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.

Hello again from Greenville, OH

Hello again from Greenville, OH

Friday Morning October 7, 2011 (third travelogue of this trip).

This week has sure gone by quickly. We leave tomorrow.

Pat has been having a ball using the various resources available here. In addition to the great resources at the Garst Museum, she has spent some time at the county records facility looking at old documents. But the really great resource has been the Library. They have a genealogy department. The woman who works there is so very helpful. She is apparently a contract person (low pay, unfortunately), and just loves her job. She has been working directly with Pat and the two of them have made some pretty good progress.

We have again gone to a couple of graveyards. Some folks think that is kind of weird, but it is rewarding to find the markers of our ancestors. Besides that, the graveyards are beautiful in their own way.

I have been spending quite a bit of time on work related efforts. It seems that when we left town, the world discovered that our business exists {big grin}. I have had to process a couple of nice orders for our fire detection and suppression system and have an order for a specialized version for an industrial customer (indeed, all of my orders have been non-RV). That is a great trend. Hope it keeps up.

We are heading to Chattanooga next week to participate in the Bus Conversions Rally (website). I have been working with the Bus Conversions Magazine owner, offering several seminars (including Pat's rubber stamped greeting card seminar) as well as any type of help he needs. I am also scheduled to be a co-presenter of a one day welding workshop (assuming there is sufficient registration). We will arrive a couple of days before the workshops begin and help with the various activities needed to facilitate a rally of this magnitude.

The welding workshop will be a first for me. I am doing the “textbook” presentation and the other person will work with the attendees to do actual hands-on welding. I think it has the potential for being a good session. I have been spending a lot of time pouring over welding books to get the slide presentation developed. I have a lot of welding experience (since I was 15 years old), but I have never tried to “teach” a class.

Our daughter asked about the fall colors. The trees here are just starting to turn and the colors, so far, are great. I think we will hit the best colors in Tennessee. I had mentioned that the weather was rather cold when we got here. It has now gotten pretty nice with daytime temperatures in the high 70s/low80s and nighttime in the mid 40s.

I had noted that we are staying in the campground at the Darke County fairgrounds. I had linked to a satellite view in the last blog and that view shows how extensive the facilities are. Here is the link: (map). There are a large number of barns and facility buildings. The grounds are immaculate. Many years ago, I attended a car show in the '56 Chevy in Hamilton, OH. My brother-in-law and I drove up here to attend a very large steam tractor event. I fell in love with the fairgrounds when we were here and it has been just as neat as I had remembered. At least one source says that the fairgrounds is located on 176 acres and has 1000 campsites. The Darke County Fair is said to be among the largest county fair in the US.

Last night and this morning we are trying to catch up on washing. It is sure nice to have the washer and dryer in the bus. That lets Pat do the washing while we relax and do other things. We have 30 amp service at the campground, but that is not sufficient to run the dryer. We are running the generator when we do the drying, but that is a very small price to pay for the convenience.

That is all for now.

Hello from Greenville, OH

Hello from Greenville, OH

Tuesday Morning October 4, 2011 (second travelogue of this trip).

We are camped in the Darke County Fairground campground (map). We planned this stop as a part of a large circle trip including being vendors/presenters at the Bus Conversions Rally in Chattanooga, TN.

If you have been a long-time reader of our blog, you might recall that we stopped here as a part of a trip to an FMCA rally in Bowling Green, OH in 2009. This is the town that Jim's father and grandmother were born in. The blog detailing the information is (here).

Our trip here took a day longer than we had planned. We left Prescott on Wednesday 9/28, planning on driving about 300 mile (half way to Greenville). However after a bit over 100 miles, Pat saw a sign for Fairfield, IA. Her genealogy work had indicated several of her grandmother's relatives were buried there. She had wanted to travel there for sometime, so we made the decision to spend the night there. We were able to find the rather remote graveyard and located the gravestones of her relatives. Two of the gravestones were impossible to read other than the name Miller. Pat called a relative in Iowa and confirmed that both of the grave markers were her ancestors. When asked how they knew, they said that they lucked into visiting the grave just after a hail storm and the markers had been “cleaned” by the hail!

Thursday night we stayed in a Wal Mart in Champaign, IL. We arrived in Greenville on Friday afternoon. Saturday and Sunday we spent some time at the Garst Museum (http://www.garstmuseum.org/home.php). They bill themselves as “Home of the Annie Oakley Center”. Anne was born in a log cabin close to Greenville and is buried in Brock Cemetery in Greenville. Frank Butler, her husband of over 40 years (also fellow showman), is buried beside her. He quit eating after she died and passed away 18 days after she did.

The Garst museum is a wonderful place. It has great exhibits. More importantly, it houses the Darke County Genealogical Society. They have extensive resources.

Prior to our trip, Pat had sent letters to several people with the names Shepherd or Culbertson (Jim's grandmother's maiden name) in Darke county. As a result of one of those letters, we got to meet Rick and Nancy Shepherd. They are great people and we hope that we find that we are related – so far no link yet, but we are both searching. Yesterday they took us on a tour of the Ithaca and Abbottsville cemeteries. We were able to locate several grave sites of Jim's relatives. We will be going back and spending more time at both locations.

That is all for now.

Hello from Evergreen, CO

Friday evening July 31, 2009 (fifth travelogue of this trip)

Well, as you can tell from the subject line, we are home. We made good time and got home Wednesday in the early afternoon.

Now let's finish our catching up on this trip. We mentioned that we did some fun things on our trip home. When I was doing a lot of traveling for Gates in a company van, we found a great little restaurant called the Blue Springs Cafe (http://www.foothipies.com/BSC_Main.htm) about 35 miles west of St. Louis on I 70. As you can tell from the link, they are famous for their “foot high pies”. Years ago, they used to have a billboard on the interstate that made it sound like their chicken was 100 years old. We remember hearing truckers on the CB talking about the “old chicken”. It is a fun restaurant with great pies. We also stopped in Topeka at Pat's Pig for lunch. This is a restaurant we used to eat at when we went to the races in Topeka. It has great barbecue and has quite a racing theme to it. Both brought back fun memories.

Our stop in Russell was also planned based on fond memories. They have a neat oil field museum that I really enjoy touring. It is pretty run down and basic, but it brings back memories of working on experimental belt drives in the “oil patch”.

When I talked about bus vs “normal” travel, one of the main issue for me is the coffee. I am a coffee “snob” and I really don't like the brown water that they call coffee in most of the hotels. I would stop at McDonalds and get coffee that at least has some taste to it {grin}

Let finish this travelogue with discussion about our genealogy research in Greenville, OH. Pat has been doing a lot of work on our family tree, but was not able to learn much about my father's family. I am an only child of an only child and that seems to make it difficult to get much information on that line of the family. We knew that my dad was born in Greenville, so we went to the Garst Museum which has a great genealogy section. We were able to trace quite a few relatives and get some leads for additional research.

The two biggest finds were my grandfather Orion Shepherd's grave (map) . Even more exciting was that we found out quite a bit about my grandmothers family. We were able to learn that her mother lived in a house at 420 Elm street (map) for most of her 96 years. We are sure that my grandmother was born in the house. We were able to contact the folks who own the house (Becky and Terry). Becky showed us the part of the house that she thinks was the original house. In addition to our documentation, they have some documentation that it was the Culbertson house (my grandmothers maiden name). They are the third owners and were excited to find out more history about the house. It turns out that Becky's grandfather built the house adjacent to their house, so they have a lot of family history in that area as well.

I have posted a photo of the house below. We suspect that the front part of the house is the original house (obviously remodeled).

The Original Culbertson house at 420 Elm Street

As a note to our newer readers, I post a link to Google Maps that shows the satellite view. You can zoom in several times to get significant detail. For example, we can see my grandfather's grave stone when we zoom in on that map.

Pat has been able to do some more research on the Internet based on the information we found and now we will have see if our travels will permit us to return to Greenville.

That is all for this trip. We will leave for Salt Lake (Pat: convention; and Jim: Bonneville) next Monday. I will start that travelogue sometime next week.

Hello from Russell, KS

Hello from Russell, KS

Tuesday evening July 28, 2009 (fourth travelogue of this trip)

Our main purpose for this trip was to be vendors at the FMCA International Convention in Bowling Green, OH. The facilities were great, albeit spread out over a large area. The vendor building (map) was a great building. The official coach count at 2,725. That is up a bit from the past few rallies but far short of the “good old days” of over 7,000 coaches. The attendees seemed quite upbeat and were buying at a reasonable pace. Our expectations for the rally were not good. We are SilverLeaf dealers, but the company had a booth and did the seminar. In addition, our major fire suppression competitor was there. The main reason we attended was “defensive”, so that folks did not think we were out of business.

We were pleasantly surprised in that we sold out of an admittedly limited inventory of most items. The profit did not pay for the trip, but it sure helped.

When we finally made the decision to make this trip, we said that we were going to be tourists as well as vendors. In this post and at least one additional post, we will detail some of the fun things that we have done.

One of the thing we wondered about was what it would be like to travel without our bus. Most bus conversion folks call themselves “Bus Nuts”. Indeed, there are various organizations with that phrase as a part of their title. What would it be like to travel like “normal folks”?

Well, we can tell you that we really miss the old girl!!! Bus folks often say that traveling in a bus is the most economical way to travel. Tonight we went over some preliminary numbers and it looks like this trip cost about twice as much as it would in the bus. Certainly the fuel is much less, but motels and meals really add up!

Speaking of motels, we have had some experiences! We decided to try “lower cost” motels when possible. We have stayed in several Super 8 motels with mixed results. The difference in cost between the Super 8s and Holiday Inn Express (our favorite) is $30-40 per night. Some of the Super 8 motels were just plain bad. The so called “Super Start” breakfasts were a joke. In many cases we had to stop and get something with a bit of protein and that offset our “savings”. A couple seem to be less than sparking clean. Another hotel we stopped at in Greenville, OH had a nice enough room, but the Internet connection was terrible. The night clerk told us it was something with our computers. However, we found the room where the router was and had them let us work in that room – no further problems. Tonight we are at the Russell's Inn, a hotel that has seen better days. The room is OK, but we have seen several bugs that we hope are not cockroaches.

Speaking of Greenville, OH, that is where my dad was born. We decided to spend quite a bit of time doing genealogy research and we hit the jackpot. More in the next blog.

On Sunday 7/26, we toured the US Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH (http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/). This should be on everyone's must do list. I had on my pedometer and it said I walked 4.7 miles. I am not sure how calibrated the unit is, but I suspect it is close. There are four huge hanger type buildings with at least 100 planes, many of which are one of a kind experimental planes. A separate hanger has 9 presidential planes including 4 that you can tour. One is the retired Air Force One (a Boeing 707) that carried Kennedy's body home and where Lyndon Johnson was sworn in. The facility also has a great IMAX theater and we took in two great movies.

That evening we were completely worn out and only drove a short distance to Richmond IN.

While we will be home tomorrow, I will try to finish catching up with another post (hopefully in the next few days).

Hello From Greenville, OH

Hello from Greenville, OH

Saturday evening July 25, 2009 (Second travelogue of this trip)

I am calling this the second travelogue in spite of the fact that we had to detour home and deal with the engine problems in the bus.

This travelogue will be rather short and is intended to let you know that we have survived some rather traumatic issues with our vehicles (yes plural) in the last month. It will take me several blogs to catch up on all that has happened this month. I have not had the time or inclination to do any posting in the past few weeks. As you read this blog and the ones that will follow, you will begin to see why our heads are spinning like tops.

The Fleetwood rally turned out to be a very good rally for us in terms of sales. By most standards it was a small to medium rally (415 coaches) and a small number of vendors (34). I think many of the vendors did reasonably well, which is a hopeful sign that the economy has bottomed out. This was a Fleetwood sponsored rally which almost did not happen. Fleetwood filed chapter 11 and the courts had to approve the expense of the rally. They now are in the final stages of being purchased by a holding company that seems to have their best interest at heart (an all to often false statement). In any case, the Fleetwood folks seemed upbeat as did most of the attendees.

In our last blog I mentioned our engine problems in the bus. We got the bus home without a problem, arriving there on Friday (7/3). Over the next 3 ½ days I removed the engine and took it to the Detroit Diesel Dealer. The results of the engine tear down can be seen at: http://rvsafetysystems.com/Engine_problems.htm. The quote was over $15K. We do not have that kind of money, so we have been scrambling to find acceptable alternatives. More in another blog.

We drove our car to Ohio for a major FMCA rally. In the process we destroyed the engine in our Durango. We then went back home and loaded the PT Cruiser and headed out again. The rally turned out to be a good one for us. More in another blog (detect a theme here?)

We are currently at the Greenville Inn (map). We stopped here to do some genealogy research. We hit the jackpot with some great information (more later).

Well, that is all that I have energy for right now. I will try to fill in all the holes in the next few days.