Mark O'Reilly - read this and weep

A lot of the people who read these miscellaneous ramblings won't know Mark. He's basically a pretty nice guy, although his wife and kids are a LOT nicer. His brother is also a really nice guy. Anyway, I digress. Mark used to enjoy standing under his awning in the rain at Whispering Pines and mocking me for my lack of an awning. He would sip his morning coffee and holler over some nonsense about how nice it was to be dry under the awning and then pretend to remember that we didn't have an awning. Sometimes he would preface his awning mocking with a question about how I liked my little grey Ford Exploder truck. And there was nothing much I could do, especially since I pretty well always fell for the Ford mocking.


I liked the look of our Prevost Le Mirage with no awning on it. I think this bus has the most graceful lines and an awning undoubtedly detracts from the overall beauty of any coach. But I had resigned myself - we needed to have an awning. Not just for the rain in Whispering Pines either. There is a lot of glass down the curb side of the bus and having an awning provides a shady area so that open windows aren't open onto the direct heat of the sun. An awning also provides a shady spot to sit under and so we had decided that this winter we were going to find ourselves an awning.


When we got to Florida we were feeling a lot poorer after our engine episode in New Jersey but we still intended to go back through Michigan. That would have taken us by some of the RV salvage places around Elkhart, Indiana. For those of you that don't know, Elkhart is ground zero for RV manufacturing. The area is currently hard hit by the US recession which would have only improved our chances of finding a bargain awning had we ended up going home that way. However fate intervened and one night while we were in Florida I got an email from Clifford Allen in Mojave Valley, AZ. He offered me a free awing that had been taken off a Prevost. All we had to do was show up. It seemed too good to be true.

However after several emails and a couple of phone calls it turned out that not only was Clifford serious about his offer of an awning, he intended to help me install the awning and provide us with a 50 amp hookup while we were here doing the install. So yesterday we rolled into Clifford & Sonja's yard around 2:00 in the afternoon. Clifford had told me we would be able to recognize the yard by all the busses that would be lying around and he wasn't exagerating. The only catch is that our frenchy-bus is now surrounded by Eagles.


Today we got busy and installed the awning. Its not done although it is pretty close. We still have to install the stabilizer arms, the purpose of which I don't completely understand and we've got some fine tuning to do on the work that we did today. I need to get up on the roof and caulk the track that I installed this morning but that may wait until we get moved to our next location. All in all I'm pretty impressed. The awning hardware is definitely used but I expect a little metal polish will remedy that quickly and the fabric is in excellent condition. Its a ZipDee awning which is the penultimate RV awning - the same one that Airstreams use. So in return for a few extra miles and a nominal expenditure for some hardware that Clifford was missing we have ended up with a very professional looking ZipDee awning. Last night we attempted to repay our hosts' kindness with a feed of camarones rellenos but it still seems like we got the best of the deal.