Donna went out for a Sunday morning bike ride at 8:30am trying to beat the heat. She wasn’t entirely successful. By the time she returned from her 26-mile ride at 10:30am, the temperature had risen well into the 80s with high humidity.

I grilled a couple of salmon burgers that we bought at HEB in Rockport, Texas and froze for later consumption. We have two more in the freezer. We had them for lunch on onion ciabatta rolls. I wrote about the fresh salmon burgers from HEB in this post.

After lunch, I rode the scooter to Memphis via the I-55 bridge. I followed Riverside Drive to Beale Street and found my way to Lt George W Lee Avenue where the Gibson guitar factory and retail store is located. Parking is problematic in this area. I had no choice but to pay $5 to park in the Gibson lot.

Gibson retail entrance

Gibson guitars are made at four factories in three locations – Memphis is where they make the semi-hollow body and hollow body guitars. My ES339 was made here. In Nashville, Gibson USA makes the solid body guitars. Also in Nashville, the Gibson custom shop makes special guitars – my Les Paul 1960 reissue G0 was made there. In Bozeman, Montana, Gibson makes acoustic guitars – my L130 acoustic guitar was made there.

Orville Gibson founded the company at the end of the 19th century to make mandolins. The company was headquartered in Kalamazoo, Michigan and built guitars there until guitar production moved to Gibson USA in Nashville in 1974. The Kalamazoo plant continued operation as a custom shop until it closed in 1984 and the Nashville custom shop opened.

The tour cost $10. About 20 people were in the tour group. All tours for the weekend were sold out. They give six tours daily, Monday through Saturday from 11am to 4pm. On Sunday, they have five tours starting at noon. Our tour lasted about an hour and we walked through the entire production area. We saw how the process works from beginning to end. There’s very little automation – almost everything is carried out by hand. Each guitar takes about four weeks to  to finish and they complete about 65 guitars per day here. There are several inspections during the process. About 4% of the production is scrapped due to flaws. The final finishing process is all done by hand. The guitars are painted with a nitro-cellulose finish by painters using spray guns. The last step is polishing the finish on buffing wheels. Polishing is a three-step process with increasingly finer compounds used to achieve the final lustre.

My tour ticket

It was a very interesting tour for me. I was surprised by the diverse people in our group. We had older folks and young people. We had families. Most of the people in the tour weren’t very knowledgeable about guitars – I wondered what enticed them to take the tour. I think most of them didn’t really understand what the tour guide was talking about some of the time – like when he explained the installation of truss rods or how the binding is applied.

After the tour, I walked to Beale Street a block away. It was fairly quiet as it was Sunday afternoon. I saw two bands playing – one was jamming loudly in the court where we saw the Australian guitarist on Friday night. I cooled off with a cold Wiseacre Ananda IPA at BB King’s Club. While I was at it, I checked the Statelines app (from Technomadia) on my smartphone and saw that alcohol is not sold in Arkansas on Sunday. I needed to get some beer, so I decided to stop at a store in Memphis where alcohol sales are legal on Sunday after noon. I saw a funny sign as I was walking down Beale Street.

So true

My map showed a market a couple of blocks away on Vance Street, so I scootered over there. Wow, what a difference two blocks makes in the neighborhood. The gentrified Beale Street is world away from Vance Street. The neighborhood was reminiscent of Beale Street back in the ’70s. I found of photo of Beale Street taken in 1974 on this site.

Beale Street at Third Ave circa 1974

I went into the market and made my purchase quickly. I wasn’t comfortable in this neighborhood. The people loitering on the curb outside the store looked rough. I rode back home to Tom Sawyer’s RV Park.

I was inspired to practice guitar while Donna was outside reading a book. Later, we took a walk together through the park. This RV park has very few long-term visitors. It seems like most people use it as an overnight stopping point or maybe a weekend getaway. Unlike most parks, we haven’t seen the usual weekend influx of campers or the Sunday afternoon exodus back to the workaday world. Instead, people seem to come and in and out in a fairly equal exchange. Over the four nights that we’ve been here, we’ve had four different RVs in the site across from us.

One of the rigs that’s been here since we arrived is an old GMC bus converted to an RV. A lot of the bus conversions I see are a little rough looking, but I’m always intrigued by them. Converting an old bus into an RV is a lot of work. It’s invariably a labor of love to make it into your own vision of what an RV should be.

GMC bus conversion

This is a far cry from the Millenium Coach built on a Prevost chassis I showed in my last post. Speaking of Prevost chassis, we saw two more coaches built on Prevost chassis as we walked through the park. The first one was a 2011 Liberty Coach. We met the woman who owns the coach along with her husband and chatted for a while. They’ve had several coaches, including a Marathon Coach built on a Prevost chassis. She said the Liberty was the best they’ve ever owned.

I forgot to take a photo of their beautiful RV, but I snapped a shot of a Country Coach built on a Prevost XL chassis.

Country Coach Prevost XL chassis

Today the thermometer is forecast to hit 90 degrees with less humidity than we’ve had lately. There’s a 40% chance of a thundershower. I might try fishing the ponds here today.