Hello from Rossville, GA

Hello from Rossville, GA

Wednesday Evening October 12, 2011 (fourth travelogue of this trip).

When I started this blog, we were parked at the Choo Choo Garage in Rossville, GA (map). This afternoon we moved to a different state (trip was all of three miles), but that will be the subject of our next post.

The Choo Choo Garage is a pretty famous bus repair shop and the site of the Bus Conversion Magazine Workshops. I helped with the first two workshops – mostly as a gopher and video camera operator. However, being me, I just had to jump in and “contribute” to the workshops {grin}. Indeed, the two presenters and I made a pretty good team as each of us came from different backgrounds.

Now let's catch up on some of the events since our last post. Last Friday we took an unbelievable tour of the KitchenAid factory in Greenville. This is the only plant in the world to manufactures the counter-top or “stand” mixer. When I say only, that is significant. They export this type of mixer all over the world including China – from this plant! The pride of the workers is amazing. But, even more amazing were the huge number of workstations hand assembling components for the mixer. This is work that is typically sent overseas, but KitchenAid has staunchly refused to ship jobs overseas (Tom are you reading this). Indeed they are working towards bringing jobs back to the US on some of their other product line.

They charge $5 for the tour but it is well worth it. The lady that gave us our personal tour was a great ambassador for the company. She took us all over the huge plant and had knowledgeable answers for almost all of my technical questions. Probably the most impressive part of the tour was seeing all of the beautiful colors that are used for the mixers.

Saturday we left Greenville and drove to Lexington, KY and stayed at a Wal Mart. Our main reason for stopping there was to visit with a customer and his wife. Bill and I have grown to be great friends over the years and he has offered great support when I was struggling with some issues a few years ago. I have told some of you about Bill - he was a government psychologist who evaluated many major criminals including John Gotti and the unabomber. I have talked to Bill on the phone many times on many subjects but had never gotten to meet him.

He was as fun in person as he is on the phone and his wife Genie is a great lady. We had a lot of fun looking at the Prevost that he converted himself - a beautiful bus. Bill and I also went to visit another busnut who is working on an Eagle with 4 slide outs. It has an amazing amount of great work. While Bill and I were looking at buses, Pat and Genie went to a horse race. In the evening we toured around areas where there were beautiful horse farms. Lexington is in the heart of the horse country that Kentucky is so famous for.

Sunday we drove from Lexington to Rossville and met with Mike Sullivan who is the president of the Bus Conversion Magazine and who has almost single-handily arrange the Bus Conversions Rally. Monday we helped Mike with some of the details. Yesterday and today were two of the workshops. There will be one more this week and several next week including the welding workshop that I will co-present.

The color of the trees on the drive down from Greenville were gorgeous. As we got closer to Chattanooga, we noted that the colors were not as great. We are quite a bit south of the areas with the best colors and we will probably see the trees change here in the next week or so.

That is all for now.