Coon Dog Cemetery, and Repairs Update

To distract ourselves from the environment of motorhome repairs, we took a drive about 18 miles from the Allegro Campground on Saturday to the unique Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Graveyard, aka Coon Dog Cemetery.

The final resting place for over 185 dogs, only “authentic” Coon Dogs are allowed to be buried here. The first dog to be buried here was in 1937 by a man named Key Underwood was his beloved hound “Troop.”

The grave markers are sometimes clever, some are simple, and some are comparable to those used for highly revered humans.

We weren’t lucky enough to observe a funeral, but there’s a video of one on the web site that you can watch. We had heard of a recent one that other Tiffin owners had attended, and it wasn’t too hard for us to find that grave. The dog’s name was Beaujolais, and he died on 5-25-2011.

Meanwhile, the week prior was productive in getting some of our repairs done. The floor in our big slide was replaced on Monday. When it was removed from the coach, the techs were surprised to find part of the frame was broken and had to be rebuilt. This required that we spend the night in a motel, the closest of which is in Russellville, AL about 25 miles away. It’s been a long time since we slept anywhere but our motorhome, so packing and moving into the motel was an unfamiliar procedure. The repair job was finished on Tuesday and we moved back in to our home around noon.

We had just gotten set up in our campground site and had lunch when we were called to go to the wet bay! I could hardly believe my ears, since this was much sooner than we expected. The floor under the holding tanks was replaced in two stages on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. A possible cause of our long-time intermittent problem with sewer odor in the hallway might have been found in the process. We asked Curtis and John to look for a possible cause while they were working in this area, as previous visits for service didn’t offer any clues to a reason for the odor. Curtis found that an opening in the sub-floor that wasn’t sealed with foam as it should have been might allow fumes to work their way up into the vents in the bedroom floor and under the refrigerator. We won’t know if this has fixed the problem until we start traveling again. Here’s hoping it’s the end of an annoying and frustrating problem!

A few other small jobs were finished as well. For instance, we had the headboard and our dining chairs reupholstered. Now we’re waiting for calls to get the Diamond Shield replaced and the roof rails replaced and painted, as well as 3 windows replaced. And we’re still hoping to replace the sun roof and get other body work done on the car while we’re in this area.

If anyone is interested in pictures of our repairs, I’ll be happy to post them separately. But I thought it would be more interesting to write about something fun rather than dwell on the more frustrating aspect of the RV life: getting repairs!