July 14th Airstream factory tour, WBCCI Headquarters & Jackson Center

I slept in. I finally got up about 9:00am because Leon was making me breakfast! Coffee, eggs and toast, yum. The rest of the morning I spent updating our blog and Leon read and then removed a dead bird from the wiring between the solar panels on the roof of the trailer. He told me it had been there awhile, it didn't smell very good and was filled with maggots. Poor thing, it must have hit the top of our trailer and passed away early on in our trip. On to the rest of our day: To fill some time we took a drive down to the WBCCI Headquarters which is about 1/2 mile from the factory. We looked at the few displays that are set up in the waiting area and picked up a national caravan flyer. It was very quiet there, I assume because it was lunch time and only one person was watching the store so to speak. Just before 2:00pm we gathered in the lobby of the Airstream Service Center to wait with 25 or so other folks to take the factory tour. Our tour guide was a retired Airstream employee who had worked at the factory for 30+ years. He told us the history of Airstream, how Jackson Center was selected to become Airstream's headquarters, the types of trailers and motorhomes that had been built there and what was currently on the production line. As we explored the factory it appeared to me that it was organized chaos, I'm sure there is a well thought out system to how and when things are done but my untrained eye could not see it. The biggest things I took away from the tour were:

• 34' trailers are discontinued
• Slides are discontinued
  
• The 31' model *may be* discontinued
• Currently the hottest selling models are the 25' and 27' front bedrooms, the next hottest is the 19' Bambi
• The EURO models are doing fantastic (we saw 4 of them on the production line)
  
• A year and 1/2 ago they were building 40+ trailers a week, now they are building 15 and more than half of the production staff have been laid off
  
• Our tour guide did not know why Wally's "golden trailer" was no longer on display. But he did point it out in a fenced in lot a distance from the factory
  

After the tour we visited the Airstream store and purchased a few replacement parts and a trinket or two.

For our last evening in Jackson Center we planned to visit a cafe in town that came highly recommended from other Airstreamers who had visited "Mecca". We walked the few short blocks from our trailer to the restaurant and were disappointed to find it was closed, it only opens for dinner on Fridays and Saturdays. So, it was back to the trailer to fetch the truck to head out to the little town of Lakeview for dinner at "Captains Point" which was nothing special (and I'm being kind). As the next two days would be spent traveling through the "I" states (Indiana, Illinois and Iowa) we retired early.