May 29 2012

Pre-dawn, Alumapalooza load-in

It’s 4:53 a.m. I have not awoken this early for any particular reason that I can think of. It is the big morning of our load-in to Alumapalooza, but although that’s an exciting time, I don’t think I’m up because of the anticipation. I just woke up, having slept well and having had lots of interesting dreams. Although our alarm was set for 6:30 a.m., I guess I’m up for the day.

There are various “industrial” sounds of machines and whirring fans that always accompany a work day at the Terra Port, murmuring beneath the usual morning bird songs. Everyone who has camped here is familiar with them. Soon the Airstream staff will begin to arrive and get to work building Airstreams and opening the Service bays. They are going to have a busy week, just like us. At 7 a.m., the tractor will come out to the Terra Port to pick up the first Service customers.

I know from prior years that in the next hour a lot of guys will start stumbling around outside their trailers in the dawn light, puttering with various pieces of equipment and generally killing time until it’s socially acceptable to fire up the old diesel pickup and start hitching for real. This year I may be one of them. I’ve got to dump the holding tanks and pack up a few things, and I might as well get started soon. Besides, it’s hard to sit inside the Airstream this morning. It’s exciting to line up the first group of Airstreams (all the Alumapalooza staff, about eight trailers) to parade into the field and take our designated spots at 8 a.m.

Everyone will be up and watching, including our little “eye in the sky,” a GoPro Hero2 sports camera mounted to a 30-foot pole. It will be shooting a time-lapse video of the parking process today. We tested it yesterday while the tent was being set up, and it’s pretty cool. I’ll try to get the video of the Airstreams parking today uploaded to YouTube later this week. We are expecting 102 trailers today.

Yesterday was another hot one, but the weather service (our own Alex K) says that today will be a little cooler with a few showers in the morning, than comfortably cool all week. The day started with setting up the eye in the sky, while our parking crew flagged the fields and set out the big yellow “ALUMAPALOOZA” road signs. The big old & ugly box trailer that we use for winter storage was towed over and we unloaded all the gear, including a complete Airstream kitchen and stage sound and video equipment.

This year we’re trying a much more streamlined online check-in process, so I held a brief training seminar with most of the staff after the main tent was set up. We all stumbled through the process with a clutch of iPads until we’d finally worked out all the issues. Despite a few challenges, I think it’s going to work fine and save everyone considerable time. Two staffers will have laptops and the ability to fix any problems that the iPad users in the field might encounter.

A few people have arrived early and are parked in the Service Center lot. They have no hookups of course, but seem to be fine with that. I should note that arriving early is discouraged and there’s a risk of being turned away unless you are staff or have a service appointment on Tuesday. Also, arriving early doesn’t get you in to Alumapalooza early. These folks will be parked at the same time as everyone else, after 9 a.m. today.

But those who were here seemed to make the best of the situation, heat and all. I got a chance to take a break around 6 p.m. and wandered into a group of merry-makers who were playing and singing some of Kirk McKellar’s songs.

Kirk is the middle guy in the photo with the blue hat. Every year he writes a theme song for Alumapalooza. The first year it was the Alumapalooza Anthem. The next year it was “Wally Byam Would Be Smilin’ “, and this year he has something new that we haven’t rehearsed yet. Regardless, we will be singing it from the stage today.

Thanks to Nick Martines for this photo. He’s one of our official photographers, and you will see his panoramic photo work from last year’s event hanging in the Airstream Service Center.

May 28 2012

The “snake killers” are on the job

One of the important aspects of planning the Alumapalooza prep schedule is to leave in lots of time for “contingencies.” You never know what will crop up, but it’s virtually guaranteed that several things will. The other key is to be surrounded by people who are really capable, so when a problem does pop up, they just jump on it without even having to be asked to do it.

I’m reminded of a quote from Ross Perot, the billionaire founder of EDS, after he got involved with General Motors: “At EDS, the first person who sees a snake kills it. At GM, they form a committee on snakes.” Our core team members are all snake-killers, figuratively speaking.

So when I awoke in the morning to one of the worst sounds you can hear in an Airstream—drip drip drip—I was dismayed but knew I was surrounded by people who could help. The air conditioner had run most of the night to beat the incessant heat and intense humidity, and apparently the condensate drain tube was clogged. This caused an overflow of water in the drain pan, and when that happens you get a light rain shower in your trailer.

One of the many handy folks parked in the Terra Port with us is Super Terry. I threw a couple of salad bowls beneath the air conditioner and went to get him out of bed. This took over an hour since he had slept poorly and had his own water problem to deal with as well. A water line had sprung a leak right underneath his bed, which needed to be fixed immediately. S.T. put a temporary patch on his leak and then came over to help me, a gauge of his Super-helpful character.

The problem was readily remedied by blowing out the drain tube, but as we were in there S.T. spotted daylight coming through. The air conditioner, when replaced last fall, didn’t get a layer of double-sided tape between it and the drain pan. This is not a serious issue, as rainwater won’t normally get through the gap, but in wind-driven rain or while towing we could have a minor leak.

By this time it was 9 a.m. and time for me to join all the volunteers are our little appreciation breakfast at the Verandah. Normally we just treat the volunteers like rented mules, with nary a thank-you card for their efforts sweating in the field all week. This year our hearts softened enough to buy them breakfast at the best restaurant in town, which happens to be a short walk from Airstream. Eleanor and Emma even dressed up a little for the occasion.

Once back, we had to do some prep for the new Backup Derby event. We ran the course several times (with plenty of onlookers) and worked out a nice little routine that took “the Stig” 59.6 seconds. We expect most people will take about 90 seconds to complete it. You can get full details about it by going to the Alumapalooza website. This is going to be a seriously fun event.

Meanwhile, our crack team of volunteers was inside the Service Center stuffing 200 goody bags. We have a rented Gator to shuttle all the stuff around this year, from our U-Haul trailer to the Service Center, back to the trailer, and then eventually to the field. In previous years we used our car, but the Gator is a lot more convenient.

This year we have a nice black zipper bag that even had a little iPod pocket in it. It’s a great souvenir of the event, and it will (as always) be filled with treats and coupons and the all-important Survival Guide.

As predicted, the heat and humidity were brutal on Sunday, but we were ready for it. Brett kept a large ice chest filled with water for all the volunteers, and everyone had their sun hats and sunscreen on. It was only really bad for us because in the middle of the day Super Terry returned (with some of the special double-sided tape) and removed our air conditioner in order to apply the tape. I got up on the roof with him and we managed to get it done in about half an hour.

Of course now the heat was nearing peak and the trailer had become completely heat-soaked, so it would take two hours to cool off again. I say “would” because then Eleanor began cooking an elaborate dinner of beef tenderloin, orcchiette pasta with a smoky mushroom tomato cream sauce, white bean & roasted garlic puree for the bread, and sfogliatelle (an Italian stuffed flaky pastry, courtesy of Elsa) for dessert. All of this meant all three burners of the stove and the oven running for two hours, which completely overwhelmed any good the air conditioner could do. We ended up turning it off and running fans despite the 91 degree temperatures outside. It was actually cooler that way.

Well, dinner was worth it. I mean, really, it was. And since we suffered in a trailer that was hotter than the outside (where the “heat index” was 100 degrees), you know it had to be good chow. But we won’t be eating like that again this week. Too much time involved, too much work. This week we’ll be mostly cooking on the Open Grill with the rest of the people who are coming this week.

May 26 2012

The trip to the Terra Port

We are at Airstream, in the village of Jackson Center, Ohio. I took a day off blogging yesterday, so here’s a rundown of the past two days.

Our drive from Johnson Saulk Trail State Park to our next stop of South Bend IN was uneventful. This would not be news except for our history: every other year we’ve driven past the Chicago/Gary area, traffic on I-80 has been horrible with congestion and construction. This year the work seems to be mostly done, and it was a smooth ride on new concrete all the way to the Indiana Toll Road. We landed at Charlie & Lynn’s house in South Bend right on schedule.

It has become a sort of tradition for us to stop with Lynn and Charlie nearly every year. They were our first stop in October 2005 when we began full-timing with the Airstream Safari, and they’ve made us so at home that we just keep showing up. The last three years we have made their driveway our home as a final stop right before Alumapalooza. It’s a last chance for us to recover from the long drive before we jump into the tempest that is Alumapalooza.

This year was no different. We set up the Airstream, visited the horses, and took Charlie’s vintage Mercedes (300SEL, I believe from 1959) down the country roads to get some pizza. It was exactly what we needed: a chance to unwind and hang out in a peaceful, low pressure setting.

And the weather was just spectacular. Perhaps that’s what inspired us to clean the trailer’s windows and the mini-blinds in the kitchen, the next morning. They had suffered from a year of dust and uck while parked in Vermont last summer and all winter in Arizona, and were long overdue for a good cleanup.

Or perhaps we were just delaying the inevitable. The forecast was quite different for Jackson Center, 200 miles away by road: 90+ degrees and “oppressive” humidity, and none of us were eager to get into that for the weekend. But we did arrive in J.C. by 2:45 p.m. and it was indeed oppressive. In fact, Alex K was already on site (he’s acting as our resident weather reporter this week) and he declared that the heat index was officially 100 degrees by late afternoon. It’s supposed to stay that way through Monday, but then cool down nicely for Alumapalooza. In the meantime, air conditioning is our friend.

We seemed to be nearly the last members of the advance team to arrive. Brett & Lisa got here Thursday, Alex & Charon also, Tim & Alice got here Friday, Matt & Beth were probably here a couple of days ago, and Lou & Larry beat us to the site today by about 15 minutes. In our defense, let me note that our drive was further than anyone’s at 2,450 miles total.

We did a little chatting about details of the event setup, but the real work won’t begin until tomorrow. Tonight Matt organized a small potluck dinner at the picnic tables under the hickory trees that border Airstream’s Terra Port, and despite the heat we all had a nice evening. Tomorrow we are holding a small appreciation breakfast for the volunteers who work the event, and then the work begins with flagging the sites and stuffing the goody bags.

For those of you who are coming to Alumapalooza, the field looks nice and dry and evenly mowed—just perfect for the event. The chance of rain is very low for the next few days (except for a 30% chance on Tuesday) and the temperatures should be ideal. If you planned to come this year, you’re in for a very fun week!

May 24 2012

Johnson-Sauk Trail State Recreation Area, IL

You know we’re on a serious mileage-conquering roadtrip when we drive until 9 p.m. and spend the night at a Cracker Barrel. That was yesterday. It’s not as bad as it sounds, since our drive was pretty pleasant and the night was reasonably quiet, but still it’s not an experience I care to repeat any time soon.

We’ve been lucky this year because the weather has been extremely nice as we have descended slowly from the altitudes of Colorado and into the plains and river valleys. Even tonight, east of the Mississippi, the humidity is low and it hasn’t been scorching hot, so we can boondock without the dramatic suffering of years past, if we care to. The forecast for Jackson Center OH (the home of Airstream and Alumapalooza) is surprisingly good too, without a lot of thunderstorm action predicted. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

The story of today is high winds. It started off as a light breeze but by 11 a.m. it was a nasty crosswind out of the south and it just wouldn’t let up. White box trailers were dancing around in their lanes and it made me extra cautious even though our Airstream was handling very well. By 3 p.m. the wind was a solid 30 MPH with gusts, and by 4 p.m. the gusts got to 40-45 MPH (according to the weather service). We were trying to make it to Starved Rock State Park in Illinois but around 4 I decided to cut the drive short and look for some other place to spend the night.

I did this not because the Airstream couldn’t handle the weather, but simply to maintain my safety margin. I’ve done a lot of high-risk activities (ultralight flying, diving, motorcycling) and I know that safety does not come from any single choice, but from multiple layers of good choices. I’m talking about things like good skills, driver fitness, appropriate speed, safety equipment, and situational awareness. Make all the right choices and you’ve got a padding to help keep you out of trouble—or resolve it successfully.

When layers of that safety padding start to fall apart, it’s time to end the trip. This time I saw extreme high winds, driver fatigue, and increasingly rough roads with heavy truck traffic as we approached the Chicago area. Three bad factors are my limit, so even though I have high confidence in our tow rig and high confidence in my own abilities as the driver, we looked for somewhere to call it a night.

This turned out to be a fortuitous move. We discovered a park we’d never heard of before, Johnson-Sauk Trail State Recreation Area in Illinois. It’s a very nice park set inside a pine and oak forest, only 6 miles off I-80. The campground is a large circle of widely-spaced sites surrounding a tranquil grassy center. We got an electric site for $20 and the Airstream is pointed into the wind so, although the wind is howling, we aren’t rocking on the stabilizers.

Stopping an hour early has given me some time to catch up on some work, and Eleanor has time to make us all a nice dinner. We’ll have to get started a little earlier tomorrow in order to make up the lost time, but otherwise this was a nice tradeoff. I don’t envy the folks who are still on I-80 in Iowa or Illinois this evening.

May 23 2012

A drive I’ve already forgotten

I woke up this morning knowing that it would be a long day. Yesterday I realized I’d made a mistake in our trip planning by not allowing enough time to drive from Denver to Jackson Center. As I mentioned in the previous blog, it is about 1,250 miles and we wanted to be located on Airstream property no later than Saturday morning, which meant we needed to cover an average of just under 400 miles each day on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

That’s far more than we usually travel (as a family) in a day, but there was nothing to be done about it now except get going. But first, I needed to get a mail delivery from the local post office. Our mail forwarding service had sent a Priority Mail envelope on Thursday and it was supposed to be in Aurora by Monday but when Eleanor went to check, it wasn’t there. So I had to battle morning rush traffic to try again this morning at 7:30 a.m.

I was told the package still wasn’t there, but then I got the Delivery Confirmation from the mail forwarders which proved it had actually been delivered on Monday. After a second wait in line, when presented with the irrefutable evidence of delivery the clerk took another look and found the envelope. With drive time, this episode took about an hour, so my hope of an early departure was already dashed.

E&E were still packing up anyway. Our Airstream friends Forrest & Patrice, who had shown up in the site next to ours on Sunday, dropped by to say goodbye, and the owners of another Airstream pulled up to ask a few questions, and then the volunteer camp hosts dropped by to wish us a good trip (they’ve seen us there every year for at least four years), so it became a leisurely departure. I also got a call from a local paper in Shelby County Ohio, wanting details about Alumapalooza. In between all the chatting, I took the time to lube up the Hensley hitch, fill the water tank, and charge the cordless drill batteries. We finally got going around 10 a.m.

The drive ahead was nothing we wanted to contemplate. We’ve done this run too many times: I-76 from Denver to I-80 in Nebraska, and then the long straight drive through ranchlands and grasslands as far as possible. Like last year, the winds came down the prairie from the north and gave us a strong & steady crosswind all day, which eventually eroded our fuel economy to a fairly poor 11.8 average for the day. Of course, the fact that we were towing at 70 MPH might have had something to do with that too. It takes a lot of discipline to tow at 60 or 65 when you know that 400 more miles of Nebraska lie ahead.

520 miles later, just past sunset, we landed in Lincoln NE and parked the Airstream for the night. We get to do this again tomorrow, thanks to my error in planning. You’d think that after doing this a few times, I’d know that 2,000 miles is a helluva long way to drive, but for some reason I’m always struck by the magnitude of the trip. Emma has been a good sport about it, although having an impressive array of diversions in the backseat is probably the key there. She’s either reading, playing a game, studying dog breeds, or corresponding via email to one of her friends. I am grateful that we don’t have to entertain her any more on these long car trips.

For those who are interested, the car seems to be operating perfectly, with no further Check Engine lights. Our local dealer has agreed to credit us $132 against a future service, for the mistake, which is fine with me. Driving across the windy plains today I was reminded that when you’re out on a long trip your satisfaction is very much tied to how you feel about your tow vehicle. A purring car or truck is like a faithful friend, and a balky or unreliable vehicle is just a nightmare.

The Airstream is equally happy. We’ve had to chase quite a few moths out of the trailer over the past couple of days (not sure how they got in) but other than that there have been no issues. The only concern is that the interior is looking quite tired. The 6+ years of heavy use are really starting to show. Mechanically the Airstream is in great shape, but the curtains are splattered with stains, the vinyl floor has a couple of rips and is turning permanently gray, the countertops are riddled with scratches and knife cuts, the dinette foam is going flat, and the front bedroom carpet needed replacing a couple of years ago. Eleanor and I had a discussion about this and are considering a DIY makeover in our carport this fall. We’d outsource the floor covering installation and upholstery, but do everything else ourselves. This would also give me a chance to do some electronic upgrades I’ve been wanting, like a permanently-installed inverter. We’ll keep thinking about it.

The rest of the Alumapalooza advance team will be hitting Jackson Center starting Friday. Tomorrow we’ll decide if we are going to get to J.C. on Friday or Saturday, but either way we’ve got to keep hustling if we are to make it on time. Alumapalooza is just around the corner.