It turns out that just up the road from Eugene are the assembly facilities for both Monaco Coach (expensive motorhomes) and Marathon Coach (extremely expensive motorhomes). They’re right across the street from each other in Coburg, OR.

I like factory tours in general, and of course have a professional interest in travel vehicles, so the opportunity to see how these RV’s are built was impossible to pass up. (It doesn’t hurt that the tours are free.) Monaco runs the tours at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. currently, and Marathon runs theirs at 11:30. The Monaco tour can run 1-2 hours (ours went almost a full two hours) so if you want to do both, go see Marathon first.

As is typical for these tours, cameras are not allowed, so I have no photos from inside the plant. But I can tell you it’s a great tour with lots of opportunities to get very close to all phases of the process. We watched as the motorhomes were welded together literally from the ground up starting with 3×8 box sections of steel for the frame rails. Monaco builds the whole coach including the chassis, whereas most manufacturers buy their chassis already pre-built, so you get to see just about everything that goes into making a motorhome.

Emma liked watching the process of heating and stretching vinyl to make dashboards, which looked like a giant art project that a kid could enjoy, but otherwise she wasn’t fascinated with the factory. But she was a good sport about it and we rewarded her with lunch at Subway, a kid favorite. I found everything interesting, and came out of the tour thinking what a well-built product Monaco made, which was precisely the point of the tour. Only two things hold me back from buying one right now:

1) Like most Class A motorhome manufacturers, they don’t make a two-bedroom floorplan.

2) I don’t have $500-800k to blow.

But otherwise, I was that close to writing a check on the spot. So I’d better not take the Marathon Coach tour. Those babies, built on Volvo bus chassis and highly customized, often run over a million bucks. I can’t even afford a tank of diesel in one of those…

We’ve moved on to our next stop, Valley of the Rogue State Park, between Grants Pass and Medford OR. We’ll spend Halloween here and take a couple of days to get other things done before heading into California.