Sep 08 2013

Back into the routine

Sometimes the best part of a long drive is the chance to think. The road through the Adirondack State Park region of New York is scenic and winding, but also familiar, so as we meandered through on our way down to the I-90 tollway and Eleanor and Emma became engaged with their books (and in Emma’s case, Nintendo games) I had the chance to explore my own thoughts without much distraction.

At first I was mostly concerned with “feeling out” the Airstream. Sitting for a long time means little surprises can crop up, and although it towed as nicely as ever and my pre-flight checks turned up no problems other than rusted hitch pin (which I replaced), I was on alert for anything unusual. We weren’t even one mile down the road before I realized something odd was up with the braking; the trailer wasn’t stopping as well as normal.

At first I assumed it was rust on the brake discs, but after the rust wore off there was still a feeling that the trailer wasn’t braking as hard as it should. I also got a bit of a sideways push on hard braking, which is sometimes a hint that the Hensley is not aligned perfectly straight. That happens when the hitch is removed and re-installed, but we had already aligned it on the way east in May, so the theory didn’t fit. The hitch alignment is a “set and forget” sort of thing. You don’t need to re-align it unless you remove the hitch head from the trailer, but just to be sure I stopped on level ground and tweaked the adjustment a couple of times.

That didn’t seem to fix the issue. I realized the off-center push would sometimes happen to the left and sometimes to the right, which actually suggests that the hitch head alignment is fine. (A minor off-center push in either direction is normal, caused by uneven road surface when you are coming to a stop.) But I never had any type of push before, so what was up?

After about 80 miles of towing and fiddling, I realized the cause in a “DUH!” moment. The Prodigy brake controller had somehow gotten set to a lower maximum voltage. This reduces the braking action, which allowed the Airstream to push the Mercedes a little, and thus allowed the Hensley to articulate to one side or another in a stop depending on the slope of the ground. I checked and the Prodigy was set to a max 8.8 volts where it should have been set to 10.0 volts at least (on our trailer, yours will likely be different). I have no idea how it got altered, since the setting can’t be changed without the trailer attached, and the Mercedes hasn’t towed the Airstream since early June.

Once I corrected that, we had the normal sensation of the trailer brakes leading the car, which prevents the “Hensley bump” and returned the confident braking feel I’m used to. Other than the brake issue, the Airstream seemed to be perfect, which was great.

That’s not to say we don’t have “squawk list” of things to attend to. The silver beltline trim around the lower body edge has faded to chalky white, and in one place has peeled loose. I’m going to get a big roll of the stuff and replace it (an easy job). The plastic propane tank lid is deteriorating from UV exposure and although it’s only cosmetic damage, I’m tired of looking at it peeling up like a bad sunburn, so I’ll probably replace that too. Both of these items can be picked up at Airstream when we drop in next week. We’ve got two more Hehr window gears that are stripping and I only have one spare, so I will be ordering more of those soon, too.

Lest we die of boredom with the I-90 NY State Thruway slog, we detoured up through Rochester NY and to the shore of Lake Ontario for an overnight stay at Hamlin Beach State Park. It was a well-reviewed park, with manicured green lawns and good access to the shoreline, with nicely forested campsites in several loops. Being the week after Labor Day, it was barely occupied. Since we arrived at sunset, the entrance gate and offices were all closed, but a friendly staffer passing by said to just grab a site and pay in the morning. I appreciated his helpfulness, although we would have done that anyway.

After a long period of sitting, the Airstream did experience some internal discomfort in its black water holding tank. The motion of a couple hundred miles of towing stirred up things inside the tank and the result was a pretty awful smell from the plumbing vent when we stopped. The antidote is easy, a triple dose of enzymatic tank chemical and plenty of water—the travel trailer equivalent of Pepto-Bismol.

Two days of towing has brought us to Lou & Larry’s home near Cleveland. This is the best courtesy parking spot in the entire USA, with full hookups, wifi, level ground, and lots of hospitality from our hosts. We’ve come here many times over the years. This time Larry took me to a real camera store—quite a rarity these days—and then his daughter and our friend Loren took us to Cleveland’s Westside Market.

When we are in cities it’s a big treat for Eleanor to hit the markets like this. There are a few in the USA that always are worth a stop, such as Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, Boston’s Haymarket, and Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market. Cleveland’s Westside Market is definitely on that list.

For me the attraction is both the food and the architecture. I love looking in the glass cases at the abundance and variety of food, but I often spend as much time looking for photographic subjects in the buildings themselves. Westside Market has a nice feature in its tiny upstairs gallery that gives a great view of the hustling activity below. The building looks almost like it was re-purposed from an old train station, like the Musee D’Orsay, and I love just looking at the fantastic arched ceiling.

Eleanor of course scored a few interesting things that will pop up on our table in the next few weeks. I don’t know exactly what she bought; I’d rather be surprised.

For now, we can’t seem to eat much of our own food, since Lou & Larry keep hosting parties every night. Last night we had a birthday party for a relative, with about 14 people attending and countertops buried in tasty stuff, and tonight we’ve got more guests coming for corn on the cob and whatnot. We just try to calmly accept the constant flow of friendly faces, meals, and conversation. This is what you have to put up with sometimes when you courtesy park.

Sep 05 2013

Squeezed on time

We are hitching up this morning.

Those words are always fun to type, because they mean that something new is about to start. On this particular trip we are reprising stretches of road that we have traveled before, departing from summer base camp in Vermont and heading west, but still there’s a little shiver of anticipation. Anything might happen.

Of course along the way we’ll visit favorite stops, but on the NY State Thruway there’s not too much of that. And we are pressed for time (I’ll explain why in a moment), so the major change-up in the trip will be our overnight stop. Gradually, we are visiting every state park and interesting campsite within 10 miles of I-90 and Route 8 (in the Adirondacks), and I like doing that.

The trip was supposed to start a few days ago, and end in early October, for a leisurely 4-5 week tour of the USA on the way back to Arizona, but now it has been squeezed to less than three weeks. For over 3,000 miles that means longer towing days that I’d like, and shorter stops, so some compromises in the trip plan are needed.

The squeeze started when my orthodontist dangled the prospect of having my braces removed eight months earlier than planned. I have an appointment Sept 27 to do the penultimate check, and if all is well, they braces will come off a couple of weeks later. After a year and a half of these things I’m eager to get rid of them, but I do want to say to all “older” people reading this that I am extremely glad I went through the trouble. I plan to keep my teeth for my entire life, and this was a good investment, and a real quality-of-life improvement. Braces aren’t just for kids anymore.

It’s funny, when you are an adult with braces, other adults want to talk about teeth with you. When I was at Alumafandango in Oregon I was approached by two people: the first said, “I’m so glad you’ve gotten braces!” and then proudly showed me her straight and lovely teeth. She was well into her 50s and had just recently gotten her braces off.

The second person was a man in his mid-30s, with a very crooked set of teeth and new braces. His teeth reminded me of mine, before I started orthodontia. He said he’d been embarrassed by his teeth most of his life, and was hoping the braces could correct the serious issues he had. It was a nice feeling to show him my teeth and tell him confidently that he would be happy he made the choice. So now you know what I really did at Alumafandango: I compared teeth with other people.

The second part of the travel squeeze resulted when my brother and I were talking about a grand motorcycle tour we had planned up to the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. Various schedule conflicts made that trip impossible, but then we seized upon the idea of a quick two-day tour up past Quebec City. We checked the weather, checked the BMW motorcycles, checked our calendars, and decided that still there was time to do it. So we launched on Tuesday and came back Wednesday night.

It was a tough trip but a great experience. The weather was completely the opposite of the forecast (cloudy, cold, windy instead of the balmy sunshine we had been promised), and we got rained on for about 30 minutes on the way back through Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. I was chilly much of the time despite wearing six layers on top, and the temperature just kept dropping every hour. Steve’s bike had a clutch cable failure in southern Quebec, which we had to do a “field repair” on in a parking lot, and we lost so much time in Quebec City traffic that we didn’t manage to complete the tour we had planned.

By most measures it was a disaster. But I had a good time anyway. I got to practice a lot of motorcycle skills (like bumper-to-bumper traffic in Quebec City, and riding in the rain), I did my first really long trip ever (over 600 miles), and I had lots of time to experience the zen of motorcycle travel, with the machine thrumming beneath me and the wind whipping by. There were bright spots too, beautiful scenery in the rolling hills and river valleys, the chance to eat poutine with roast beef, a couple of days offline in a land where everyone speaks French, and a peek at the first golden maples of fall up in the far northern regions of Vermont.

It was one of those trips where the telling of the story afterward helps make up for the discomfort of the experience. No doubt the story will get better with time.

So that’s why our Airstream trip has been shortened. We still have no firm trip plan, other than to stop at Lou & Larry’s house in Ohio and probably drop in on Airstream as well. It’s most likely we’ll barrel across the country after Ohio, since the stuff we want to do is mostly out west, in Colorado and Utah. The weather is ideal this time of year for high-altitude outdoors fun in those areas, and I really would like to get back to some of my favorite national parks. Hopefully, we’ll be able to make more out of less, by carefully picking our stops. I’ll be documenting the trip as we go.

Aug 20 2013

Travels this fall

I’m in my last week as TBM. This weekend I’ll be riding a Boeing back to New England, and then driving up to Vermont to regroup with the family.

This year my TBM experience has been a bit of a bomb. I lost too much time to illness, work, Alumafandango, and obligations at the house. I had great plans to go for a tent camping roadtrip, which clearly is not going to happen now. But don’t feel too sorry for me, because in September the entire family will be back in the Airstream and towing west, with a full month to burn if we want to. It will be our last chance for a long leisurely family roadtrip for several months, if not a year, so we are planning to make the most of it.

For the last few weeks Eleanor and I have been thinking about the trip plan, and neither of us has come up with much. Usually we are overcome with ideas of things we want to see and do on a cross-country trip, but after having made this trek something like 10 or 12 times, we are running out of major attractions. (For us, a “major attraction” is not a theme park, but rather a national park, or perhaps a gathering of Airstreams.)

I never thought that would happen. Are we getting too jaded, too experienced, or are we just not trying hard enough to broaden our horizons? I think it may be the latter, so I am re-doubling my efforts to seek out the little things instead of the big ones. To that end, Eleanor and I are planning to follow a pattern we used when full-timing: have a long term destination (like home base) in mind, and then take the trip day by day. This leaves lots of opportunities for the unexpected, and often that’s when the most interesting adventures occur.

The process has already started in a sense. In the past week I have been contacted by three Airstream friends, each of whom—completely coincidentally—is likely to cross our path as we head southwest. Just spending a day or two with each of them is likely to result in some new experiences. Think of it as Airstream cross-pollination. We get a taste of their style, and they get a taste of ours, and together we discover things that individually we might miss. It’s always a good thing.

So when we head out, our route will be affected by the routes of other Airstreamers, and we’ll go places we might have skipped. This is tough on fuel budgets, but to be on the safe side I’m planning for about 3,300 miles of towing, which means a fuel budget of about $1100. Seems like a lot but for a month of roaming I think it’s a bargain.

Eleanor is already thinking about getting the Airstream in shape for the trip. She’ll be cleaning the interior and stocking up on supplies; I’ll be checking all the systems and cleaning the exterior once I’m there. Everything should be in good shape, but after a summer of sitting still amongst the trees and insect life of Vermont, you’d be surprised what little problems can crop up. I’ve learned to start checking at least a week before any major trip, just in case I find a problem that requires a parts order or a trip to the local RV service center.

The Safari, by the way, will celebrate its eighth year on the road with us in October. I have lost track of the miles it has traveled, but it is certainly above 100,000. I can’t think of any other purchase we have ever made that has given us such a great return, in terms of life experiences and pleasure. When it’s not our home on the road, it’s a great guest house. People talk about houses as “investments,” and RVs are just “depreciating assets” but I have to disagree. Our house is worth about 2/3 of what we paid for it (not counting the cash dumped into fixing it up), and it costs many times more to keep running than our Airstream. It’s a nice house, but in the end it’s just a house. Our Airstream is probably worth about half of what we paid for it, but it has changed our lives and enriched us in ways we can hardly enumerate.

So by my accounting, the Airstream is the bigger bargain by far, and we will once again prove that in our month-long saga with our recently-minted teenager. She still wants to spend time with her parents, and I think some of the credit for that can be given to the Airstream as well. Going out this fall will remind us all of those precious years (2005-2008) that we spent full-timing with Emma, and I bet we’ll all want to recreate a little of that magic as we roam westward. I hope so.

Thinking of it that way, I realize it doesn’t really matter where we stop along the way. The memorable moments will happen. We just have to get out there and let them come to us, with our Airstream to keep us comfortable along the way.

Jul 03 2013

I break for motorcycling

There wasn’t much time to catch up on life after we returned from Europe, and the frequent rain in Vermont didn’t help. You might think that having a few rain days would help office productivity, since the distraction of a sunny day at the lake wasn’t tempting me away from the laptop, but really I wasn’t in the mood to get back to heavy desk work and the rain just made me want to stay in bed in the Airstream.

This has been one of those cold Junes, with lots of thunderstorms and humidity. Among other things, it put a serious damper on my plans to go motorcycle touring, but then over the weekend we had a little break. Saturday morning we had a few hours of decent weather, and so the local “gang” got together, four of us (three BMWs and a Honda). Not willing to risk a long ride lest the weather change again, we rode down to Vergennes (the smallest city in Vermont, one mile square) and got breakfast at the local cafe.

Sunday was the only really good weather day, and coincidentally the day of a charity ride to benefit an animal shelter. We joined up with a few dozen other avid Vermont motorcyclists (a category which implies people of strong character since motorcycling in Vermont’s climate requires patience and resilience) at Cycleworks in New Haven VT and went on a really nice tour of about 95 miles through Addison County.

Now, I grew up in this area and have spent part of almost every year of my life around here, and still this tour brought me on some roads that I’ve hardly ever seen. It reminded me of the beauty of the Vermont countryside–the roads that don’t go conveniently in a straight line, bringing you past the old farmhouse architecture, the rolling green hills and fields, and much more if you will only take the time to drive them. If it weren’t for this charity ride I probably wouldn’t have gotten out to see all of that.

At this point I had my eye on my impending trip to Tucson. Whatever I needed to do in Vermont had to get done quickly (and while the rain was paused). In the afternoon following the ride, I got up on the roof of the Airstream to clean off all the organic debris that had covered it in the past four weeks.

There was a lot, even more than we usually get, thanks to some tree that flowered extensively and dropped thousands of buds on the roof. In the weeks of June rain, all of those flowers decayed to brown mulch, mixed with sticks from the locust tree, and it was really a mess up on the Airstream’s roof.

Usually this job gets done at the end of the summer, just before we leave, but this year I’ll be doing it twice. It’s really not comfortable getting up on the roof when it is wet and covered with decaying plant matter. I take some precautions to avoid slipping off, but still it feels dangerous with all the slippery gunk. At the Airstream factory they have a neat harness rig from the ceiling that keeps service center workers from falling off roofs. I wish I had a Willy Wonka skyhook here.

Lately we’ve had a strange problem with the water pump in the Airstream. It will sometimes refuse to shut off after we’ve run the water. Rather than stopping automatically when the pipes are pressurized it continues to run at its lowest level, making a sort of perpetual moaning noise. We thought at first that the pump’s shutoff switch was going bad, but after a while I traced the problem to air trapped in the water pipes. The pump can’t get the water pressure up if there is air in the line (because air is very compressible), so it keeps trying forever.

Running the pump briefly with all faucets open (including the shower, outside shower, and toilet sprayer) lets the air out and cures the issue for a while but after a few days it recurs. At this point I’m thinking the problem is in one of the fixtures, perhaps the shower valve, letting air in and somehow trapping it, but I haven’t managed to narrow down which one is the culprit yet. In any case, the pump itself seems to be fine. I checked it for leaks last week.

That’s about as exciting as it got this week. I took care of a few other small things, packed my bag, and headed to the airport on Tuesday. Vermont is east of me now, along with E&E, and the next phase of summer begins with the new blog post. Temporary Bachelor Man is coming up!

Jun 24 2013

Technology for Europe

In the last blog I promised to give a few tech tips for those travelers in Europe. This is all circa June 2013, and with the fast pace of technology I can’t guarantee that any of this will be useful in six months.

During the 12 day trip I had to stay in daily contact with my co-workers while visiting three countries. Since I’m already regularly a “virtual worker”, I’ve already got all of the collaborative online tools that I need in place (shared calendars, documents, Dropbox, etc), so I’m not going to talk about those specifically.

Because we were going to be moving almost every day, and luggage would often be stored in a rental car, I didn’t want to risk my expensive laptop, so I brought an iPad with a Logitech keyboard. Not only is the iPad much cheaper to replace, it’s less fragile, smaller to pack and much lighter, and can be quickly recharged in the hotel room or car. The keyboard nests with it to create an aluminum shell, too, so I could just toss it in my luggage and not worry about breaking the screen. The iPad solution turned out to be a great move, so I recommend it to anyone who can do without their laptop for a while.

Before the trip I used the iPad on shorter domestic trips a few times to verify that it had all the apps I needed. For insurance, I installed a copy of LogMeIn and left my laptop on & connected to the Internet at home so I could access the laptop in an emergency.

I also brought two iPhones. The iPhone 5 model A-1429 from Verizon comes unlocked, works on CDMA and GSM networks, and can accept a European SIM card to give me an in-country phone number and avoid extravagant roaming charges. It’s a “world phone,” and I highly recommend it. I bought a German pre-paid SIM from Lebara because it offered ridiculously cheap calls to the USA at $0.01 per minute (plus $0.15 per call). With this we were able to make calls back home for as long as we wanted.

One day at the rally, I had an hour-long call with Brett about business stuff, and paced around the rally field while I was talking. I didn’t realize people were watching, but later some folks came up to Eleanor and asked if we had an emergency, since it had to be serious business for me to pay for an international call that long! In reality, that call cost me 75 cents. If you are paying $1-2 per minute to call home from major European countries, you’re getting ripped off.

The Lebara SIM can be bought in “dm” stores (which are sort of like a CVS) along with a ‘top-up’ card for extra airtime. I bought €20 and used €9.90 of the credit to activate a 500mb data plan on the prepaid SIM card. The remainder lasted me for the entire trip with plenty to spare.

Note the most European SIM cards will come with a PIN code that has to be entered to “unlock” the SIM each time the phone is switched on, so don’t throw away the card that comes with the SIM! The PIN # is printed on it. Be sure to bring along a paper clip so you can remove the tray to swap SIMs.

The iPhone 4 I brought was deactivated and can’t work on European GSM networks anyway, so it was only along as a backup to use when we had wifi, and as a GPS. (A deactivated iPhone is basically an iPod.) I pre-loaded it with a GPS app and local maps for Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. This would have been great but I picked the wrong GPS app (Skobbler) and it was abominable. My advice: just get the GPS from the rental car agency.

The iPhone 5, being the only device that could get online via cellular, was the “hotspot” for the other two devices as needed.

The iPad and iPhones were all loaded with:
— copies of all the electronic documents we had received (airline, trip insurance, hotel confirmations) and a few other things like our US Passports and local subway maps. Sensitive information was stored in an encrypted file using mSecure app.
— Genius Scan: I used this to ‘scan’ all the receipts so I could chuck them daily instead of accumulating paper. This amounted to over 40 receipts by the end of the trip.
— WordPress app: I wrote the blog from the iPad but occasionally made quick edits from the iPhone.
— Skype app: This is a great app but we had no luck using it when we needed it. In Italy the calls were very poor quality due to the hotel’s WiFi, and in Switzerland the hotel blocked Skype so the calls wouldn’t go through at all. When we got skunked we fell back on email and AOL Instant Messenger.
— all the booked hotels and flight information on a shared calendar so that all three devices would be synchronized whenever we got to a hotel and updated our itinerary. Since we were researching and booking hotels as we went, this was very useful later when we said “Now, where are we going today?” and needed to look up the hotel info. One day we forgot to update the calendar with the hotel’s address and couldn’t find the hotel for half an hour.
— various other useful apps: Dropbox, Pages, Numbers, Hotels.com, my bank’s app, Google Translate, Facebook, Twitter, and Weather Channel. Not so useful: Yelp. There just weren’t enough reviews in the local areas for it to be helpful and we found the database to be riddled with errors in Italy.

Part of my goal was to have the absolute minimum number of cords to untangle at the end of the day, so everything charged off the same USB cord with various adapters to connect to iPad, iPhone 4 & 5, Logitech keyboard, European plugs, and car 12-volt outlet. Only the Nikon and Eleanor’s camera required separate cords or chargers.

I also brought specialized connectors, including Apple’s 30-pin-to-Lightning adapter for the iPhone 5, a 30-pin-to-HDMI adapter so I could give a presentation from the iPad, and a micro-USB adapter so that the Logitech keyboard could be recharged. By the way, you can transfer photos from your iPhone to your iPad using the proper connectors and a USB cable.

Traveling to different countries in a short time span presented a particular problem. The Lebara SIM would allow roaming in Switzerland and Italy, but not data. Data was really what I needed most. Also, the cost of calls to the USA soared from a penny a minute to as much as EU1.49 per minute (about $2), so effectively my German SIM became useless once we crossed the border. I could have bought Swiss and Italian SIMs but in those countries I still couldn’t find a good deal on calls to the USA and it just wasn’t worth it to get new SIMs for only a day or two of use, so I fell back on hotel wifi instead.

If you do plan to buy SIMs in various countries, research them before you leave home but buy them when you arrive. You can buy them in advance from various companies at massively inflated prices, but there’s no reason to do that. You can easily pick them up at the cellular network’s own outlets (which are located in virtually every city and large town), as well as grocery stores, pharmacies, and tobacco stands just about anywhere.

Each country has several competing networks so it takes a bit of research to find the ones that offer the deal you need. You’re looking for a prepaid or “rechargeable” plan. Data and voice are often sold separately, and the tariffs can be confusing. Some countries require registration with a passport when you buy the SIM, but that’s no big deal as long as a local address isn’t required. A requirement for a local credit card can sometimes be bypassed simply by purchasing the SIMs with cash in a local store. Read the fine print when doing your research. Google Translate is a big help here.

If you have an iPhone 5 you’ve got a special challenge. This phone requires a ‘nano SIM’ which is smaller than what are typically offered. The easiest thing to do is buy a SIM cutter than will chop a standard micro-SIM down to nano size (if you do it correctly the SIM will still work), and bring the cutter with you to trim the SIMs you buy.

Hotel wifi is unpredictable. As I’ve noted, sometimes certain services will be blocked. Don’t count on Skype or any streaming service such as Netflix or Facetime. Some connections are tediously slow. More annoyingly, many hotels charge a daily (or even hourly) fee to use their Internet connection and this can really add up, often €9-20 per day. We looked for hotels with free wifi, free breakfast, and free parking since these three items will typically add €50-60 per day to the bill, but we usually only got two out of three. This information is usually listed in the details provided by major online booking services, and it’s worth checking the reviews by prior hotel guests to see if they thought the Internet service was usable.

Even “free” public wifi (such as at a coffee shop or in a city center) often requires you to register and receive a text message (SMS) on your phone with a passcode. All three places outside Germany where I found “free public wifi” required me to have an in-country phone number, which I couldn’t supply, so I couldn’t use the wifi.

The iPhones provided us with two pocket cameras but we most often used dedicated cameras, one Canon digicam and my Nikon D90. I brought three lenses for the Nikon but only used two of them: the utility Nikkor 18-200 zoom with a polarizer, and the Tamron 10-24mm ultra-wide for interior shots. The cameras both had 16gb memory cards so we would have huge photo storage capacity (over 2,000 JPG high-quality photos) and so wouldn’t have to worry about downloading the pictures and clearing the card during the trip. If I were going to be out longer I’d probably look into either a way to backup the card via Dropbox or I’d copy the photos to the iPad just in case the camera was lost.

Before going you may want to check with your bank to see if they offer a replacement VISA/Mastercard with a European SIM embedded in it. Supposedly some European establishments now have card machines that require this SIM, so I had one of my cards upgraded, but in practice we never found any store that required it. Everyone took American Express except those restaurants that only accepted cash.

Beware of machines that claim to accept credit cards, like automated train or bus ticket machines, parking garages, toll booths, etc. We found that many of them would refuse our cards (even the one with the SIM in it) without explanation.

Personally, I’d just be sure to have two working ATM cards so you can get local currency easily without exchange fees. By picking up cash only as we needed it, we ended the trip with about 3.80 in Swiss francs and ten Euros, so we lost very little to exchange fees when we turned in the cash at the airport on our last day.

Got questions or more info? Go ahead and put them in the comments. Hope this helps.