May 30 2013

Life at Alumapalooza 4

Everyone here keeps asking me how things are going for us, since we are now entering our third day of Alumapalooza. I have been replying that his has been the easiest and best year yet. Many of the troublesome issues from years past have been worked out, and we have an absolutely awesome team of “orange shirts” who have just nailed every problem that crops up, even before I know about them. As a result, we’re having a pretty good time.

This is good because we are already thinking hard about the challenges of next February’s Alumaflamingo, to be held in Sarasota FL. We’re going to be have to be at the top of our game to make that event meet our standards the first year out, especially with (likely) 200-300 trailers on the field. Normally it takes about 12-18 months to plan a new event, and at this point we have just nine months left, so it’s definitely on my mind, and Brett’s.

But we’ll talk about that later. You want to read about Alumapalooza, right? What can I say—it has been great. The weather has been excellent since the early sprinkles ended mid-day Tuesday. We’re expecting lots of sunshine and temps in 70s and 80s through Friday, then probably a few thunderstorms will roll through. That’s typical.

The events have been well-received. I’m not going to go through a list of everything we’ve held, because it’s all in the online schedule, but suffice to say the attendees have been kept completely occupied, from Yoga at 7:30 through the Roving Happy Hours in the evening. Yesterday a lot of people missed half of Marty’s talk about “Running a Business On The Road” because they were trying to chow down a little lunch between activities. We may have programmed the day a little too tight because we had so many things we wanted to present.

Well, that’s just a warm-up because today’s schedule has a lot more on it. We’ve got seven seminars and activities for today, plus towing “test drives”, plus the Aluminum Gong Show (Eleanor and I will be doing an act in it), plus a Pool Party, two factory tours, door prizes, Open Grill, and this evening’s Jam Session. Eleanor and I went through today’s schedule at 6:30 just to plan what we were going to do. She and Emma are starting their day with Yoga at 7:30.

We are taking care to pace ourselves so that we aren’t burnt out by Saturday. I’m trying to get to sleep around 10 p.m. but it doesn’t always work out. Regardless, I have to be up at 6:30 or so to get ahead of the day, take care of email, slather up on sunscreen, and check in with everyone. (By the way, “Sammy The Solar Squirrel” gets on the staff radio channel every day to remind the staff to take care. Today he is going to be joined by “Harry The Hydrated Hippo,” to remind them to drink the cold water we keep in a cooler by the main stage. We have fun with our radios …)

The new Internet system is working very well. Instead of the marginal and occasionally slow Internet I normally get while at Airstream, my system is flying along at good 4G speeds all the time. I’m getting a consistent -73 dBm. Brett has a similar system with a different antenna and he’s also getting awesome performance and a better dBm rating (-59 dBM) so I think his antenna is a better one. I may switch later. Colin Hyde has one too, and he’s very happy. Alex is next door to Colin and finding poor reception so I suspect he’s the next one to upgrade.

Gotta go — the day has already started! For more about what’s coming, check the Alumapalooza Facebook page.

May 28 2013

Pre- Alumapalooza 4

The blog has been quiet the past couple of days because we’ve been deep into the Alumapalooza pre-event routine. We’ve settled into a pattern for the set-up of these events, which started before we arrived. This year we have a slightly larger staff than before, and they are all really excellent, so the workload for us has gotten much lighter. When we pulled in to Airstream’s Terra Port on Saturday, everything was so well under control that there was little to do but get updated, and on Sunday instead of joining the goody-bag assembly line, I was able to spend the day with Super Terry doing some maintenance to our Airstream.

The maintenance was primarily about inspecting our tires and wheel bearings. It has been over three years since the bearings were re-packed, and many miles, which is far beyond the usual RV industry recommendation. Paradoxically, our heavy and regular use of the trailer is one of the reasons we’ve gotten away with it. Sitting still isn’t great for the bearings, as it offers an opportunity for condensation to get in. I’ve also periodically checked the bearings to ensure they are running cool, and whenever a wheel is up in the air I check for smoothness & quietness of rotation.

Still, it has been nearly two years and probably over 12,000 miles since the last time Super Terry and I took the wheels off to check things out, so it was definitely overdue. We found that the Michelin tires are still doing well, but wearing more on the outer edge of the tire tread, so we took them over to the Wal-Mart Super Center in a nearby town to get them flipped.

Now the white-letter side of each tire is facing out, and the tires have been swapped from side to side so that they will have the same direction of rotation. This should even out the wear a little. Based on the wear I saw, I’d guess we could get about 50k miles out of them. They’ve already gone over 30,000 miles, and the date code says they are five years old so they are probably going to “age out” before they wear out.

Our inspection revealed that the brake pads were fine except on one wheel, where the disc caliper sliders had gotten dry. When that happens, only one brake pad gets all the wear, so we replaced that set of brake pads and re-lubricated the caliper sliders. Otherwise all was good. Super Terry re-packed the wheel bearings, and re-applied gray Parbond (a sort of thin caulk used for small seams on the exterior) to a few spots that needed it, and that completed our day of maintenance.

Over the weekend I had a few minutes to look around Jackson Center to see what has changed. We knew that the Cafe Veranda, the best restaurant in town, had closed. The building is still for sale. I hope someone buys it and turns it back into a B&B. It’s a gorgeous house and has some interesting history. I’ve heard that Wally Byam used to stay there many decades ago.

The one-screen downtown movie house, the Elder Theatre, is in danger of closing for the same reason as many other old independent screens across the country. The mandatory change to digital projection is too expensive for this little Mom & Pop operation, and so they’ve launched a Kickstarter effort to raise $25,000 to save the theater. Check it out and pledge if you love the little village of Jackson Center, OH. This country is going to lose hundreds of little downtown theaters if they can’t make the digital conversion this year.

Phil’s Cardinal Market, the old grocery store, has been replaced by a spankin’ new Family Dollar store. It’s nice to see some investment in the downtown. It just opened last week and seems very fine. This week the Alumapalooza-goers will flood it and probably clear it out of milk and bread, as they usually do.

On Monday the big deal of the day was the arrival of the tent. Normally the tent crew arrives in the late morning and has it up by 2 or 3 in the afternoon, but this year things ran late, so we didn’t have a chance to get in there and set up our stuff (lights, sound, kitchen, Internet, refrigerators, etc) until after 6 p.m. This was an inconvenience but really not much more than that, so overall I would say setup went extremely well this year.

All weekend we’ve had early arrivals showing up and parking in the Service Center parking lot. At this point I think we have about 25 Airstreams there, plus another ten or so staff trailers in the Terra Port, and probably 6-10 more service customers. Everyone gathered on the grass for the Memorial Day cookout, which was a huge success. The rain we had gotten in the morning cleared up for the afternoon and early evening. It rained again last night and there is still the occasional patter on the roof as I type this (at 6 a.m. Tuesday) but the forecast is calling for improving conditions all day and fabulous conditions through Friday. Only a little rain and not too much heat is a pretty good week in JC this time of year.

Yesterday Dave Schumann showed up and took a few of us into his office to show off a new Airstream guitar. So far only two have been made, but Airstream will get more and sell you one for $2,250 if you are interested. One of our attendees is going to play this one on stage this week.

All week Eleanor and I have been practicing for the new Aluminum Gong Show, which is a featured part of Alumapalooza this week. We’ve got a little routine which involves both of us and a ukulele. If the performance is not great, at least it will be entertaining. I am hoping a few more people sign up to be in the show. Any act is welcome, even pet tricks. It just has to be a minimum of 90 seconds long and a maximum of four minutes. If you are attending Alumapalooza you really don’t want to miss this show, trust me …

It’s time to get moving now. This is going to be one of those days where we do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day. By 8 we will have a caravan of staff trailers heading out to the field, and by 9 parking of the general attendees will begin. Alumapalooza begins now!

May 24 2013

Arrived at Airstream!

We’ve completed the final leg of our long long trip to Airstream headquarters in Jackson Center, Ohio, at last. Yesterday we towed 330 miles from the Great Smoky Mtns to a spot somewhere between Dayton and Cincinnati to crash for the night, then the final 100 miles or so this morning.

I was pleased to see that even though our battery was severely depleted after three days of shaded camping, we managed to pick up 47.5 amp hours through the solar panels while we were towing. It was a beautiful day, and with the battery back up to about 76% it was no problem to spend another night without plugging in.

We’ve been lucky to avoid a lot of weather trouble along our route this year. Normally we’d follow a route across I-40 or I-70 to get to Ohio, and if we had, we’d have risked tornadoes and nasty thunderstorms. This year we opted for I-20 to I-30 only because we were heading for The Great Smoky Mtns National Park, and coincidentally lucked out on the weather. All we had to deal with was a lot of heat across Texas, and some humidity in Arkansas and Tennessee. Now it’s just about perfect in Jackson Center, OH, with days peaking around 70 degrees and dry air.

That won’t last, of course, because there’s nothing as changeable as Jackson Center weather. All I can hope is that the inevitable thunderstorms won’t be too severe, and right now the long range forecast seems to support that. We shall see, because even a 48-hour forecast really can’t be counted on for much. Every day’s a surprise.

The rest of the crew are here, and by the time we arrived they had the field all staked out. Tim & Alice were busy arranging the water system and checking on the power. Brett and a small crew were marking the tent locations (they’ll be put up on Monday). In other words, business as usual. Tomorrow we’ll stuff the goody bags and Terry & I have plans to do some service on our Airstream, but it’s generally light work. Nobody is too busy yet.

I see four Airstreams belonging to attendees who have arrived early; they’re all in the Service Center parking lot. Little impromptu Happy Hours and get-togethers seem to be forming, which is nice to see. Tomorrow it should pick up quite a bit, and by Monday we expect at least 25 Airstreams to be boondocked in the lot for the Memorial Day cookout.

It’s nice to see Jackson Center again. It’s always like a Homecoming. We have a lot of memories here and of course it’s the home of the company that my entire business is based upon. It’s a tiny village in the middle of a lot of corn & soybean fields, and I never would have come here if it weren’t for this amazing phenomenon called Airstream, but since I have it has become a place I think of fondly.

This afternoon has been spent settling in, and catching up with friends who we haven’t seen in months. There’s a lot more of that ahead, I’m sure. If Alumapalooza is anything, it’s a giant social occasion—and Airstreamers are very social people. This promises to be a very fun week.

May 24 2013

Out of the woods

It is just before 8 a.m., and it is time to start packing up for departure. I would be doing that now but the rest of the family is still snoozing. It has been a restful night, with light showers in the early morning tapping on the aluminum roof, and fresh air coming in the window. A cold front is expected today, which will sweep away the relentless humidity we’ve been experiencing and eliminate the thundershowers too. It should be a good driving day.

I mentioned earlier that we didn’t expect to get any solar power from the panels because of the extensive forest canopy above us. This turned out to be true. During the day the most power I saw flowing was 2.5 amp-hours, and that was only for a few minutes. We managed only to generate enough power to make up for the parasitic drain during the day, in other words, hardly any power at all.

If we’d had a third solar panel on a 30-foot cord, like I’ve wanted to get for years, we might have been able to place it in a sunny patch near our site and pick up a few more amps in the morning. But it still would not have been much relative to our normal daily power consumption.

So, this morning the Tri-Metric meter tells me that we have 48% of our power remaining, which equates to 89.4 amps consumed. We could stay in the park another day without a problem, but having had solar working for us on other trips, I really miss coming back to the trailer at the end of the day and seeing that meter read 95%.

On the other hand, draining the battery may have been just what we needed. A few weeks ago I blogged that I thought the problem of flickering LED lights had been cured. It had been a real annoyance when boondocking whenever we used the water pump. I cleaned up the main grounds (electrical connections), unplugged the trailer for a quick test, and the problem seemed to be cured. But I was mistaken—the problem recurred on our first night out on the road. This led me to believe that the issue might be in the battery itself.

This wasn’t a theory that made me happy, because the solution might turn out to be replacement of the $600 battery (we have a large Lifeline 4D). The flickering lights plagued us for the first two days of our boondocking adventure in the Smokies, but this morning I noticed that the problem had stopped.

Hmmmmm. We’ve used half our battery power and now the lights just dim slightly when the pump is run, rather than flickering like disco strobe lights? I’m thinking that this also points to the battery as the source of the problem. By exercising the battery we may have removed some internal resistance. It was plugged in all winter, except for our short trip last month, so perhaps it “stiffened up” like an unused muscle. Now it’s working better.

We’ll have to test further the next time we boondock. I’m not sure when that will be. We will have a power hookup everywhere we plan to go for the next couple of months, so it may be a matter of just disconnecting for a day or two (assuming we don’t need air conditioning) and doing further testing.

While in Gatlinburg yesterday I took advantage of the appearance of a cell phone signal to check in on the situation up in Ohio. Half of the Alumapalooza team is already on site, and the rest are expected this weekend. My phone revealed a total of 39 email messages and nine voicemails, which was depressing at first, but then I discovered that other team members had dealt with seven of the voicemails already and about half a dozen of the emails. Good people, especially Brett, Alice, and David, who have picked up the slack during my brief disconnect.

Still, it’s time to get up to Ohio and pitch in. We’ve got a dozen pre-event tasks to manage before the crowds arrive on Tuesday, plus we are expecting about 25-30 Airstreams to show up early for a Memorial Day picnic that Airstream is throwing for us. I’ll have to go wake up the crew in a few minutes, and start packing up for the road. We’ve got 300 miles or so to cover today.

May 23 2013

Waterfalls, inside and out

Since we are settled into the campground, there is time to take care of little things. As when we were full-timing, we have to do various jobs as we travel because it doesn’t pay to let them accumulate until the end of the trip. Eleanor has been re-packing some of the provisions that she didn’t have time to deal with before we left Tucson, which means the big pile of stuff in the bedroom is slowly disappearing into the cabinets (or being consumed).

We discovered on Tuesday that our shower is leaking at the corner where the wall meets the shower pan, just below the faucet. This is a routine job. It needs fresh caulk. I had done the other major leak point over the winter, but didn’t think this spot needed service yet.

Digging around my bin of repair supplies in the back, I found a tube of white silicone caulk that I keep specifically for this job. Unfortunately, it was a previously opened tube that (despite careful re-sealing) had fully cured in the tube since the last time I used it, probably a year or two ago. We’ll have to come up with a temporary seal (likely a strip of tape) for the shower, and buy some fresh caulk at a hardware store on the way to Ohio.

This may not sound much like a camping trip, with re-packing and re-caulking, but that’s life on the road. We do a little of the obligatory stuff each day and spend the rest of the time having fun, so I don’t want to make it seem like we are primarily focused on household duties. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park will still get our attention

Today’s plan was to seek out some of the many waterfalls in the park. This is a huge park, so we focused on those along the northern edge of the park by the Little River. A couple can be seen from the road with no hiking. We picked out two roadside falls and two that required 2.5 mile hikes (roundtrip).

I can’t say enough about the scenic beauty of this place, but it is sadly complemented by massive crowds almost everywhere. The parking lots were overflowing at every trailhead we visited, despite being mid-week and theoretically not yet in the peak season. We abandoned plans to hike one trail after seeing the hordes at the parking lot, and tried it again at 5:30 pm when things had quieted down. Even a mile into the woods on a muddy trail there was nothing approaching solitude. Normally I find hiking in the woods to be relaxing but this felt more like we had gotten off the tour bus.

This led to a new Eleanor-ism. Speaking of one of the more crowded trails, she said, “Well, that seems worth not doing.” We spent the rest of the afternoon’s hiking trying to identify other things that seemed worth not doing. (And for those of you who are long-time blog readers, yes, Reagan is still dead.)

Getting to two of the waterfalls on our list required us to break my earlier commitment not to leave the park, because it’s necessary to exit through downtown Gatlinburg to reach the “Motor Trail.” This is a horrifying shock if you have been camped in the forest of a few days. In seconds you go from dense green forest to a crowded and visually noxious tourist center, filled with every food chain imaginable, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, ersatz fashion outlets, and (oddly enough) multiple pancake restaurants, all stacked up against each other in a mish-mash example of urban planning gone amok. Eight stoplights of this before you can make a right turn and escape back into the woods.

So that’s where all the day-trippers are coming from. I had no idea, but now that I do I feel like retreating further into the woods.

Despite the crowds, we did manage to finally complete our four waterfalls, hiking a total of about 5.5 miles for the day and amazingly not encountering any thunderstorms. The day’s drive totaled 73 miles, more than I would have preferred but every inch of it scenic and astonishing (even Gatlinburg, in its own way).

We returned to the Airstream around 7 p.m.to find that I had missed the fact that the center roof vent was open. A splatter pattern on the new vinyl floor showed that a rainshower had come through while we were gone; fortunately, not a flood and no damage done. The good news here was that the rain had kept the camp “fires” at bay, so the smoke level was low for a chance and we could open up the windows to let in some cool air. It is nice to smell the sweetness of the pines and the delicate odor of moss, if only for a moment.

And finally, because the Gatlinburg restaurants had planted a seed in our brains, we made pancakes on the stove with blackberries and maple syrup, and wrapped up the evening with a couple of games on the iPad.