At home in Fort Worth...
It was not a particularly poignant moment when I shut off my
FAA computer for the last time and handed in my ID badge and door access
card. There were few co-workers left in
the office late on this Friday before Labor Day (it WAS a government office,
after all), so the parting gestures were finished quickly, and I strode out the
door into the scorching August heat.
Still it had not struck me as particularly momentous that I was
officially retired, not only from a great job with the FAA but from my entire
aviation career of 45 years. As I turned the car onto Freeport Parkway and headed
home, I thought how great it is that I will no longer have to dodge the buckled
pavement of that street, whose repairs had been ignored by the city of Irving
for years. That was it…no dramatic
chords from Beethoven’s Fifth in my head, no sense of regret, no sense of loss...just
a sneer at the rough spots in the roadway that I would not encounter
again.
My thoughts immediately turned happily to Phannie (Phaeton), the big
gray motorhome I would be retrieving shortly from the Cummins/Onan service
center in Fort Worth. They had finished
the yearly service on the genny, during which they had also replaced the fuel
pump. The diesel engine that runs the generator had developed a problem of
suddenly shutting down for no apparent reason and needing priming to
restart. After checking everything else,
it was decided that a new fuel pump would be the answer, and they proved to be
right. The genny ran perfectly all the way home.
My long countdown to retirement was made easier by planning
for a long RV trip immediately afterward. For years I had pored over hundreds
of posts by RV bloggers describing their idyllic lives on the road and the wonderful
places they’ve been, and I was more than ready to join them. It was with that
anticipation that I had planned a month-long tour of the mountain west that
would include a stop in Colorado Springs to visit Ed and Marilyn and ending up
in Yellowstone. It was not to be, however. Ed wrote me a nice note apologizing
for needing to leave their mountain retreat earlier than planned, but that
turned out not to be the issue in canceling that outing. On a recent trip to Houston to visit our “kids”
(as we call our daughter Mindy, her husband Tyler and our grandson Mason), we
noticed a leak in Phannie’s black tank. The leak was apparently not located at
the bottom of the tank, for it would not appear until after a couple of days’
use. Now if you are an RVer, you know that any kind of leak from a black tank
is not something that you can ignore. We dealt with it by dumping the tank
daily, but that is not the desirable method of managing a black tank.
I decided that the best thing to do would be to take Phannie
back where she was born, at the Tiffin factory in Red Bay, Alabama. Bob Tiffin has built a huge repair facility
there, and we also wanted to see if Phannie was subject to a recent wet bay
floor recall by the factory. Since we had a number of other small issues to be
looked after at the same time, we decided this would be a good time to head to
Red Bay and experience this legendary gathering of Tiffin motorhome owners
taking advantage of the highly respected factory repair shop. We knew, of course, that a wait is usually
involved in Camp Red Bay, as the factory RV campground is known, but we thought
we could make some side trips in the interim or afterward. We’ll get underway in a few days and see how it goes.
As it turns out, I don’t really care where we go on our
first trip in retirement. It will be so nice not to have to be so
time-conscious as we were while I was working. For the first time, we will have
the luxury of moving around when and where we choose, spending extra time at
some places if we wish. That will be something to be savored, for sure.
