Archives for 2012

Apr 14 2012

A bit of a hitch

This time of year our tow vehicle, the Mercedes GL320, generally rests in the carport. We log about 14,000 miles each summer between May and October, mostly towing, and that’s a lot of use. So in the off-season I try to give it a break, except for occasional cross-country trips. This allows the car’s years to catch up with the miles somewhat. It’s a 2009 and already it has 56,000 miles on it. By the time we get back from travel this summer, it will have about 70,000 miles.

A few weeks ago I had the car out for a little trip and the Check Engine light popped on. This is becoming a familiar sight, unfortunately. We’ve had about five incidents of Check Engine lights since the car was new, and all of them have been related to the Adblue (a.k.a. Diesel Exhaust Fluid, or DEF) system. This system is a big part of why the car’s emissions are legal in in all 50 states. It injects a spray of DEF into the exhaust stream, which combines with the exhaust gasses in a special type of catalytic converter and results in the nasty smog-causing oxides of nitrogen turning into harmless water vapor and carbon dioxide.

It’s a brilliant system when it all works, but our 2009 model was the first year for Mercedes to install this technology, and there have been a few bugs. Mercedes seems to have worked them out with a combination of software updates (yes, like everything else on modern cars, this process is entirely controlled by computers) and upgraded components.

This time the Check Engine light was indicating that a heater for the Adblue (DEF) was failing. The heater is needed so that the fluid doesn’t freeze at low temperatures. Replacing the heater is a labor-intensive job that requires complete removal of the Adblue tank. And this is where the nightmare began …

You see, back when we first bought the car, we had to do some extensive modification of the factory receiver hitch, in order to make it suitable for our Airstream Safari. The key modification was the addition of a “third leg” that spread out the tongue weight of the trailer. You can see this “leg”, made of 2-inch square tubing, in the photo at left. It was welded to the rear suspension crossmember and to the factory receiver.

When this solution was proposed, I had two misgivings. First, that this would take up too much ground clearance. This turned out not to be an issue, as the car still has 10″ of ground clearance at this point even with the tube installed. My second concern was that it was blocking access to the black tank you see above, which is the holding tank for the Adblue fluid.

After considering for a while, we decided that replacement of the Adblue tank was highly unlikely, so we went ahead and installed the third leg. It has functioned perfectly ever since, taking up stress from the receiver so that we can get good weight distribution without overstressing the rear end of the GL’s frame.

So when I got the call from the dealership’s Service Advisor telling me that the tank had to be removed, my heart sank. We had to cut the third leg of the hitch off (where indicated with the orange line in the photo above). I dragged the decision out a few days by asking the dealership to do an individual component test on the Adblue heater to double-check that it really had failed, and to try to rule out the possibility of another software problem. They did that, but the news was unchanged: we have to remove the entire tank in order to replace the heater.

I feel very protective of my receiver hitch. We went through a lot of trouble to get it modified just so, to suit our particular needs. We first had reinforcements (not visible in the photo) welded on here in Tucson, and then drove 2,000 miles to Can-Am RV in London ON (Canada) to have the final reinforcement added. I inspect the receiver at least monthly, and do an annual crawl-around-on the-ground-with-a-flashlight inspection at least annually, along with wire brushing and repainting. Any receiver can fail, and since a failure can result in your death, it’s a piece of equipment worth taking seriously. So I didn’t want anyone touching it, and I especially didn’t want anyone coming near it with the intention of cutting it off.

But in this case there was no choice. Andy Thomson at Can-Am was very helpful in marking up the photo above, which I gave to the dealership’s body shop to show them exactly what to do. The hitch was cut, the Adblue tank and some other components were replaced, and I got the car back a week later with the hitch re-installed—but sliced right through the third leg. I drove it 50 miles and the Check Engine light stayed off, so the next step was to get the hitch repaired.

Obviously we didn’t want to weld it back, since there’s always the possibility that we’ll need to remove the hitch again, so after discussions with Andy and other consultants we came up with a plan to add some heavy plates and bolt the two ends of the cut tube together. This was done locally at a qualified welding shop. You can see the result below. Sorry for the lousy iPhone photos.

The bottom line was $49 to the dealership body shop, and $200 to the welding shop that installed the bolt-up re-attachment. The Adblue tank was covered under warranty, which was good since the estimate for that job was a whopping $2,200. I do like the Mercedes as a tow vehicle, but the cost of parts and repairs can be astronomical. I’ve already started a maintenance fund for repairs after the 100,000 miles warranty has expired. As I tell people these days, it’s the best tow vehicle I’ve ever owned, and it’s also the least reliable tow vehicle I’ve ever owned.

But I’ll cut it some slack since we really use the heck out of it. There’s a chance that this replacement of much of the Adblue system will resolve the persistent issues we’ve had with it in the past. Discounting the Check Engine lights, it has done well for us. We bought the GL320 because we wanted a long-term tow vehicle with a durable diesel engine, and overall it has worked out well.

Realistically, there are no perfectly reliable vehicles, just different compromises. At this point the car still feels and drives like new, so my original goal to get 250,000 miles out of it has not wavered. In that long-term context, this little bit of receiver work seems well worth the expense. It is just part of a long-term investment in safe and happy traveling.

Apr 01 2012

Faux Japan … In Phoenix

I wasn’t kidding in the last blog when I said we needed to go somewhere to make up for the loss of our trip to Hawaii and Japan. With Emma feeling a little better, we decided that we could take off for a 3-day weekend in Phoenix.

This became one of our non-Airstream trips. Eleanor booked us into a downtown hotel and we just decided to wing it from there, with no particular plan. As it turned out, the weekend has been a tiny taste of the trip we had planned, kind of like visiting Epcot Center is like traveling to foreign countries. Certainly not the same, but at least you get to eat the food.

The first stop was the Japanese Friendship Garden, called Ro Ho En. It’s a tiny oasis that sits almost above the sunken part of interstate 10 near downtown Phoenix. Inside the garden fence is a beautifully landscaped 5 acres with pond, waterfalls, koi, and desert-adapted plantings. It invites pausing and contemplation. I particularly like the way that the landscaping is designed so that every fresh angle of view provides yet another perfectly proportioned composition.

We were riding Phoenix’s smooth and modern streetcar system, which connects downtown Phoenix with Mesa and Tempe. I noticed that the streetcars themselves were Japanese, made apparently by Kinkisharyo. We might as well have been riding the trains of Tokyo, if we sort of squinted and pretended that our fellow riders were fashionable Shinjuku girls. At this point it seemed we had a theme going, so I pointed this out to e&E and we resolved to keep it going all day if we could.

From there we rode another 3 stops to downtown, and walked over to the Science Museum to take in an IMAX movie. The title was Coral Reef, and the underwater sequences reminded me that we would have been snorkeling on Oahu or Maui if we’d gone. I couldn’t decide if this was a sad thought or a happy one at first, but ultimately I realized I was happy to see colorful reef fish even if I wasn’t actually dipped in salt water myself.

At this point we weren’t going to let go of the Japan/Hawaii theme, so I pulled up the Yelp app on my iPhone and found a sushi restaurant nearby. Sorry that all the good stuff was eaten by the time I got around to shooting a picture with the phone. I warned Emma that our next steps might be to sleep on tatami mats on the hotel room floor, and order raw fish for breakfast. She drew the line at that.

Instead we decided to take the train back to our hotel, and the car across town to the Chinese Cultural Center. This was the closest thing we could find to a Japanese market. Eleanor spent a happy half hour browsing the aisles and then we hit the bakery for dessert. Actually, several desserts: red bean paste mochi, custard cream filled cream puff, flaky lotus yolk pastry, red bean sesame bun, cream horn, mango mochi, and something called a flaky wife pastry. (Yes, we made all of the obligatory jokes.) We took them all back to the hotel and shared them with hot green tea.

I would happily have sushi for breakfast tomorrow, but the hotel’s breakfast buffet comes with our room and the offerings are entirely American. But perhaps tonight we will dream of adventures on the other side of the Date Line, and at least have a few hours more of our faux Japanese vacation.

Mar 30 2012

A long strange road to nowhere

It has been a long strange road since I last wrote in this space, and yet we have not managed to go anywhere at all. If anything, the events of the past month have reminded me of how much I love my Airstream, and how relatively trouble-free it has been.

You might be thinking, “Aren’t you the guy who had the brake actuator problem that canceled your trip a few months ago?” and yes, you’d be correct. But that failure was one of only a rare few incidents that have derailed Airstream voyages, whereas our success rate with airplanes has been much worse.

It all started last October, when Eleanor and I decided we finally had accumulated enough airline points to book a family trip to Japan for the cherry blossom season in late March. The mystery, beauty, culture, and food of Japan have long beckoned to us, especially Eleanor, and we have been saving up points on our airline-affiliated credit cards for that dream trip over the last five years. We worked every angle to build up points until we could get (almost) free tickets to Tokyo, with a stopover in Oahu, to depart in mid-March.

From that point, we spent many hours over the winter preparing for this trip. We bought maps and guidebooks, and downloaded information about Tokyo’s complex rail system. We planned out our days, reserved hotels, figured budgets, and researched specific historic and natural sites we wanted to see. I figured out how to stay in touch with the office (using Skype, and iPad, wifi hotspots, and remote access to my computer). I even bought a translator app for my iPhone, and guides to the language and culture.

But the trip didn’t happen. Japan is an extraordinarily expensive place to travel, and with various unexpected expenses over the winter, by February it became clear that this wasn’t our year to go to Japan. Reluctantly, we canceled the trip and got our points returned (for a somewhat painful fee of $300), and vowed to try again sometime in the future.

In a way, we were lucky. Two days before we were scheduled to fly, Emma and I were stricken with some sort of horrible virus. We thought it was a cold, but it turned out much worse (fever, chills, nausea, etc.) and in retrospect we think it was actually the flu. Whatever it was, we were incapacitated for about a week. Only Eleanor was spared, and she was kept busy with nursing duties. If we had kept our trip to Japan, we would have been sick on the flight to Oahu, and on the flight to Tokyo (a total of 14 hours on airplanes). That wouldn’t have been feasible for us, and if we had tried it we would have probably infected the entire airplane. Plus, our entire first week would have consisted of Emma and I lying in bed at the hotel and looking out the window at the cityscape of Tokyo, while refusing all offers of food. It would have been a disastrous “dream” trip to Japan.

However, when we canceled Japan, we kept the trip to Oahu as a sort of consolation prize, shortening our trip from three weeks to six days. So all the time we were sick, and all the time that Eleanor was taking care of us, we had the knowledge that at least we’d still get a vacation to the beautiful islands of Hawaii.

Now, there’s definitely nothing wrong with going to Hawaii for six days, but if we had originally planned to go solely to Hawaii we would have not chosen Oahu as our destination. So after we recovered from the virus, and after a lot of discussion, we changed the destination to Maui. This required cashing in some more airline points and another $272. We re-booked the hotel, reserved the car, and started researching hikes in Haleakala National Park. All seemed well, until …

… two days before we were to leave, Emma woke up with a cold. This triggered an ear infection, which meant a visit to the doctor and antibiotics. She wasn’t capable of flying in that condition. Reluctantly, we canceled the trip to Maui too. Another scramble ensued to recover airline points ($180 in fees) and cancel all the associated reservations. This trip to Hawaii and Japan has become the most expensive trip we’ve never taken.

Today would be the fourth day of our Hawaiian vacation, or the 17th day of our tour of Japan. Instead, it is more memorable as the fourth day of a ten-day course of Amoxicillin. It’s pointless to wail about the trip we aren’t having right now, and we know that someday we will manage to pull it off, but at this time I have to contemplate the Airstream and how very good it has been to us. Many times we have been sick while traveling and rather than punishing us with fees or threatening us with exploding eardrums, the Airstream has always provided a cozy, safe, peaceful place to lie down and get well, without serious interruption of our travels.

The Safari has been busy this season doing duty as a guest house, and is doing so right now, so we can’t take it out this weekend. But we will find somewhere to go in order to feel as though we got a little bit of vacation, as soon as Emma is feeling better. No more booking airline flights for us. This time we’ll take the car.

Feb 28 2012

Modernism Week 2012 Vintage Trailer Show

Have I finally bitten off more than I can chew? I think so. The blog hasn’t been updated as frequently as it should be, emails are going unacknowledged for days or even weeks, and I’ve been shelving good & interesting projects simply because I don’t have time anymore. It’s an abundance of riches in a sense —too much work to do when other folks are still looking for some, and (briefly) too many friends overflowing the driveway into the street—but drowning is still a bad thing even if it’s in a vat of hot chocolate with marshmallows.

So I’m making some tough decisions. Brett and I went off to Palm Springs on Thursday with the decision that we would regretfully resign our volunteer positions as “Event Captains” once the weekend was over. We’ve enjoyed organizing the Vintage Trailer Show for the past two years, but it’s time to hand the reins over to someone else, and we are lucky that a friend in the vintage trailer community has already expressed tentative interest in managing the show for 2013.

The actual Vintage Trailer Show this weekend was fantastic. The final count of visitors was 1,935, which is a record for this event. I was asked a few times why an owner would want to display in this show (and pay for the privilege) rather than just going to a vintage trailer rally elsewhere. I think the volume of visitors explains why. Nowhere else will you see such a huge volume of people who are avidly interested in your trailer, and if that’s useful or important to you, Palm Springs is indisputably the place to be.

The photo above shows Randy and Jeannet Grubb in their one-of-a-kind “Decoliner,” which was one of the stars of the show. It has a full upper deck from which you can drive the rig. It’s for sale, and it would make an awesome promotion vehicle for those who can afford it.

My photos really don’t do justice to the event, and most of them were taken for very specific future uses, so if you want to get a better look, check out Alison Turner’s blog. That’s a picture of Alison coming down the steps of the Decoliner. It was great to see Alison, as well as Dan & Marlene of Malimish, blog readers Kristiano and Christy, Bert Gildart (see his pictures from the event here), and about 1,930 other people.

All in all, it was a fine road trip. We met a lot of great people, enjoyed some superb weather, and had a fantastic 800 mile speed run across the southwestern desert, which always makes me happy. We really couldn’t have hoped for a better weekend.

Next year, since we won’t be organizers, we’ll just attend the show like everyone else and that will be even nicer. I’ll be able to bring a “date” along (guess who) and actually enjoy Palm Springs like a tourist.

Being back home now, it’s time to plunge into the remaining list of tasks. I’m already behind the curve on the Summer 2012 issue at a time when I should have it mostly wrapped up and be planning out Fall 2012. That’s enough to make me nervous but then atop it I have lots of work to do on Alumafandango, Alumapalooza, and a third event that we hope to launch in 2013.

Speaking of Alumafandango (our Denver event), you might have gotten an email today that says if you register for it on Wednesday February 29, you can get a free Alumafandango t-shirt. Just enter the code “LEAPDAY” when you choose your shirt size. This code will only work on February 29.

I’ll post more soon about plans for all of the events. We’ve got quite a few interesting things in the works, and I want to tell you about them as soon as things start to jell. But for now, I’ve got to get back to the job …

Feb 20 2012

Guest house Airstreams

I occasionally think that we have too many Airstreams, but sometimes we don’t have enough. This is the time of year when people tend to come visit (guess why) and the Airstreams become very useful as guest houses.

We live in a three bedroom house that is in a perpetual state of construction and has only two usable bedrooms, and 1.5 usable baths. I don’t even have an office that I can use, just a desk in the corner of the living room. So we aren’t well set up for having overnight guests, at least not indoors.

This has never been a problem for the dozen or so houseguests who visit each season, because the Airstream makes a far better place for them to stay. We tell prospective visitors that they will be welcome to stay “in the Airstream in the carport.” This is a sort of test. Those who are intimidated by the idea of sleeping in a trailer, parked next to the car and tool shed, would probably be happier in a hotel. Most of our friends have the opposite response. They say, “Oh cool, I get to sleep in the Airstream?” and then we know that they’ll be great house guests.

This week we have a full house. Lou & Larry have arrived in their 30-foot Airstream and are parked in front of the house. We have courtesy-parked at their place in Ohio many times, and this is the first chance we’ve had to reciprocate. They will be here a couple of nights and then head to California to visit Bert & Janie at their boondock site in Anza-Borrego (and Michael Depraida at his spot at “The Slabs” near the Salton Sea), and then come back here for a few more nights.

Tomorrow, a long-time friend of Eleanor’s will fly in from the northeast, and she’ll be accommodated in the Safari. That trailer is like having your own apartment, since it is roomy, stocked with everything you could possibly need, and fully hooked up to utilities. The same day, Brett will fly in from Florida, and he’ll be set up in the smaller Caravel. So we’ll have four guests at once, across three Airstreams.

This works out really well. Everyone has a space to call their own. We don’t have to worry about whose towel is whose, or when people like to get out of bed. Everyone has their own refrigerator, stocked with the things they like to eat. Everyone has their own bathroom, and can set the temperature where they like it. Lots of those opportunities for friction (even between good friends) are eliminated, and we all get to focus on the good parts of visiting.

It’s financially very practical too. We don’t need a big house just for those occasions when people visit. There are no unnecessary rooms to dust or pay taxes on. When our guests are gone, the “guest houses” revert to being our vacation and business vehicles, or I can use one of them as a private office when I need a quiet space to work. The Airstreams make our little house much more flexible and affordable.

I may someday get a plaque for our Airstream Safari’s bedroom that lists all the people who slept there. (That ought to freak a few people out during tours.) I think a few of them stayed specifically because they could sleep in the Airstream. It is an attraction, to some folks.

Long term I would like to buy a few more Airstreams, set them up luxuriously, and place them on a piece of property, for rental to the general public when visiting Tucson. This is a popular idea, which we’ve documented several times in the magazine. There are spots all over the world where you can spend the night in an Airstream “hotel room.” I feel like I’m nearly in the business already, especially this week, so it would probably be fun to do for real someday …