Charlotte, Michigan

Aug 17th we attended the 1st day of what I thought was a motor home driving school in Charlotte, Michigan but later learned that it was really a Spartan Chassis Owner's class. What comes to mind when you mention driving school, which I thought I was attending? Driving around the streets and hwys? Nope, when you attend the Spartan class you go to a very intense, detailed, structured classroom. We were first given a tour of the facility where our motor home chassis was built and it is amazing all the steps there are in creating these monstrous 'things' that you don't see, but carry our motor home down the road. Interesting, with the current economy not too many large motor homes are being built, but what we did see were lots of fire trucks in different parts of construction. All the fire trucks built by Spartan are customized for each city. Funny fact, there are 350 different colors of fire engine red to choose from!

After the tour we began our classroom studies where we were told and shown all the parts, from the air brakes in the front of the chassis to the engine in the rear. Lots of importance stressed on the need to know where parts are located whether you personally work on your coach or not. We were there for 3 days and the last half day we did drive our motor homes to the local high school parking lot where Frank and I both practiced stopping the motor home at given places, driving around cones in a serpentine pattern forwards and backwards and backing into coned off parking spots. I only ran over one cone, so Frank said I did very well. I just need to make myself drive down the road now.......

After our 3 days of class we drove to a few farm markets I found on line and one surprising place that we learned about where you wouldn't think anything like this would exist in Michigan was a shrimp farm. This farm is still in 'beginning' research and no tours are being offered as the owner doesn't want anyone to know the details of the operation as there are only 6 known operations like this in the US and the only one in Michigan. The shrimp are raised in salt water wooden tanks indoors as opposed to traditional outdoor farms. We bought a few pounds of shrimp and so far they have been very delicious grilled on our Weber Q.

Charlotte is in Eaton County and today there still exists 3 court houses, 2 of which have been turned into museums.

Next stop: Back to Celina, Ohio to have awnings, new shades and a remote system on the shore power cord installed.