Jun 08 2014

BMW day 1: Vermont to Beaupre, QC

It takes a while to “get into” a trip like this. First you’ve got to adjust to the sensations of riding on the motorcycle for long distances. On a motorcycle you aren’t just passing through the countryside—you feel and smell everything in a way that is impossible in a car. If it’s cold, you stop to put on a layer. When there are bugs, they smack on the visor right in your field of view. If there’s a skunk, you can’t hit “recirc” on the climate control to avoid it. If the road is potholed, you count on the agility of the bike to swerve around the holes, or take your lumps.

Fortunately, we smelled more lilacs blooming than skunks or manure, and the roads were fine, and the weather was sunny.

The other adjustment is more mental. We had two weeks blocked out, and no fixed agenda. We had to shift our own minds to the mode of exploration without deadlines or major expectations. Undoubtedly in the coming days we would have mechanical problems, bad weather, changes of heart, uncomfortable situations, language barriers, etc. But also we’d find adventures of unexpected kinds, and there would be no rush at any time, so the important thing was to just mentally slow down and (literally) smell the lilacs.

Our first day was one of our longest, at nearly 300 miles from Shelburne, VT to Beaupre, QC (Canada). Steve led us on long and winding detours through backroads of Vermont that I’ve never seen before (and I grew up here). That is part of the point of motorcycling the countryside, of course, so we didn’t mind but we did decide that future days should be shorter. It took us three hours just to reach the tiny border crossing at Richford, VT, which I suppose we could have done in half the time if we had tried a more direct route. The border crossing was uneventful, and there wasn’t much going on in the countryside south of Quebec City (an area referred to as the Eastern Townships) so we planned to move through with few stops. We just wanted to get past Quebec City in the first day, because until then it wasn’t going to feel like a trip to us.

One key piece of technology we used was a headset intercom on each helmet. These used Bluetooth wireless to connect to each other, and to our cell phones, and (in Steve’s case) a motorcycle GPS. Just by tapping on a button on the side of my helmet I could call up either Steve or Eric and have a conversation while riding. This proved to be very useful, although the headsets weren’t entirely reliable.

The really neat bit about this was that the headset connected to my iPhone, so I could listen to music as we rode, take phone calls, or even send and receive text messages. I was able to hear the announcement chime when I had a text message, and say “Siri, read my messages”. Listening to the phone reading my text messages to me while riding through the northern Vermont countryside, it felt like the future that I had always expected as a kid had finally arrived. All that was missing was some way to make the motorcycle fly.

When we planned the trip, staying in touch with the outside world was not a high priority for us. I went to considerable lengths to get everyone I work with to understand that I would NOT be reachable, and fully expected that somewhere in northern Quebec I would enter massive dead zones of phone coverage. This turned out not to be true, as Bell Mobility has excellent coverage all the way around the Gaspé peninsula, better in fact than I got in Maine and New Hampshire.

For this possibility I had purchased a Canadian calling plan from Verizon Wireless ($15 for 1,000 minutes & unlimited texting, plus $25 per 100 megabytes of data), and it turned out to be extraordinarily useful. We used my phone daily to check weather, share pictures with family, and book hotels. Steve and Eric didn’t buy a Canadian phone plan, so they only used their phones on free wifi at hotels and restaurants, which also worked well because wifi was available just about everywhere.

Toward the end of the first day we made a brief stop in Quebec City’s old town. Our trip plan called for cruising along the north side of the St Lawrence River, and Quebec City was the obvious place to cross. After that (going northeast), there are no bridges crossing the river. We parked on the street in town and grabbed a couple of cold smoothies at a sidewalk cafe. I got stuck with paying for them and was shocked to find they were $7 apiece with tax. OK, never again. This was to be our only stop in a large city for the entire trip, and we were fine with that. We took a quick cruise through the historic Chateau Frontenac for Eric’s benefit, and headed out of town to Beaupre.

Steve’s wife, Carolyn, is from Quebec City, so she did some quick scouting online and booked our first night’s hotel: a ski condo that “sleeps 4” for only $85. Seemed like a bargain until we found out that the only way it could sleep four would be if two people would share a double bed and the other two would share a small pull-out couch, AND that Carolyn booked it for the wrong weekend. Fortunately nobody was renting ski condos in June, so we had no problem re-booking for the same unit on the correct night.

That night we worked out a routine. We’d take turns breaking out a sleeping pad and bag, and sleep on the floor for the night. Steve was the first “floor man.” We also brought earplugs because snoring was definitely going to be a problem. (The photo above is from the nicest motel we booked on the entire trip, the Baie Bleu in Carleton-sur-Mer. Most places weren’t so pleasant. That’s me on the floor, reading a book on Kindle using my iPhone.)

Everything came off the bikes and got carted into the condo, then we started re-charging stuff (helmet intercoms, phones, iPad). Since we had to unpack almost everything every night, the room quickly filled up with our stuff, and we just got used to it. Each one of us would stake out a little sector and spread the stuff out. Then we’d think about where to get dinner, do any bike maintenance (Steve adjusted and lubed his chain almost daily), wash the bugs off the helmet visors, shower, do a little laundry in the sink if we had a motel room, plan the next day, and I’d type up notes on the iPad.

There wasn’t really a lot of spare time with all this going on, so our evenings were generally quiet and we didn’t have time for campfires or nighttime explorations. This evening, for example, we just walked to a nearby restaurant and ordered whatever they had, using our anemic French. After that, it was time to collapse into bed and try to get rested for whatever lay ahead. The trip was finally happening.

Jun 07 2014

Hey dude, where’s my Airstream?

As long-time readers of this blog know, I do occasionally travel without the Airstream in tow. It’s never as comfortable or as easy, but there are places you can’t go with an Airstream and things you can’t do. (It’s hard for me to admit that, but it’s true.)

For the past year or so, my older brother Steve has been talking about a big tour on his BMW motorcycles. We took an initial 500-mile trip on these bikes back in June 2012, with Colin Hyde and our friend Eric, through the Adirondacks. That was a big success, so the next year Steve & I took off to Quebec for a couple of days, and ever since we’ve been talking about a truly awesome adventure around Quebec’s Gaspé peninsula that would take a couple of weeks.

A ride like that isn’t as simple to plan as an Airstream trip. Packing for two weeks on a motorcycle is nearly impossible if you try to anticipate everything. The major trick is to be ready for a wide range of weather conditions. Even in summer, Gaspé’s weather can run anywhere from 50 to 80 degrees, with plenty of rain and wind. We also planned to camp every other night or so, to up the “adventure” quotient and hold down the cost, which means a tent, sleeping bag, foam pad, etc.

Being an adventure-loving nut, my brother plotted numerous side trips up into the mountains where we would be out of reach of cellular service, roadside assistance, restaurants, and virtually all other services. So being reasonably self-sufficient was important, too. We had to carry some food, lots of tools, spare parts, and first aid kit. I also was responsible for trip documentation, so I brought my Nikon D90 with 18-200mm zoom lens, an iPad, and an iPad keyboard.

All of this meant a large load for the BMWs and careful strapping of the gear into waterproof bags. It felt a little like carrying a passenger. I wondered if by the end of the trip we might jettison some gear just to lighten the load, but there was really not one thing in any of our bags that we didn’t absolutely need.

This trip was a sort of tribute to my father, who died this year. In his final years he didn’t have a lot of things he could enjoy, but he did like to live vicariously through us, watching Steve and Eric work on the BMWs, tracking our progress on trips via his computer, and hearing about our plans. He said he really wanted Steve to do this trip, and to be sure to bring Eric (who was like a son to him) and me along. So while none of us needed much pushing to join the adventure, it was nice to know that we could fulfill one of Dad’s last wishes by doing it.

A note on the motorcycles: We are riding two kinds of bikes, the BMW F650GS and the F650 “Dakar”. These bikes are virtually the same except that the Dakar (which I’m riding) has a little more ground clearance, a larger front wheel, and some suspension changes. It’s set up more for off-road than the other two bikes, but all three of them are capable of traveling on dirt and rough roads, as you’ll see in later blog entries. The point of these bikes is not to have a comfortable ride like a big highway cruiser, nor are they true dirt bikes. They are designed to go anywhere. As Steve says, “They aren’t the best at anything, but they are the best at everything.”

If you aren’t familiar with motorcycles, you might be surprised to learn that they have one-cylinder engines. These are called “thumpers” for the vibration they produce. The advantage is that they are simple (which helps with roadside repairs) and fuel efficient. We get 69 MPG with these, which helps quite a bit in Quebec, where gasoline cost about US $5.50 per gallon (CAN$1.42 per liter) this summer.

The next few blog entries will document this trip as it happened. I’m going to pre-date all the entries to the days they actually occurred, all 13 days of the trip, and release them one per day. I hope you enjoy the ride as much as we did!

May 22 2014

All the same, but different

Every voyage is different. Even though we are once again in the Airstream that has been our second home for six years (and our first home for three years before that), and we are once again traveling to the Airstream factory in Jackson Center OH, there is a mental aspect of each trip that is unique.

I used to think that this was by design, a result of my effort to find new things to see and do along routes we had previously traveled, but during preparation for this trip my adventure-planning stalled out and we were left with nothing but the same old route that we had done before. Neither Eleanor nor I were particularly excited about the 2,000 mile drive that faced us, and we delayed our departure a couple of days. We spent the extra time finalizing things at home and enjoying the last few gorgeous dry warm days in Tucson before the summer heat attacked.

Delaying, of course, put more time pressure on us to get to Ohio, and it seemed we were faced with nothing but a tedious slog along the Interstates, lacking time even for a few small detours on the “blue highways” where America keeps its most interesting diversions.

And that has turned out to be true for the most part, but yet something odd has occurred: the trip is unique. There’s a mental aspect I hadn’t anticipated. We are all a year older than the last time we drove this route (and in Emma’s teenage world a year is a huge difference), we have new ideas and views of our travel, different concerns, changing attitudes. The Airstream is the same, the road is the same, but we are just a little bit different—and that changes the flavor of the trip. The Airstream once again shows us that it is a vehicle in more ways that one.

All this is part of the inner view we each carry; often unspoken, but which colors our attitude toward what we experience and how we interact. Practically speaking, we drove from Tucson to a point just west of Albuquerque on Sunday, a total of 480 miles, and on Monday covered about 525 miles Oklahoma City, and then Tuesday a shorter drive of about 200 miles to a quiet state park in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma.

This puts us 1,200 miles closer to Jackson Center, so with 60% of the traveling done, we can slow down and explore a little. Last night in Twin Bridges State Park was an antidote to endless concrete roadways and truck traffic: peaceful, green, shady, and it smells like summer here. We opened all the windows on the Airstream and let the fans blow the warm summer air around. I took a nap and tried to recover a little. Eleanor and Emma took an exploratory walk, and then Eleanor made dinner (with extra for a future night when we might not have a full hookup), and we ate ice cream and generally got comfortable. No high-concept entertainment here, just a little of the relaxation that you can’t often find at home.

I say “you can’t find at home” because we are conveniently cut off from modern distractions. Our location in the state park is shadowed somewhat from radio waves, so we can’t place calls and Internet access is nearly impossible. My phone will send and receive text messages (very slowly, sometimes taking a few hours to send a single message) but that’s enough to keep in touch with the rest of the Alumapalooza team as they work on final details before the event. Otherwise I’ve got no communications with the outside world, and that’s fine after three days of juggling steering wheel and cell phone while dodging trucks. We will be back in the connected world all too soon anyway.

I know someone will ask, so here’s a report: The Airstream is behaving very well. A couple of things are on our bug list, but nothing substantial. The toilet bowl seal has been slowly leaking for the past few months (causing the water in the bowl to drip into the tank), and so we are going to replace it at Airstream. It’s an unpleasant job and the seals are moderately expensive, so I had put it off until a convenient moment. With Super Terry on site, it should be much quicker and easier than if I had attempted it myself at home.

I also have a replacement bath vent fan to install. The handle broke on that part last year, and I’ve been carrying around the replacement since October but in the carport at home there’s no room to get on the roof for a job like that, so it’s actually easier to do while on the road.

Other than that, we just have a single cabinet latch that broke. I’m going to replace it with a magnetic latch because this particular location has always been a problem. That’s easily done with just a shopping trip to a good hardware store—and the tool kit that we always carry.

What’s remarkable is how many things haven’t gone wrong. I did a rough calculation yesterday during my copious hours of freeway driving and it seems that the Airstream has traveled over 120,000 miles at this point. It’s a well-traveled 9-year-old. Of course, we’ve replaced or upgraded almost everything except the body itself at this point.

Likewise, the Mercedes GL320 is purring along. It is about to pass 90,000 miles on the odometer. When I bought it my plan was to accumulate at least 250,000 miles before getting a replacement tow vehicle and now I’m thinking I might bump that up to 300,000.

Today’s trip plan calls for another short drive, into Missouri. After that, well, we’ll see how the experience unfolds and decide as we go.

Mar 11 2014

Taking stock

I remember back in our full-timing days that we used to tell people we had chosen lifestyle over money. In other words, our apparently footloose life was a compromise balanced against career advancement, possessions, community, and the sense of security that a stationary house provides. But this was just a convenient explanation for people who couldn’t understand why we’d sell our house and most of our stuff to go “out on the road.”

In reality, we didn’t give up much at all. I was able to grow Airstream Life slowly while we were traveling, and we had all the possessions we needed (and gained a new understanding of what’s really important), we discovered an entirely new traveling community, and we felt just as as secure in our Airstream as in any home we’ve ever owned. Few people who hadn’t tried the lifestyle would believe that.

However, there was one painful truth. When the business got to a certain point, it became less convenient for me to be traveling around full-time, and I found much greater productivity when I was able to stay home and sit at a desk with reliable high-speed Internet. I’m not saying that I couldn’t continue to travel, but once placed at home, things sort of blossomed, work-wise.

Now, five and a half years after we stopped full-timing, I find that I’ve managed to fill in all those hours that I formerly spent towing the Airstream and exploring national parks, and suddenly the work has taken over. It all came to a head on this trip, as I was trying to tow the Airstream east from Tucson to Sarasota, then run a week-long event, and then tow back to Tucson. There just wasn’t enough time in each day to take care of everything and it was getting frustrating to try.

So after Alumaflamingo, we stopped to take stock of everything. We dropped out of sight for a days, Internet- and phone-free, and spent some time in the driveway of our friends Bill & Wendimere. Think of it as a sort of personal retreat. Time to contemplate toes and get a fresh perspective.

The outcome is that, given all considerations, we should lean back a little toward lifestyle over money. For one thing, that means bringing on more staff to do things that I (and Brett) have been doing for both Airstream Life and R&B Events. It also means looking at everything else we do as a business and as a family, to decide what needs to be pared down so that we can start traveling with less pressure and more spontaneity.

These choices aren’t easy. It’s very much like moving out of a large house and into an Airstream: you have to be decisive and committed to the path or you’ll fail. In the case of downsizing one’s possessions (which we’ve done once before), success is indicated by the amount of “stuff” you stick in storage. If you put a lot of stuff in storage, you haven’t really pared down, you’ve just postponed the decision till later. It’s the same with lifestyle choices. If I offload work but continue to micromanage, I’ll be reminded of the folly of that strategy next year when a lengthy trip is interrupted and made stressful by numerous problems from the office.

It will all work out in the long run, but I also know that none of this can take effect soon enough to help me on the drive home. It’s over 2,000 miles back to home and my “to do” list is embarrassingly lengthy. My goal is to be closer to the footloose mode of travel by next year, albeit perhaps a little bit poorer financially. It’s worth it.

For the return run to Tucson there wasn’t much to do but to put on a smile and drive like a lunatic. The longer we take to get home, the more work piles up. The quicker I get home, the sooner I can start training people to do jobs that lighten my load. So while we aren’t going to get home quite as fast as we left for “Aluma-Zooma” we are going to be back no later than March 16.

Let’s see … what have we done so far? Wednesday March 5, we left the driveway near Kissimmee and headed toward the panhandle. After an uninteresting roadside stop overnight, we pulled into Henderson Beach State Park in Destin, FL and had a couple of days at the beach. We watched the seabirds and walked the white sandy beach. This visit set a pace that I liked: two days of zoom, two days of chill.

So we headed to Austin, TX next. Despite the fact that South by Southwest is going this week, we managed to snag two nights at Pecan Grove (near the epicenter of SXSW). I had a meeting downtown on Sunday night, which turned out to be an adventure in itself thanks to the colorful array of humanity attending SXSW, and another meeting on Monday at a barbecue place. To me, that’s a double-dip because Texas barbecue is pretty good stuff.

We logged a lot more miles on this trip than I had anticipated, so I also spent half of Monday at the local Benz dealership getting routine service done. Good thing the dealers all have fast wifi—it was just as productive a morning as I would have gotten at home, with the added benefit of free pastries and a comfy couch. The GL320, by the way, has 87,000 miles on it now.

Today, Tuesday, we started the trek across west Texas. There isn’t much to be said for the run along I-10 after Fredericksburg, so we made a point of stopping for lunch in Fredericksburg at one of the German restaurants, as a sort of last hurrah before plunging into the nothingness. Fredericksburg was a mob scene, as all the state parks are, because this week is also Spring Break in Texas. We had plans to hit a bunch of state parks on the way home, but that plan got quashed when we tried to camp at South Lllano River tonight and were told “all full”. Ah well, sometimes the footloose life isn’t easy. May we live in interesting times.

Feb 11 2014

Frozen

I have to admit that living in Tucson has changed our perspective on winter a little. All the news stories on TV about major winter storms, freezing temperatures, airport & highway problems, etc. have seemed a bit unreal as we have shivered our way through days where the temperature barely reaches 72 degrees.

But as we were preparing to leave Tucson we heard a few warnings from those who had come west. “Watch out,” they told us. “You’ll run into nasty weather soon enough.”

We figured that by the time we got to the southeast the weather would have changed and I-10 would be a safe route to get to Florida. Indeed, as we drove through New Mexico yesterday under clear skies and warm air, the prospect of bad weather seemed impossible.

And yet, in the afternoon after leaving El Paso (where we stopped for some nice Texas brisket), there was a chill in the air. By the time we reached Van Horn it was distinctly cool, enough to make me shiver in a long-sleeved shirt, and then to our dismay we watched as the temperature dropped into the thirties in a very short time.

By the time we reached Balmorhea State Park in west Texas, it was nearly freezing and the sky had clouded over in a grim and vaguely threatening way. Even though the spring-fed outdoor pools were as warm as bathtubs in this park, it was far too cold to enter without calling it a Polar Bear Dip.

In the morning we found the Airstream covered in ice, and a forecast of “freezing fog and freezing drizzle” along our route. We delayed a while, then hit the road, but I wasn’t happy with conditions as the temperature remained in that dangerous zone of about 27-28 degrees where freezing rain is possible. We stopped for lunch in Ozona, but the weather was unimproved when we moved out again. Finally, with the prospect of making our destination near sunset and a very fine mist on the windshield, I called Alex on the radio and announced we were going to bail out.

Since we only covered 200 miles today, this is going to put us behind schedule, but continuing on wasn’t worth the risk. Fortunately we were near Caverns of Sonora (Sonora, TX) where there’s a pleasant little campground that we’ve visited before. And I needed some time to catch up on work.

So all seemed well, and I was happy with the decision to stop early. The weather outside remained just awful outside but warm enough in the Airstream and we have an electrical hookup too.

Then the next problem cropped up. The water pump started cycling when we weren’t using the water. There’s only one reason for that: a leak in the fresh water plumbing system. I went outside to find water dripping from the bellypan, then started tearing out drawers inside, in an attempt to find the leak. Eventually I isolated it to the fresh water fill. It has sprung a leak. There’s nothing I can do about it (because there’s no convenient shutoff valve) except leave the water pump off when we don’t require water pressure.

This has changed our plan yet again. We were already accepting that tomorrow we might not get on the road until afternoon, when the threat of freezing rain is supposed to abate, and now our first stop will have to be an RV parts store somewhere along I-10. Oh well, at least it’s a 30 minute fix and I have all the tools and caulk here with me. Looks like we will be late getting into Sarasota, but I won’t officially make that call until Thursday, when hopefully the weather will be better and we have had a chance to make up some time.

Tonight we are going to have dinner together here in our trailer, and forget our troubles in the warmth of an Airstream. What else can you do?