into anybody? Could Spyro? Well, perhaps Spyro…now that his teeth are cleaned they gleam in a most ferocious way, so if anybody alive can be intimidated by a Cocker Spanial they certainly could be by Spyro if the light was just right.

Reality is always an slap in my worried face, presenting me as it does with totally unanticipated outcomes. In this case it was Karaoke. If I ever go to hell, which if it exists is probably a likely outcome given my sins, I will at least be joining my friends, as the Irish expression goes, and more to the point I’ll be used to the experience as karoake at the KOA will have showed me the way. Nobody in the camp could sing. None of them could carry a tune, even with the tune and the published words apparently trying to carry them. And, being directly downhill and under the swimming pool and stage areas, we were bombarded by the noise as if we were in the flight path of cargo jets. And, of course, the summertime hours had just gone into effect, meaning that the quiet times were diminished and didn’t start until 11 PM, which doesn’t sound late but when you are as old as I am it might as well be dawn, especially when you factor in that I must lay awake for at least an hour or two settling my mistakes of the day before the books are balanced and I can go to my restless sleep. Probably in an ideal world I would go to bed about 8 and get to sleep by 10 or so…in this case, starting after the noise finally backed down a bit meant that it was probably 2 AM or so when sleep finally arrived. When you are looking at traversing 50 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway later today, a beautiful route unfortunately characterized by turns wrapping endlessly around each other, one leading into the next, it is good to have your wits about you, and, unfortunately for the motorcyclists and bicyclists and joggers and hikers who will be in the road up there, today I won’t and most of THEM will be lucky if they get through it alive.

Well, it could be worse for them. They could be sentenced to the KOA. And me? I’m gonna go find some coffee.

Which is here in the RV, as we have been, now, for over two days. There are times in the RV life when you better friggin’ have everything you need within your own cave because you simply aren’t going anywhere and what you’ve got is what you live with. Sickness, yours or your dog’s, can get you there, but so can weather, and here in Alabama more often than not the strange subset of weather, the humidity, is the main villain, coupled with the regularly-attending rain and localized but still ferocious thunderstorms that to this uninitiated ex-Californian sound like someone banging on the gates of their personal hell. Which has been the case here, in the PeeWeeRV, over the last two days. It rains, it thunders, it keeps on raining. The rain lets up, we let the dogs out, the thunder portends more rain, the dogs want to go back in, I look up at the sky, Irene shouts out that the back of the RV stinks of sewer gas which, inexplicably, is beginning to settle there -she opined earlier that a dead opposum had crawled into the vent to the washer and drier and died there, it smelled that way to her, and, this being Alabama, I didn’t question her but went outside and looked at the exterior of the vent pipe to see if, in fact, I could see claw marks on the paint. That I couldn’t didn’t mean she was wrong, and that I would say something that patently is that silly speaks more to this being Alabama than to anything more serious, for instance that I have finally gone to the Dark Side and joined up with, as Charles Pierce would say in his book of the same title, Idiot America.

The sewer gas smell comes and goes and in between attending bouts of nausea I look around and realize that Dennis was right, one can have a little cave and have everything in it one needs, especially now that I have three flat-screen TVs, with working HD and three different DirecTV receivers to go with them. The three allow me to have Speed Racer on one, a 2008 World Series of Poker event on a second, Kite Runner on a third for Irene to cry at and some other martial arts experience being taped to disc, all at the same time. But, attractive as this reality is, the real value is in the metaphor…not only do we have everything in this perhaps 300 square feet that we could possibly need, including each other, the two mutts and the HIK (Highly Interactive Kitty), but past all that we have the luxury of enough to eat, a toilet that flushes and books beyond the immediate reads that give us the illusion of seperate lives we can experience as soon as we get a minute…and in this case a blog site and readers, or at least one, otherwise how would you know about all this? Ain’t logic grand?

I had intended, when I began, to use the elegant bridge earlier in this piece to morph over and talk about Charles Pierce a little more, and to rant awhile about the continued dumbing down of America in general and as near as I can tell, except for Tom and Ann and a few other folks, of the South in particular, no offense to anyone if there is anyone reading this who takes offense at my calling the South dumb, which, in context, there probably won’t be for reasons that may become clear if you bear with me a little longer.

But I don’t know about all that right now……from here I intend that we migrate over to Montpelier, home of President Madison, who with Jefferson formed one of the great duos of earlier constitutional thought, although they certainlydidn’t spend a lot of time agreeing with each other. I point out in the doing that not all people here in the South are, in fact, stupid….but as Forest Gump so famously said, “Stupid is as stupid does”…and I’ve seen things here that are, in fact, stupid, but I’ve probably seen as many things being done in other parts of the United States that are just as stupid, and I’m really afraid, afraid….afraid in this case that what I’m really saying isn’t that the South is stupid at all, at least no more so than any other place, but instead I’m saying that people everywhere simply don’t think, and suddenly I have six hundred examples of this lack of thought to share and no energy remaining to share it with, and, back to Dennis, I have everything here that at least EYE need, and therefore will retreat for a few moments, intellectual coward that I can be, to the refuge of a soft chair, to the hypnotic patter of rain, to the sympathetic murmer of air-conditioning and to the comfortable belly on my arm of a once-sick but hopefully recovering-somewhat dog, and take a nap. The stupidity, if that’s what it is, will be there, waiting for me, the next time I dare venture outside our cave.

In fact, I’m sitting pretty today, typing away in an amazingly tasteful and even more comfortable customer lounge, (and, hey, you wanna look? Check it ooouuutttt….), Irene and I just waiting (and OH how we love waiting!) for six things to simultaneously get done on our Allegro Bus. Outside in the almost-spotless shop, Brannon and his consistently hard-working family – his brother, father, father-in-law and his wife – stay hard at it, replacing my 2,000 Watt inverter with a 3,000 Watt version, adding two more house batteries, and getting ready to install our Kenmore residential refrigerator, which will roughly double both our refrigerator and freezer capacities while simultaneously working, which the Norcold refrigerator standard to most motor homes hasn’t done very well. In fact, I could tell you stories about the Norcold but won’t, at least today – all I can say is that Irene is liable to be so happy having a reliable, working, decent-sized refrigerator instead of, as she so succinctly says, “that friggin’ Norcold” – that it could bode very well for me if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

But it’s all taking some doing, and don’t tell me ‘cuz I’ll tell you, nothing fits easily when you are doing a retrofit. For instance, the six batteries will be increased to eight, but there is no good other place to install the extra two batteries, so they are customizing two battery slide-outs and will install six batteries on the bottom on one and have the other two batteries on the top. The space they have to work with is exactly the size it needs to be…to about the sixteenth of an inch. If they get it working correctly, and right now it looks like they may, it will be a feat of custom engineering that will alone be worth the price of admission, not that I’m telling Brannon that until this is all done, of course.

Nor is the refrigerator install the end of the story, even given all it entails. By the end of tonight, per Brannon, not only will the refrigerator be installed (and the supporting batteries and inverter), but a residential-style fan will be in the bedroom,

Brannon and friend install fan

the old-school night drapes will be gone from the coach’s front and the new-school drop-down day/night shades will be in place, and Brannon’s peer Chris will have also showed up after having worked three other jobs to install our flat-screen TV in the bedroom. There are other things….trouble-shooting a water-pump light that shows a continuous “on” condition and putting a new power plug into a wall to facilitate the subwoofer’s new home, a change in placement necessitated by the previous replacement of the cabinets by the dining table, done yesterday by the famous Tim (who has yet MORE cabinet work to do, but that’s Friday…what day is this, anyway?).

They work hard and they apparently don’t stop and I recently learned they don’t sleep. Brannon has estimated we will be finished up by 11:00 PM this evening. But he and his brother won’t be finished. A bit ago he received an emergency phone call from the famous Bob Tiffin, who owns Tiffin Motor Home Company. Bob has a highly irate customer in a new Zephyr…the top-end Tiffin coach….without air-conditioning for three days now. In Raleigh, NC. Five hours away at least.  In 90+ heat and supercharged humidity. And, when Brannon and his brother are finished here, they will, without sleep, drive five hours to Raleigh and help out the guys there. Because, you see, Brannon is still working for Tiffin, and until July that’s the way he’ll roll.

If, when I talked previously about my observing a somewhat lackadaisical work ethic in some of the Tiffin employees over the month we’ve been here, I bet you thought I meant EVERYBODY who works back here, didn’t you? Let me say right here, right now, I didn’t. I didn’t mean everybody. I didn’t, at least, mean Brannon and his gang. Or Tim or Chris. I can’t speak for everybody, but I can speak for them. These guys, at least, rock big.

The Folks Next Door

here at the Allegro Campground, who, for some reason, choose to have the strangest party almost every night outside their coach door, which, since they are parked on our driver’s side, means that they are partying right underneath our living room window. Since motor homes all have the sound insulating qualities of a single thickness of spider webs, it’s as if we are attending a virtual party every night. Which would not be a problem except for, as I said, the strangeness of it all…their parties are attended by all those around here who they have previously met on other factory visits and who only exist to share, at top voice, the stories of their lives. The noise level, which goes on until the outrageous time (by geezer standards) of 10:30 PM and once….hard to believe I know…even until 11:00 and is about equivalent to their repeatedly throwing a bowling ball at our coach. They seem to take turns at this, none listening to the other, often two or more sharing (or bowling) at the same time. What they get out of this I don’t know, but what I get out of this can be similar to the following, shared just last night by Walter over a period of not more than a minute and a half, I’m sure. (I’m sure because I tend to get migraines if I force myself to listen to unasked-for, unimaginably boring drivel  for more than 90 seconds, and in this case I didn’t….):

Walter (talking at top decibles to overcome the other sharers who are simultaneously telling all about THEIR admittedly fascinating lives):

1.                  Is from somewhere 200 miles West of Albuquerque, NM, where

2.                  It rained 14 inches the other day when they were there, which

3.                  Caused his front slides to leak again, but

4.                  They’ve leaked since he got the coach in 1999, plus

5.                  He’s glad he left Los Angeles. anyway, since

6.                  Los Angeles was the worst foreclosure market in the world, because

7.                  ACORN really gave too many mortgages to people who couldn’t afford ‘em, (yeah, I know, but that’s what Walter said…NOT me….), and anyway

8.                  He has a cousin in Wichita, Ks. who owns a fish market and who

9.                  Would let people take fish right from the counter and leave notes saying they owed him, and

10.              they called him Brown because (could I even be making this up?) his last name was

11.             Smith, and the Smiths all got rich and famous and

12.             Bought a big ranch up by Cotton Valley, and then the government came and

13.             Bought part of from him for a million, and Walter never

14.             Saw that kind of money “slapping” pigs (said to great personal hilarity, with him then explaining it’s SLOPPING pigs, not that anyone other than me heard him or could have guessed for themselves) but

15.             His other 10 brothers and sisters had chores, too, except

16.             His oldest brother who had allergies, and

17.             They had 16 milk cows but he didn’t have to milk them, or

18.             Feed the horses either, but when they sent the pigs out to market, he would wave and say “goodbye, pigs, I don’t have to feed YOU any more,” at least until

19.             The next batch of pigs was born and ready to “slap”, as

20.             They always tried to have 125 pigs getting’ ready for market at the same time, and so on.

There was more, but you get the point.

Is this kind of behavior worth the violent and painful death(s) I advocate above? Others would say not, including my sweet Irene, who has the tolerance of a saint, and says, strangely enough, that I can still be (even 25 years after I last had a drink) quite loud myself. She says I should have tolerance. I say that I do have tolerance, and would be more than happy to sponsor a designated “strange party” zone where the geezers in these parks can go to share. These rooms already have a good model in airport smoking rooms, which nicely contain smoke, hot air and noise, meaning they could do a similar good job here, I’m sure, and would be much cheaper than installing a large, soundproof booth, shades of the old TV show $64,000 Question” with its’ Cone of Silence, and better, too, because the booth I have in mind would have places to sit, being all heart as I am.

In an aside, Irene adds that, while I’m entitled to this as an opinion, I do NOT get to cut another sandstone identifying marker to put out in front of our coach. Our existing simply says “A.J. and Irene” on one line and “Flyfishing America” on the second, with a pretty scene of a forest and a trout jumping on a line shadowed into the background. The new one, which I think would be a great match, would say something like “You Think Your Story is Interesting?” on one line, and “We Don’t!” on the second. Optionally, it would have a third tag line underneath, saying in a much smaller font, “(so shut up!)”.

This, of course, doesn’t mean I’m out here advocating Jihad against EVERYONE who annoys me. Other people should never die, even though they have tried my patience as God tried Job’s…they’re the good ones. This may include you, dear reader, depending on your comments….but first and foremost this certainly includes my buddy Mike, who I’m pretty sure never will die anyway, being both too ornery and too important to my own fragile sense of self, as I’ll discuss in my next post.

The weapons used in this battle are legion. Did you identify an issue to Tiffin during the warranty period, but not bring the coach in? Better, do you have proof of that…an email you sent, or a letter? Best, did THEY offer a commitment back to you via email or letter or fax? Is there a recall on something? Did they do the same thing for somebody else at no charge – and can you prove it? Did you whine at Bob Tiffin and get him to take pity on you?  Do you have an extended warranty that might pay for something? (Extended warranties are useless, I think…I own one – paying almost $3K for it – and so far have been unable to use it for anything because of the restrictive conditions and the deductable.) We all look for an edge…but it creates a constant source of tension between them and us and, while Tiffin is, given they are one of the rare motor home manufacturers still even in business and providing warranty service to begin with, quite nice about the whole thing, they are likewise somewhat less giving than they apparently (this being our first time here and therefore relying on the historical experiences of others) are more profit-center-oriented than they used to be.

This profit-centeredness is attributed by many of the Tiffin coach owners towards Tim Tiffin (the son) taking charge of the service plant and displacing in this role Bob Tiffin (his father and founder of Tiffin Motor Homes). Tim apparently is setting his own brand on the service side and in the doing wants to insure that the service biz. pulls its weight, but it’s a rare business these days that isn’t tightening its belt where it can, to mix weight-oriented metaphors a bit. This all said, we-all get that doing business means something a little different today even to a famously service- and customer-oriented group like Tiffin, and those of us that have a strong business background get this completely and want them to be here….and thus are willing to pay our fair share.

So there is the push and pull of it. We (all consumers on the macro level, Tiffin customers in general, Irene and I in particular) have our own economic crises to address and we have no government bailout likely. So we want to spend as little as possible. But Tiffin is providing work for 1,200 or more people (in previous counts I underestimated this number, having heard only a factory and manufacturing component number closer to 400-500, so if you’re remembering a past post, don’t bust my chops, OK?) and their responsibility to them is to continue as a profitable business…and, again, we, if we’re being sensible, want them to be here, because obviously they are not here for us if they are not here at all.

Albert and I apparently see things differently, however. An example:  he and I had both had our coaches’ fronts repainted under warranty. This by itself would be an expensive item any time; in my case the bill for that work was over $2,000 and I think Albert’s was at least that. And both of ours were to be covered under warranty and neither of us expected any push-back from Tiffin about this, and neither of us had gotten any grief, either…expectations met, no problemo.

However, there is a gray-area part-two to the front-end-painting scenarios. This is the re-doing of the protective coating that must be applied over the front end paint when complete. Both Albert and I have 2007 Allegro Buses (this being one of Tiffin’s more up-end models if that matters…thought I would just brag on myself for a second). In 2007 Tiffin was trying an unfortunate experiment called Armor Plating. This involved spraying a rubberized compound over the paint, and eliminated the installation of a physical film that was previously applied by hand, a film made by 3M and usually referred to simply by the manufacturer’s name, e.g.  Q.  “What coatin’ ya’all got on yer coach?”, A. “3M!”.

When I met with Bob Tiffin earlier last week and asked him about the coating scenarios, he himself described the Armor Plate as an “experiment”, although he stopped short of calling it unfortunate…those were my words. But unfortunate it was and is. It, not to put too fine a point on it, doesn’t work. At all. When I showed up here and we-all did a front-end check on our coach, Tiffin identified 127 rock-dings in the paint, most visible, a few not yet, none of which should have been there (not that ANY protective shield can be entirely fool- or even rock-proof. But, as he said, “3M” had its limitations, too, and now they didn’t even offer Armor Plate OR “3M” but have gone to yet another, more durable product/service called Diamond Shield. Diamond Shield’s both a product and service because the product, a very rugged yet very clear film, is installed only by their own people, who work in two separate bays in the Tiffin service area. And it is very pricey. Per Bob, they upgraded the cost of the 2008 and beyond Allegro Buses to compensate for Diamond Shield’s almost $1,200 price tag. And, he said, the approach they were using with the 2007 customers was to re-paint the front-ends of their coaches if they wanted that and then to credit them the cost of the previous, relatively inexpensive Armor Plating…$300…against the Diamond Plate, so that customers would be “encouraged” to upgrade. Also per Bob, inadvertently reinforcing something his service manager had previously told me, all customers are being treated the same here, the implication being that whining about paying additional money for protection we thought we had bought wouldn’t get us a free ride.

Therein lay my personal dilemma. I didn’t want to pay for the Diamond Coat, but I wanted the additional protection. Bob did offer that they would replace the Armor Plate, if I wanted that, but didn’t recommend it – the same deal, as I already said HE said, he had offered others with the same problem. Not much of an alternative, thinking back on the 127 rock-dings previously mentioned. So, after kicking around alternatives with Irene, I did what I was told the many other 2007 Allegro Bus owners did…I went ahead and had the Diamond Shield installed and agreed to pay the additional $895…which, just prior to meeting up with Albert, I had done.

But, as implied earlier, Albert had taken another approach. He had worked around the system. He had the front-end repainted and then…without having a recorded conversation about it….”allowed” the coach to go from the “paint” step to the “Diamond Shield” step…the coach being moved, with only his tacit approval, from the paint bay to the Diamond Shield bay sub rosa, as it were. This allowed Albert, in effect, to claim that Tiffin had never consulted with him about the Diamond Shield installation. And, by extension, it allowed him to argue that, if he wasn’t consulted about it, he didn’t feel he had to pay for it. And it allowed him to walk out of the office with a receipt totaling charges paid of less than $100, whereas I paid $2,400, because he applied this philosophy, with variations to fit the circumstances, to a number of other things as well – not just the $895-worth of Diamond Shield.

Malevolent Avoidance, my descriptor of Albert’s negotiation technique, is obviously a successful approach to getting away without paying, and worked, if not paying was the only objective, for Albert. But I have issues with it, and I’ve already mentioned them. Let’s cut to the chase; it isn’t honest. It takes money away from Tiffin. And it encourages the “Them vs. Us” competition, that, while inevitable, isn’t positive. So, truth be know, while I’d like to keep my money if I can, I’d rather be honest with Tiffin and pay for the services they provided.

Of course I’d have to be completely naive to feel that Tiffin was totally honest with me in the exchange. After all, they (Bob and his Service Manager) both told me that all customers were paying full-boat for the upgrade, and my entire exposure to other customers with the same problem as I (this being Albert) is 100% in favor of them getting it done for free because they used Malevolent Avoidance, or other tactics when I didn’t and, I suppose, because Tiffin then decided not to try to out-argue the point. I had offered to split the cost of the service with them and they had refused; seems if they were giving it away to some they could have compromised with me. Thus, in the unspoken contest I described above, I can’t help but feel somewhat like I lost – but at least I can view my loss from the moral high ground.

Can you believe this? We couldn't.

In the overall frame of things, life is comprised mainly of small things strung together without a lot of coherence…or so it seems to me. Those fundamentalist friends of mine that believe in predetermined destinies and so on tend to overlook the power of Free Will, but then again the Catholics, of whom I count myself one, tend to overemphasize it, in my view…as Free Will talks to our power of choice, and how much choice do EYE have, for instance, in whether or not I actually leave Red Bay anytime soon, what with 127 identified dings being sanded down on the front end of our coach at the rate of maybe one an hour, and with people stacked up from here to doomsday waiting to get in to have the “Diamond Shield” protective film replaced on THEIR already-painted front-ends – which, as you already have picked up, we will have to stand or sit in line to have replaced as well???  If you can wend your way back to the beginning of that ultimate run-on sentence you’ll realize I asked a question…”how long, Oh Lord”…and the answer is VERY long, but who cares, really? In spite of my seeming attitude, we obviously have nothing better to do, we have to be somewhere, and anyway there is really much to enjoy around here. I’ve written about much of it already in our travel blog (see links) and won’t repeat it all. But I have to go back to one thing. Roads. To an RVer, roads are, if not everything, big. We take certain routes not because they are the most direct or the most scenic or the most anything but usually because they are the LEAST…the least problematic, the least bumpy, the least teeth-rattling potholed or filled with paint-scraping overhanging trees, the least populated by 18-wheelers…The Natchez Trace comes to mind as the ultimate RV Road, populated as it is by NOTHING commercial and paved perfectly from end to end. Some states absolutely suck for roads…California, in our opinion, is the worst of any, although we haven’t been to Alaska yet. But some excel, and Alabama is one of them. Not long ago Irene and I were out touring around the countryside near Red Bay…on our way, I think, to a town fair at Vina, about 12 miles out…and the little country highway we were on kept getting better and better until finally it was like riding on some bizzare black cloud, like sliding along on thick black cream.

Same Stretch, Another View....MAN!

The roads aren’t all like that around here, but enough of them are to make me wonder how a state that has a retiree property tax flat-lined at….are you ready?….$1.25 per year (not per thousand of assessed, OVERALL….per YEAR!) and not outrageously high sales or income tax….can do it. Anyway, look for yourself, and for us, we’ll just enjoy them while we’re here, and remember them longingly when we aren’t.