Happy Valentines

Thursday, 14 February
Camp Tiffin — Red Bay, Alabama
Temps: Lo 30F / Hi 61F (-1C / 16C)

Most couples exchange cards and gifts for Valentines; they might go out for a romantic meal as well.  We did go out to dinner tonight — with our newly-minted friends from Florida (by way of the UK) — but our gift to each other was a bill from the Allegro Tiffin Service Center!  Far from romantic, but satisfying in an odd sort of way.  We’ve been anticipating getting this work done for almost a year, and it feels really good to have it behind us.  We feel like we can really get the wheels rolling on our fulltiming lifestyle now.

All the work that was on our list when we went into the first service bay at 7:00a on February 4th is done.  And very much to our satisfaction.  All but a few of the items were covered under warranty, so we can’t complain about the bill.  Well, I suppose we can, but we won’t ;-)

We won’t be leaving Red Bay immediately since we have some non-Tiffin work we want to get done.  Another week should see us heading back to whence we came — that would be Montgomery.

Our day started with an 8:00a call to Bay 8, one of the express bays here at the service center.  As promised, Earl the Whirlpool guy came by to fix what he calls the touch buttons.  Replacing the flimsy rubber piece in the photo with a new one was all it took to get the stuck extra rinse button working again.  It took him minutes to do so.  He didn’t charge us for the part.  I should hope not — his $68 visitation fee was steep enough.

Our next — and final — stop was a return visit to Bay 45 to get the exposed metal under the coach undercoated.  Curtis, who worked on the replacement of the wet bay floor last week, called us over to the bay just before the lunch break.  It was a relatively easy job — in fact the prep for it took longer than the actual spraying of the undercoat foam.

Mui gets down and dirty to show Curtis …

… the basement support beams that he wants to have undercoated.

Curtis tucks old bedspreads along the basement doors to keep the foam and fumes contained …

… before he dons a disposable jumper and breathing mask,
and gets to work spraying the support beams.

It’s apparently customary for the last tech who works on the coach to escort the owner to the service office to complete the check-out process.  Sort of like leading the lamb to slaughter ;-)  I envisioned reviewing the line items on the service ticket would take a while, but Mui was back fairly quickly — and he was smiling.

Since we still had some pennies left in the bank after paying the bill, we joined Maria and Nigel for dinner at the 4th Street Grille and Steakhouse.  We’ve now eaten at this restaurant three times, and of the meals we’ve had, our first one was the best.  I think it’s time for us to check out some of the other restaurants in Red Bay for a change of pace.

Wish I could say that we’re going to take it easy tomorrow.  Sleeping in and lolling about is not on the agenda, however.  We have an 8:00a appointment to keep with Bay Diesel to get the M3 service done on our Freightliner chassis.