Man In The Maze

by Rich Luhr, Editor of Airstream Life magazine

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Last tasks in Vermont

We’re getting serious about gearing up for travel now. The Airstream has been stored all summer in the most unfavorable conditions: exposed to sun, rain, falling tree branches and leaves, in a humid environment, and used essentially as a giant storage locker.  It is our joint mission to turn it back into a habitable travel trailer in the next 48 hours.

It’s always best to work from the top down, so I started with the roof disaster.  The debris was so thick that the first step was to get on the roof with a broom and sweep away most of the accumulated branches and leaves.  It was pretty nasty up there with older leaves that have composted and filled every possible corner and crevice — worse than I remember from the previous year.  I think an extra layer of tree bits landed in the past week thanks to Irene.

Then I got into the detail work, using only water and a soft brush.  I never use soap on the roof because there’s too much chance of slipping off.  Working outward from the centerline is most efficient, as things tend to wash down to the sides.

It took quite a while to clean up the detail spots, like beneath the TV antenna, under the solar panels, the upper gutter of the awning, and around the refrigerator vent.  The work would go faster if I wasn’t working on a wet sloped roof with numerous delicate obstacles (like plastic roof vents) and hardly any open space to stand.  I recommend extreme caution if you ever do this.

The rear solar panel was so obscured by tannin from decaying leaves (far more gunk than you can see in the top picture) that I had to spend several minutes scrubbing it.  A small amount of brown stain on the glass can have a large impact on electrical generation capacity.

Once the roof was done, I gave the rest of the trailer a conventional wash.  I got the bulk of it with a telescoping brush and Eleanor followed up with a plastic scrubber, cleaning up the details. Even after our efforts, the trailer will win no prizes in a Concours d’Elegance but at least it is no longer embarrassing. If I have time today, I’ll also wax the front dome, as that seems to make it easier to clean off squashed bugs later.

Getting ready to go is obviously important.  (I spotted a tree turning color yesterday — a warning sign from Mother Nature that the cold weather is coming.)  But we’ve got other important things we must do before we leave, including eating birthday cake.

We missed the normal time to celebrate my birthday (in mid-August), because I was in Tucson.  Being of a certain age, I am not really all that hung up on birthdays, but for some reason my birthday is a well-attended event every year.  I am pretty sure that the entire family takes an interest in my birthday primarily because Eleanor always makes a special cake with butter-cream frosting, and each year the cake is different.  Usually a few weeks or months prior, I dream up a rough idea and then Eleanor figures out the details.

The cake this year stems from the fact that I am an admitted and unrepentant maple fiend.  There is no ten-step program for people like me and if there were, I wouldn’t follow it.  The Addison County Fair (held in August) is my annual maple pig-out, but again, I was in Tucson and missed it this year.  You have no idea what a serious loss that was to me.  The Fair has an entire building dedicated to all things maple.  Maple frosted donuts, maple milk, maple creemees (“soft serve” to the rest of you), maple milkshakes, maple bread, maple candies, and this year they added some sort of baked confection that had walnuts on top.  Having been entirely deprived of all these goodies in maple-free Tucson, I requested a maple-walnut cake for my late birthday celebration.

So Eleanor did some research and has developed her own recipe, which starts from scratch.  Some of it is roughly based on an Italian cream cake recipe that we got from (believe it or not) our insurance company USAA some years ago, but at this point Eleanor has modified it so much that it is truly her own.  The cake contains about $30 of ingredients, as real maple sugar and such things are rather expensive, but as I often point out to anyone who will listen, I’m worth it.

The cake, which you can see here during construction, is not only maple-flavored batter with fine-chopped walnuts, but between layers contains a whipped chocolate ganache with maple flavor.  (If you’ve never tried maple and chocolate together, you need to.  I can recommend the maple crunch chocolates from Lake Champlain Chocolates as a source for aspiring addicts.)

The final layer is a maple butter-cream frosting that literally melts in your mouth, leaving a buttery coating and a strong desire for more.   So we’re looking at triple maple cake with walnuts and chocolate ganache.  Talk about decadence … there will be no leftovers.

There are a few other rituals that we must complete before departing.  Last night, for example, the humidity and temperature rose and so I was finally motivated to go jump in the lake.  Lake Champlain is running a bit cooler than normal, due to all the rain and storminess (which stirs up cold bottom water).  It’s a “refreshing” lake at the best of times, usually peaking around 68 degrees, and I think yesterday it was a few degrees cooler than that.  But this is what I grew up on, and I’m used to it.  On a sticky afternoon it’s just right — a thrillingly icy splash as you dunk under for the first time, and then in just a few minutes your body core is cooled down and it feels like no amount of heat and humidity will ever bother you again.  Emma and I got in and played a few splashing games.

With that, another summer tradition has been accomplished.  Only a few things left to do.  It looks like we’ll be ready to hit the road by Tuesday.

Birthday menu:

lobster ravioli with an orange saffron cream sauce
mushroom ravioli with browned butter & sage sauce
grilled asparagus with lemon & parmesan shavings
endive, mushroom, & artichoke salad with mustard & white wine vinaigrette
maple walnut cream cake

Orange Saffron Cream Sauce for Seafood Pasta

Ingredients:

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 3 thinly sliced strips of unsmoked bacon, most fat removed, cut into 1/4″ dice
  • 1 small shallot, minced
  • 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
  • zest and juice of 1 orange (preferably Minneola Tangelo or Blood Orange)
  • saffron threads (about 6, crumbled)
  • 12 ounces light cream
  • freshly ground black pepper
  • kosher salt
Preparation:
add saffron to cream & set aside.
heat oil in saute pan.
add bacon, cook until crisp & brown. remove bacon from pan.
add minced shallot to same pan. stir until coated with grease from pan.
add butter & stir until foaming subsides.
add about two thirds of the orange zest & cook until shallot is soft & translucent.
deglaze pan with orange juice; reduce to a thin layer.
whisk in saffron cream in two separate additions, allowing all ingredients in pan to be completely incorporated after each.
simmer – do not boil – and reduce until lightly thickened, whisking constantly.
add pepper, whisk & taste. add salt if needed.
*pour over cooked, hot, lobster ravioli. sprinkle cooked bacon and remaining zest over top and serve.

Readying the ship

OK, let me get this out of the way before I say anything else:  WE ARE FINE.

I continue to get daily emails from folks who are concerned that we might have been affected by the recent storm.  The media frenzy about the “devastation” in parts of Vermont has painted a really distorted image of the situation here, especially up in northern Vermont where it’s hard to find visible impacts from the storm.  At our current base of operations, the worst thing that happened is that my brother had to pull up the dock and boat lift due to Lake Champlain rising a few feet.

My previous blog entry was intended to make it obvious that we were relatively unaffected, but it seems to have backfired.  One friend even wrote, “OK, I read the blog.  You are safe, parent’s house is fine, the trailer is fine,  All sounds good. Now, what’s the rest of the story?”  Sorry, that’s all there was.  Any further drama will have to be self-created, and believe me, we’re good at that.

On Wednesday I took a roadtrip up to Plattsburgh NY, fifty miles away by car and ferry, to make a client visit to Colin Hyde Trailer Restorations.  About two years ago Colin opened up his own trailer restoration shop and has been doing quite well with it.  I spent a few hours checking out every Airstream in the shop and catching up on everything.  In the afternoon Colin donned his bunny suit and demonstrated how he can paint an entire chassis (in this case the restored/improved frame of a 1953 Flying Cloud) in less than an hour with just one quart of POR-15, using a sprayer and his “rotisserie” set-up.  The rotisserie allows the frame to be rotated in the air for ultimate convenience.  This is a much more efficient method of painting a frame than the old “bend over and brush” technique that many people still use.

It’s interesting to me to note how the vintage trailer restoration business has matured over the past several years.  When I started the magazine in 2004, there were only a handful of restorers out there and most of them didn’t know what they were doing.  They’d come out of the hotrod business, or evolved from trailer repairs, and frankly there was a lot of overpriced hack work going on.  Only a few really understood how these trailers were intended to work (from a design perspective) and so I saw a lot of horribly botched trailers coming out of “professional” shops.

Actually, that still happens quite a lot.  It’s pretty easy for anyone to hang out a shingle and say they are in the trailer restoration business, with no licensing, no real knowledge, and little accountability (since the customers themselves generally only see the surface of the work).  There are still a lot of hacks out there.  But a few have studied the history, engineering, design intent, period materials, and even philosophy of Airstream and other vintage trailer manufacturers.  Those people are doing the good work these days.

I’m very happy to say that most of them are advertisers in Airstream Life.  As one non-advertiser put it, “Being in Airstream Life sort of says you’ve ‘made it’.”  We don’t vet the advertisers for quality but I do find that when they are willing to make the investment in advertising their business, it indicates a seriousness and professionalism that usually carries over to their work.

Being at Colin’s shop (and MEL Trailer, C&G, etc., a couple of weeks ago) has reminded me of the work I want to do on the Safari.  After 100,000 miles of towing and six years, it has accumulated a bit of wear around the edges.  I want to replace all of the flooring with Marmoleum, refurb the Hensley (again), add another Vista View, wire in an inverter, convert to LED lights, re-upholster the dinette, rebuild our microwave/laundry storage, replace the curtains, repaint all of the steel (A-frame, bumper compartment, entry step), re-caulk all the roof openings, upgrade the stereo with MP3 input & better speakers, etc.  This will not be a quick or cheap refurb, but in the process I expect to renew the trailer so that it is ready for our next 100,000 miles. As I’ve written previously, I see no reason why a new Airstream can’t last a lifetime with proper owner maintenance (including annual leak tests).  Like an airplane, a periodic refurb is to be expected.

This week, however, I just need to get ready for our upcoming trip. The Safari has been stored all summer, and now it is covered in spider webs and debris from the cedar trees overhead.  I’ll need to get on the roof and wash it down, lube & inspect the hitch, check the tires & reinflate as needed, re-organize tools that have gotten spread out over the summer, and re-stock.   That process has already started, and we’ll finish this weekend so we can depart on Tuesday.

The trip plan is already growing.  I had planned to zip back across the USA in a relatively straight line to economize on fuel (diesel is running $4+ per gallon up here) but there are too many things to do.  I like to treat every trip as if it might be our last, just so there are no regrets.  Or to put it another way, I’d rather regret spending a lot of money on fuel than regret passing up once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunities.  So our route currently brings us west through NY state, briefly into Canada, then down to western PA, near Washington DC, a stop in NC for service, a quick stop in central AL, and then Florida.  From there, we may spend a few weeks in Florida or we may head west toward home, depending on circumstances.

Storm chasing

My triumphant return to the northeast somehow became a story about a hurricane.  In the last 48 hours leading up to my dawn flight from Tucson to Manchester NH, I was suddenly getting emails (and a blog comment) from friends & family who were concerned about my apparent interest in flying into the midst of a famous hurricane, namely Irene.

Not to worry.  My flight was via Chicago, which meant that I didn’t need to worry much about in-flight weather and also that there would be an astonishing rarity in these days: a plane with lots of empty seats.  86 people on the Tucson-Chicago leg bailed out presumably because they couldn’t get their connections to eastern seaboard cities like Washington DC, New York, Baltimore, and Norfolk.  Without all the crowding, it was like flying in the 20th century.  (The illusion would be complete if only I didn’t have to turn my head and cough at the security checkpoint.)

We landed in Manchester in the late afternoon on Saturday, when people in North Carolina and Virginia were firing up their generators and bailing water, with only scattered clouds and no rain.  But not for long — the long gray tendrils of Irene reached us that evening and the excitement began.  Being from the area and having seen many an expiring hurricane dawdling up the east coast, I knew what to expect.  By the time they get up around Boston, the weather event is basically a lot like every summer afternoon in central Florida: torrential rain, occasional high winds, predictable flooding, plus a local bonus lots of hyper-excited news coverage.  I met my long-lost wife and we went out for dinner, then spent the night at a hotel listening to the splatter of an overloaded rain gutter splash the window.

The next day at noon, we took to the road.  The trusty GL was as surefooted as always, making the 200 mile drive up I-93 and I-89 a non-event for the most part, despite constant heavy rain.  Swish-swish went the wipers, the tires sliced through the puddles (as long as I stayed at a reasonable speed, far below the posted limit), and inside we had plenty of time to talk and listen to podcasts.  The best part was that virtually nobody was out, so the highways were wide open and there were no yahoo drivers to avoid.  We paused in Hanover NH near Dartmouth College to take in a long lunch and were the only people in the Chinese restaurant.  On the other hand, it was a bit sad to see spots where the White River and others had apparently overflowed their banks and flooded some farms and homes.  Up on the high ground of the Interstate we had little to complain about, but down below the damage was quite obvious and I’m sure many people are having a really rough time at the moment.

All of this is a long way of saying that we drove through a tropical storm (“hurricane” status having been stripped from Irene about the time she arrived in Massachusetts) for four hours and the most exciting part was lunch.  Things got considerably more interesting once we pulled into Vermont, where the Airstream has been stored all summer.  I was concerned that a tree branch might have fallen on the roof, but no.  The lake was rolling with huge widely spaced waves like you’d expect on Lake Michigan, not on our relatively small “sixth Great Lake.”  The power went out at the house, because this is Vermont and that’s what happens in virtually every storm.  We hung out with the family by candlelight for a while, then fired up the noisy backup generator that services the house on these occasions.

The Airstream needed no external power, of course, but as we attempted to sleep we were located far too close to the generator’s Sturm und Drang cacophony and it was a bit like being at the worst rally of our lives.  No “generator hours” here; we were the guests and without the generator the basement sump pumps in the house would cease working and then we’d have our own little tale of flooding to tell.  So we endured some noise until about 3 or 4 a.m., when the generator finally ran out of gas.  At 5:30 the hard-working representatives of Green Mountain Power arrived with a powerful chainsaw and proceeded to spend about half an hour rescuing power lines.  It was not the best night for sleeping, but the power was back on when we finally awoke for the fourth or fifth time.

And today it is the classic “day after” a major storm: startlingly clear skies, a beautiful view of New York state across the open waters of Lake Champlain, and the ground littered with downed branches.  I got out the wheelbarrow, ladder and tree trimmers, and with a little help from Emma cleaned up the overhanging branches in the driveway so that the Airstream will be able to depart in a few days.  The trees needed trimming anyway.  Tonight, friends will come over for dinner on the deck.  A precious few warm days remain up here in northern Vermont, so we’ll make the most of them while plotting a convoluted route down the east coast and across the south, in the Airstream, during September.

TBM wraps up

Plot summary:  After the last burst of wonderful road-trip glory, Temporary Bachelor Man (TBM to his friends) finds himself in the sad anti-climax of his adventures.

I knew it would be hard to top the big three-city tour that I did last week, and upon returning to home base I had to face a mixture of painful realities:  (1)  the end of the 2011 TBM season was fast approaching; (2) I would have liked a drop-in visit by my wife/girlfriend (it’s a dual role this time of year) before returning to family life; (3) we had absolutely no plan for where we were going in the Airstream once we resumed travel; (4) I was bored with Tucson.

For me, the charm of a place is often inversely proportional to the amount of time I have to spend in it.  I have enjoyed weekends in absolute hell-holes and dull-as-a-butter-knife cities simply because they were novel to me, and I have completely lost my mind after eight days on the action-packed Las Vegas Strip.  It’s the experience of learning, exploring, and being stimulated by new things that makes a place fun for me, which is the same personality characteristic (some would say “flaw”) that causes me to shy away from the routine.  And lately, home base has become a little too predictable: not much happening, always hot, nearly always sunny, and everyone hiding indoors to avoid the weather, like northerners hide in the winter.

With only a few days remaining, I scrambled to find things to do, but at every turn was stymied by forces beyond my control.  There’s always work, of course, but with excess time the Winter 2011 magazine is not only well in hand, but actually — for the first time in years — somewhat ahead of schedule.  The Vintage Trailer Show for Modernism Week 2012 is almost ready to begin accepting trailer-owner applications, and we’ve got the new Alumapalooza 2012 website up, too.   That’s all good, but there’s got to be more to life than work.

More sensible people than I have all fled the desert southwest, of course, so few of my local friends can be found.  (Note for next year: plan more trips up into the cool country; this means FIND A TOW VEHICLE FOR THE CARAVEL, YOU DOPE!)  Over the weeks that I have been in TBM guise, I have satisfied myself with a little checklist of absolutely inane & mostly unnecessary goals, all of which I can accomplish solo:

(1) Eat ice cream at every local place within 2 miles (Baskin Robbins, Culver’s, Dairy Queen, and Frost).

(2) Buy a bunch of used books at Bookman’s for the long trip back in the Airstream and in the process reclaim my “Mayor” status on Foursquare.

(3) See every R-rated movie of interest that I can, either in a theater or via Netflix.  This summer I’ve managed about a dozen, including X-Men, The Trip, Potiche, Rango (OK, it wasn’t R but I’m a sucker for animation), The French Connection, Sucker Punch, The Adjustment Bureau, The Illusionist (another non-R animation but charming), Night and Day, and Inception.  I’m not recommending all these movies, by the way …

(4) Go for at least one hike above 8,000 ft. (accomplished 8/13)

(5) Cook my own dinner at least a dozen times.  This has been accomplished mostly through the miracle of pasta and a very robust sauce Eleanor left in the freezer.  I may not be able to face pasta again for months, however.  The Weber grill is also a TBM friend.

(6) Sell the Miata.  This has been done, although at painful cost.  We never intended to keep the car for longer than this summer, but our impetus to sell it became more urgent when the car began to puke up intermittent “Check Engine” lights.  The suggested repairs (from three different sources) ranged from simply cleaning carbon out of the EGR passage, to a basketful of repairs that would have cost $2,500.  Nobody really knew what the root cause was, and we didn’t have the time or inclination to get into it.  Finally we found a buyer who was willing to take on the car as-is, and so we sold it well below the price I would have liked.  It was a gamble, and ultimately a failed experiment, but in all failures there are lessons to be learned.

So with those momentous accomplishments behind me, I can turn to the final tasks of the week.  Mostly that means buttoning up the house and thinking about where we are going to head once we leave Vermont.  Planning travel would seem to be the really fun part, but I have to justify my miles with business along the way, so the planning gets complicated quickly.  When we were doing the Tour of America I didn’t write about all the business stuff I did along the way because it was not all interesting and some of it had to be kept confidential.  But regardless, nearly every mile had a purpose that related to growing Airstream Life magazine.  Marty says that I need to keep that justification in mind and document it better — daily —  in case I get audited.  In addition to that consideration, I’ve got more projects going on these days, so any time out of reach of cell phone towers is a problem.  It puts a high burden on the planning process.

At this point I can only say that we are planning to head down the eastern seaboard again.  Beyond that, we may be winging it.  If prior experience is any guide, many opportunities will pop up as we go, and the trip will turn out to be much more than we could have foreseen.  Traveling in the Airstream tends to go that way.  So I’m not worried about making the trip work, but rather anticipating interesting opportunities.  If you have any suggestions along the general direction of Vermont-Georgia-Arizona, let me know.

Roadtrip, weather or not.

If you would like the short version of this blog entry, here it is:  500 miles later, I’m back at home base.

But there’s so much more to it than that.  The day started beautifully in the best fashion of southern California, with a light summer fog in the air that was quickly giving way to sunny skies and views of green desert hills.  I opened up the car windows and sped over to meet Uwe for breakfast in Orange at 8 a.m. We talked for over an hour, sitting at one of the outside tables at the Watson Drug & Soda Fountain, watching as very fit-looking men in blue Fire Dept. t-shirts ran around the block a few times.  The second time they came by I felt like getting up and joining them (and I don’t run, that’s how inspiring the morning was), but then I came to my senses and tucked into the waffle I’d ordered.  Extra maple syrup, please, I’m going to have a long day.

After dropping Uwe off at his shop, I automatically headed east on CA-91 toward Riverside, but a few minutes into the trip I realized that I didn’t really want to rush back into the desert heat.  It was still gorgeous where I was, near the coast, and it seemed a shame to have to close up the windows and turn on the air conditioner.  I’ve been doing that all summer.  So I took a right onto the Rt 241 toll road instead, with the vague plan of enjoying a scenic route along the California coast all the way to San Diego.

This turned out to be a bonus.  Being a toll road, Rt 241 is lightly traveled, and it rises up dramatically into the hills on smooth new pavement.  The toll charge of $5.25 was well worth it for this driving experience — at least once — and after about half an hour I was dropped off at I-5 in the traffic south of Irvine.

Nearer the coast, the way became foggy and even cooler, to the point that I eventually rolled up the windows just to stay warm.  Listening to the radio and distracted by scenery (I took a quick stop at San Onofre State Beach), it wasn’t until I was well into the Camp Pendleton area that I realized I hadn’t gotten gas, and now the car was running drastically low.  I exited I-5 at the first opportunity south of Pendleton to fill up and consider exactly what I was doing heading toward San Diego.  This plan wasn’t making a ton of sense.  Here I was, eighty miles from my starting point and still only a few hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean.

Well, I had all day, so what the heck.  I don’t get to just wander around aimlessly very often (or at least, not often enough).  Despite appearances, my travel usually has a definite purpose.  Besides, it had warmed up a bit, and that meant I could I roll down the windows again for a few minutes before the upcoming plunge into the desert heat.

Only a few minutes later, I picked up I-805, and then finally I-8 to head eastward for the next 300 miles or so. The road climbs out of the San Diego area, through La Mesa and El Cajon, past the inevitable & lonely Indian casino, and up to 4,000 feet over the portion of I-8 known as the Kumeyaay Freeway. This is a beautiful stony scenic area through the Cleveland National Forest, followed by a long descent right back down to sea level through a series of fantastic twists to the flat desert floor near Ocotillo.  At that point there’s little remaining to see, and the speed limit opens up to 70 MPH.  As I traversed this part I had to fight the urge to hang a left onto Rt 79 and drive the road up toward Julian — there just wasn’t time for that detour.

As I left the San Diego area I was watching the temperatures climb and the landscape grow steadily more arid.  By Ocotillo, it was a rousing 113 degrees and only Mexican stations could be picked up on FM.  I tried to remember that only a couple of hours earlier I was freezing in the cool fog of coastal California, but it seemed to be only an impossible dream.

I-8 runs tightly to the border from here all the way to Yuma, tediously straight most of the way, and there aren’t many places to stop for a cold one.  Fortunately, I had a cooler full of drinks and lots of calls to make.  For a long portion of this road you are south of the Salton Sea and below sea level.  The highway gets pinched between canals (like the one that formed the Salton Sea) and the fences along the US-Mexico border.  Then there’s the Imperial Sand Dunes, and then you’re seeing another Indian casino and the AZ border at Yuma, followed shortly by the welcome increase in speed limit to 75 MPH.

Somehow I managed to completely overlook Dateland (AZ), which is a great place to try a date shake and pick up fuel.  Not much else.  Having missed that opportunity, I paused in Gila Bend instead, where it was still 106 degrees under a cloudy sky.  Thunderstorms were threatening in the distance, and I knew at that point I was going to have an exciting end to my trip whether I wanted it or not.

Five miles later, the temperature plummeted 20 degrees, and for the rest of I-8 was buffeted by winds and sprinkled by the remnants of thunderstorms.  Lightning was everywhere to the east and south.  By the time I reached the end of I-8 where it merges with I-10 near Eloy, the rain was occasionally torrential, the desert was puddled with water, and kamikaze tumbleweeds were blowing across the road.  I clipped one with the right wheels and saw the tumbleweed explode into a thousand dry match sticks in my rear view mirror.

The weather was getting seriously threatening. I stopped to check weather radar on the iPhone at a gas station, and the gas station turned out to be closed for lack of electricity.  I saw one serious accident with police & rescue on the scene (two cars in the median, heavy damage), then another a few miles later.  Brief sections of the road were flooded a few inches, and the radio was filled with warnings about dust storms and lightning.  I had that feeling again — was it really only an hour or two ago that I was blinking in the burning sun at a rest area and marveling at 113 dessicating degrees?

Finally, Tucson: 72 degrees in light rain, wind blowing, flashes of lightning over the Rincons, carport half flooded.  Whatever.  It didn’t matter if it was snowing, I was home.  Time for laundry, dinner, and a few days of catchup.  It’s nice to be back, but the trip was so great that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t zip out for a roadtrip somewhere again this week.  I have only seven days before my TBM license expires.  Hmm… what next?