Red Bay Acres is the newest RV park in the town of Red Bay, AL. Any Tiffin owner knows about Red Bay, it’s where the company was born and all the beautiful motorhomes are built. It’s also home to the Tiffin service center and owners far and wide make the pilgrimage for service, warranty work and after-market updates to their coaches.
But, you don’t have to own a Tiffin to camp in town. Girard, the RV awning company built a factory on the western edge of town and built Red Bay Acres right next door. My fabulous in-laws stopped in Red Bay on a recent trip to get undercarriage lights installed by Trevor Nichols with Nichols Customs on their American Coach. They’d been having problems with their patio awning after an Arizona dust devil did a number on it and were so excited to find Girard right next door. A Girard employee came over to their campsite and fixed it in a jiffy. I joked with them that they were the “field trip” for all the other campers because they weren’t in a Tiffin.
On our recent stay in Red Bay for warranty work on our new Phaeton, we opted to stay the last few days at Red Bay Acres instead of the service center campground for the stellar Wi-Fi. Parked across the way from us was a brand new Newmar.
The campground is 51 back-in spaces situated in a horseshoe around a fishing pond. The sites are long and level with nice sized patios. Did I mention how great the Wi-Fi is? We don’t typically stream movies when camping but I bet the signal was strong enough to. There are repeater towers every third site. We lucked into a deluxe site, with an even bigger patio, huge grassy space next to and behind us, and our own personal firepit. Too bad it rained everyday and we didn’t get to use it.
The office does double duty with the camp store where you’ll find the usual camping items and souvenirs. You’ll also find local items like a wide variety of dill pickles, salsas of all kinds, several different jams and jellies and even a spicy Bloody Mary mix. You can pick up a cup of coffee anytime and the popcorn smelled wonderful. Judy takes great pride in keeping the store and all her campers well taken care of. It was a stormy forecast during our stay and she came by with a list of the storm shelters which, I have to admit, freaked me out a bit. This California native will take an earthquake all day over a tornado, which makes our son Jeff laugh because tornadoes are his specialty as he finishes up his PhD in Meteorology at University of Oklahoma. She explained to me that she knows we’re all from somewhere else, many of us don’t regularly experience their kind of weather and she wants to keep us all safe. That, my friends is great customer care.
Situated near the camp store and restaurant are a pickleball court, horseshoe pit and a dog run. Always important in the humid south, the dog run had nice shade.
In part because of Judy and because most of us have a Tiffin, there is a comradery here. When people come back from their time at the service center, others will go over and chat about what was done. This is especially true for after-market work. We had the cabinet under our cooktop repurposed with two huge pull-out drawers, when we got back several people wanted to see it all finished.
Also on site is a restaurant with a clever name, The Yacht Club, complete with a large patio overlooking the water. It’s open for breakfast and lunch, adding dinner on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. At dinner on the Saturday we stayed there, we enjoyed live music. Harkening back to Tiffin, some items on the menu have Tiffin related names. We ate lunch there one day while our coach was in the service bay and none other than Mr. Bob Tiffin himself was sitting right behind me.
Of course we walked the park. It’s much smaller than other places we’ve told you about, coming in at only .33 miles for one loop. That’s okay, because you’ll get lots of waves and “hey there” as you make your laps. This is a “never met a stranger” kind of place.