80% of the nation’s RVs are manufactured in Northern Indiana, and therefore you can find everything RV here: service, repairs, dealers, campgrounds and museums. All in the name of enticing you to “Go RV’ing!” Wait … we already have! Taking a trip to the RV Capital, while RVing in your RV, feels like a return to the mothership.
Decatur, IN
We started in Decatur with a long-scheduled service appointment for our 2019 Fleetwood Southwind RV at one of only two official Fleetwood repair facilities (the other one in Oregon). Our service technician, Earl, had worked at the nearby Fleetwood factory for 18 years before moving to the repair side. Having a tech who knows how an RV is built, really helps them to know how to fix things.
Bringing your RV here, while also living in it, is an interesting process. You “camp” overnight in their parking lot with electrical hookups. They bang on your door at 6 AM sharp to drive your RV away into the service bays, with no further access for the day. But they provide a really nice building for you to hang out in, with seating areas, TVs, a full kitchen, outdoor patios, even laundry, and — luckily for Finn — the dowstairs is all dog friendly!
Fleetwood doesn’t give factory tours to the public anymore, but once a week on Wednesdays, they’ll take whomever is waiting on service work and wants to go, over to the factory a few miles away. We happened to be there on a Wednesday!
A group of about 10 of us strapped on our steel toe shoes, safety glasses, and earplugs (these factories are LOUD!), and got a semi-private factory tour. It was fascinating to see how these babies are put together, and some of the most luxurious lines are built here: Country Coach, Holiday Rambler, Monaco and Fleetwood.
Beyond the safety gear, there were no OSHO rules or regs to hold us back. They let us go wherever we wanted and see literally everything for more than 2-1/2 hours. Especially fascinating were the specialized workers plying their crafts, and the sequence of steps that go into RV creation.
This factory tour was REALLY a return to the mothership when I spotted parts of our actual RV in-the-making. Squeeeee!!! This is the passenger side wall of our Southwind, minus a whole bunch of things like a fridge and a TV, and better wallpaper.
The biggest modern revolution in RV’s is the “slide,” a portion of the RV that literally slides open and increases the living area when parked. On the left, the big hole where the slide will go. On the right … here comes the slide! More expensive RVs can have up to four separate slides.
The skilled RV painters are some of the highest paid in the plant, and the paint job on a high-end coach can cost the company as much as $60,000. Here, a staff of 110 works in 10 spray booths and uses a staggering amount of materials annually: 8,000,000 linear feet of masking tape. 85 acres of masking paper. 64,000 gallons of paint.
Although Fleetwood doesn’t do “regular” factory tours, many manufacturers do. If you’re visiting this area, check one out! The only thing missing was a dunk tank for the designer who thought adding a Vacu-Flush toilet to our unit was a good idea. Don’t get me started.
Elkhart, IN
The town of Elkhart is perhaps most associated with RVing, so it makes sense that the RV/MH Museums and Hall of Fame, a 100,000 sq. ft. museum, is located here. You might think that the “MH” in the title stands for MotorHome, but no — it’s for Manufactured Housing, a decidedly less fascinating side of the museum, to say the least. “Look, aluminum siding! Single pane glass! Window AC units!” Wheeeeee! Not.
But on the RV side, this place is definitely the “Mothership of the Motherships” of RVing. It features a bunch of old, historical RVs from Airstream, Winnebago and other iconic manufacturers.
Inside a huge, air conditioned facility, you are able to enter many of them and ogle all the hilarious features of days past. RV design has come a long way!
There are a bunch of extremely rare and unusual RVs, including one custom-made for Charles Lindbergh.
The museum also had the smallest Airstream ever made: 1958 “Der Kleine Prinz”: The Little Prince was the only one ever made, and the prototype for the classic Airstream Bambi.
We took our second factory tour here, of the Thor line of RVs, but it wasn’t even close to the first tour. Less than an hour long, with few people working, and a seriously disinterested tour guide and a no-pictures-allowed policy (why?!), we left having been glad for the first tour in Decatur.
Indiana Dunes National Park, IN
The visit to our 44th National Park, Indiana Dunes, was also a return to the Mothership of Friendships. My long-time friend Beth lives nearby in Michigan City, Indiana, and our mutual dear friend Nancy and her husband Don also came up from San Antonio, Texas, for the occasion. Beth’s daughter Erin, who was like a daughter to me growing up, also lives here with her husband and two sons.
Indiana Dunes is obviously named for the towering piles of sand that have built up along the shores of Lake Michigan in this area. Within the State Park, the three largest dunes are called the Tremonts, taking you well above the forest canopy. Mt. Tom, Mt. Holden, and Mt. Jackson are each nearly 200 feet above lake level, some with views for miles.
The “3 Dune Challenge” is a 1.5-mile hiking trail that takes you on exhausting, sandy inclines that in places can have 40-degree slopes. It can be a “doggone” hard hike — just ask Finn!
Beyond these dunes, it really is more of a National Seashore than a National Park, set on the shores of Lake Michigan just around the curve from Chicago. Because of its city-adjacent location, Indiana Dunes now sees almost the same number of visitors each year as Yellowstone and Yosemite. For the Motherships of Sand Dunes, however, you’d have to look at two close cousins in the National Park system:
Great Sand Dunes National Park (Colorado)
White Sands National Park (New Mexico)
Camping in this area is at Indiana Dunes State Park, which is set inside of Indiana Dunes National Park (confusing, for sure). We hereby issue a strong caveat for staying at this nice campground: don’t do it on a weekend. Why, you ask? On weekends, people flock to this park, primarily to visit the beaches. Why should you care? Because there is exactly ONE and only ONE entrance into the state park, whether you are camping or not. What this means IRL is that any time you want to re-enter the park and get back to your campsite, it can be up to a THREE-HOUR wait just to get through the front gate. Ridiculous!
Our friends had rented an AirBNB in New Buffalo, Michigan, about 30 minutes away. Here, we indulged in ice cream from The Original Rainbow Cone, an offshoot of the Mothership location in Chicago for over 95 years, where their signature item is a cone of the same original five flavors — Orange Sherbet, Pistachio, Palmer House, Strawberry, and Chocolate — which are sliced (not scooped) into a cone or a cup.
An RV-themed blog post would not be complete without a picture of what is perhaps the most-clever set of RV vanity plates EVER, do you not agree?!
The sun eventually set on our Indiana adventures, but oh what a sunset it was! Our return to the Mothership was a success, and now it’s on to Illinois — where we will survive our SECOND tornado of this trip.
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loved seeing the pics of the RV factory and all that goes into it (inc. you in the lil bathtub)
Yes! Yes! Yes! There was so much that went into the RV production, and every bit of it was fascinating! I just can’t figure out why the bathtubs aren’t standard features …. 😉 a jacuzzi would be nice too!
Enjoy these! You are a skilled writer…
Thank you so much, Barry! If you watched me agonize over every word and take 10x longer to finish each blog than it realistically should, you might think otherwise! 🙂
Elkhart is a pretty fascinating place, and I often wonder how they manage to keep all of the factories and related businesses staffed. Factory tours are very eye-opening and tons of fun – if you get the right tour guide. So lucky for you guys that you happened to be there on a Wednesday! Too bad, though, that Philip and Finn had such a hard time getting comfortable in the waiting room . . . 😁
You know Philip — he’s at home no matter where he is! I asked him if was planning to trim his fingernails, or host a party, in that waiting room!
You two have this RV life on the road more than the touring, but get to the root of what machine is taking you to your destinations.
The Indian Sand Dunes! OMG. That was our post high school graduation destination. 50 yrs ago. We’d drive from the burbs of Chicago. I most respectably will not let you know of the great fun we had as ” young adults”. Thanks for sharing
Hi John! Philip had forgotten that you were from the Chicago area! And would like to remind you that anything that happened prior to age 30 is classified info … sealed away forever! Great to hear from you — hi to Michelle too!