Red Bay Alabama to Franklin NC - June 21-23, 2016

Day 11 – Tuesday June 21, 2016 We got the motor home almost ready to depart and drove downtown to the Tiffin Factory to take the tour. This is our second time taking the tour and it still fascinating to see how they build them. To me it looks like organized confusion. There probably is not another manufacture that will let you take a tour like this. You are taken right in the plant where the employees are doing their job and can walk right up to the work stations and talk to the employees and touch and feel the product everywhere except the welding shop.

At the last station there were several almost completed units that were getting final touches. Even though the employees were all over the motor home doing final touches we were allowed to go inside them and look all we wanted and ask questions.

We picked out a new right off the line 2017 Phaeton 40' AH that we think we will get just as soon as we win the lottery.

After leaving the plant we got a quick lunch, checked out of the campground and departed Red Bay. We stopped for the night outside a small town named Woodville Alabama at Parnell Creek RV Park. I checked in and was assigned site pull-through site 45. We quickly set up as we did not have to unhook the Jeep. This is a clean well kept RV Park but like most privately owned parks/campgrounds the site are close together so they can pack as many sites on their space as possible. Our site was on the side of the Park nearest the highway so we heard traffic all night and didn't sleep as well as normal.

Day 12 – Wednesday June 22, 2016 We got up early, ate breakfast and departed about 8AM. Before we got to our destination we traveled through parts of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and on into North Carolina. The drive down highway 64 was very pretty. We arrived at The Great Outdoors RV Resort outside Franklin NC and was assigned to site 1. The couple that was checking in ahead of us had a restored Model T Ford on a trailer behind their motorhome. One of the staff escorted us to our site. The resort is almost full.

Later in the evening we took a walk around the resort and met a couple that we had met at a couple of Tiffin Motorhome Rallies and another couple that owns a Tiffin Motorhome. We all use the same Tiffin Motorhome Internet Forum to share information about our motorhome and experiences.

This is a well maintained resort but I expected the sites to be a little larger. The resort has new owners since 2012 and they have done a lot of updates to the resort. I noticed when I was in the office checking in, that there was a plastic construction wall installed. I just assumed they were renovating the office. Later we found out someone recently had accidentally driven their truck through the wall and had knocked almost the entire exterior wall down.

Day 13 – Thursday June 23, 2016 After breakfast at Shoneys we drove back up highway 64 to Brasstown NC to visit the campus of John C Campbell Folk School. They teach all kinds of classes at the school from woodworking to blacksmithing to jewelry, spinning, etc. The school was started in the 1930's. I have wanted to take a class here on woodturning for a long time, so since we were so close to the campus I wanted to visit it. Just my luck this week was all kids week so the woodturning studio was not open. All the classes this week are setup for young people.

We took some back roads on the way back to Franklin and also visited a few campgrounds. We stopped at Walmart for a few groceries before returning to the resort. It is a few degrees cooler here since we are in a little higher elevations in the foothills of the Smokey Mountains so after supper and a walk around the resort we set outside and read until bedtime.