Today is our last day here at the Alliance RV factory and started very early as we had to have our coach at the service bay at 0600 hrs, That means rise and shine about 0500 hrs! See a pattern here? Yep, so do I! That's two days in a row of getting up very early. Oh well, that is the price of progress. So Doreen , Liberty and I had the entire morning and early afternoon to "standby" as they worked on our coach. Well there is plenty to do here as we have friends to see in about every building.
We greeted some of the Alliance leadership as they arrived for work. It was great to talk with Bill Martin (of the "Whatcha Know Wednesday" video fame LOL) Alliance's Vice President of Customer Service; Curtis Carlson, Vice President of Dealer Services; and our dear friend Kelli Bonacci who works in their headquarters as well.
Then we made our way to a nearby restaurant for a leisurely breakfast. It was early and cool out, and Liberty was very content and comfortable sleeping in her kennel in the truck. After breakfast we stopped by Alliance Parts facility and talked with Brenda Rock-Arms who is a dear friend that we have known since day one with Alliance. Brenda manages the entire parts operation here at Alliance. Just five years ago when Alliance started she was it! She took care of all the parts department functions including shipping, receiving, ordering and managing. Now she has over 20 employees working for her in the parts department! They are implementing a warehouse management system and a parts book for dealers, which is huge! Brenda's husband Adam runs Alliance's Pre-Delivery Inspection (PDI) program and we saw him later in Plant #1. Adam and I hit it off right away when we first met as he owned a beautiful blue low mileage 2010 Dodge Challenger. I drooled over that car as a Challenger is on my bucket list and I loved the color. But life changes and Adam sold his pride and joy, It is probably a good thing I did not know about that or it might have found it's way to Iowa!
From the part building we stopped over to talk with Adam a bit and there we also were greeted by many other Alliance leadership including co-owner's Coley and Ryan Brady; Joe Mehl, Vice President of Marketing; Jeremiah Dumka, Vice President of Sales; Ab Saleh, General Manager; April Clark who ran this year's Alliance Rally. We saw Ben Randall, Alliance Plant Manager, cruising by several times in his golf cart, but we were never able to flag him down! Here is the Alliance Leadership Team: https://www.alliancerv.com/alliance-team
Later in the afternoon we headed over to Plant #2 where they were working on our coach. Josh Gonzalez manages that team and today we had John York and Adam Fuson working on our tank replacement. I was thoroughly impressed with these guys. Adam had the tank replaced and was doing the final testing when he noticed a small drip from the fresh water dump valve. Unacceptable to Adam, he explained he was disassembling the vale to clean and lubricate it, and if that did not solve the issue they would replace it. While he was working on that, I was asking John questions about a few things and he was giving some great advice which was really appreciated. Soon Adam finished up servicing the dump valve and it passed his tests, so our coach was done. I hitched up and headed back to the camping spot for the evening.
Later Trent and Yvonne Mills stopped by and we said our goodbyes once again. Their coach was supposed to be done today but there were some issues and they spent this afternoon dealing with that. Was great seeing them again!
Tomorrow we load up and head south to Camp Atterbury which is an Army National Guard Training Base south of Indianapolis IN. We have stayed there several times previously. We will be there just two nights before we continue on south to the next stop in Frankfort KY.
That's it for today. Next report from Camp Atterbury near Edinburgh IN.
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