Nov 24 2010

Landed

We’ve landed in Tucson, and thus the Airstream has returned to home base after seven months of travel. It is now tucked away in its carport, getting a well deserved rest after a total voyage of nearly 9,000 towing miles. Likewise, the Mercedes is chillin’, with 14,800 new miles added to its odometer since we left in May.

There are a lot of ways I could measure this trip, but the photo at right shows my favorite. Emma has grown an inch and a quarter, as marked on the door jamb of our Airstream bedroom. By any measure, it has been a good period of growth for all of us.

The last phase of our trip was unremarkable by design. We basically bolted 350 miles from Padre Island to central Texas, where we camped overnight at the Caverns of Sonora’s little campground (W/E, $15). If you are driving through central Texas on I-10, there are few options for overnight stays, and many of them are of the down-and-out variety. So Caverns of Sonora provides a very welcome oasis just about five miles off the highway. The big attraction is of course the exceptionally well-decorated caverns, but Emma thought the peacocks that roam the campground were pretty worthy too.

Our next day was another 350 miles, this time through west Texas and over to Las Cruces. It was a stunningly beautiful fall day in west Texas, with azure blue skies and temperatures of around 78-80 degrees, but with one unfortunate aspect for towing: a strong headwind. Many times I am asked, “Does that Mercedes really pull that big trailer OK?” and the followup question is often “Well, how about in the mountains?” or “Yeah, but wait until you cross the Rockies!” When people say such things I know that they aren’t really experienced at towing, because if they were they’d know that the true challenge of a tow vehicle is not the occasional mountain pass, but the long day spent bucking a 25-knot headwind. That’s when you find out who has the chops.

See, you can almost always get up a hill one way or another. You might have to go slower, or stop to let the engine cool off, but it’s very rare to find a hill so steep that you can’t climb it with any decent tow vehicle. (We have never had an overheating problem with the Mercedes, but we did with the Nissan Armada. The Mercedes does high-elevation climbs much better, mostly because of the torquey turbodiesel, which isn’t affected by the thinner air at altitude.) And hills are generally short. In Colorado you can find a few 6-8% grades that run for eight miles, and in Wyoming there’s the Teton Pass at 10%, but that’s about as bad as it gets.

In contrast, imagine trying to pull a trailer through a strong headwind for 350 miles. That’s a whole different ballgame. If your tow vehicle struggles from lack of power, or your trailer is being tossed around by gusty winds, or if you’re not hitched up properly, you’ll feel that misery for six hours. That makes a 20 minute hill climb in the Rockies look like a happy memory.

You’ll run into that a lot when heading west through the central states. I-90 through South Dakota, I-80 through Nebraska, I-70 through Kansas, I-40 through Oklahoma and Texas, or I-10/20 through Texas. We’ve hit it in all of those locations. The car can do it, and our ride is safe & comfortable, but fuel economy suffers horribly. Sometimes we just stop for the night and try again the next day.

Our headwind on I-10 was pretty stiff. I know because our fuel economy plummeted, from 13.5 MPG the previous day to a dismal 10.3 MPG. Keep in mind that your speed relative to the air (airspeed) is what matters to your fuel economy, not the weight or length of the trailer. If you normally tow at 65 MPH in calm wind conditions, a 25-knot headwind results in drag equivalent to towing at 90 MPH. Because air resistance (drag) increases in proportion to the square of your airspeed, a headwind like that has a massive impact.

In our case, the wind-induced penalty was about 30% of our fuel economy. At one point we were getting just 9.7 MPG, the absolute worst I have ever seen from this vehicle. But in west Texas, the options for stopping overnight are somewhat limited, and it didn’t look like the wind was going to abate much in the coming day. So we plowed on. By the time we reached the brutish traffic of El Paso, the wind had died down and it was relatively smooth sailing up to Las Cruces.

[By the way, the center display in the photo above deserves some explanation. The display shows the distance and travel time since our last fuel stop (87 miles, 1 hour, 25 minutes), our average speed (61 MPH), our fuel economy average since last fuel stop (9.7, ugh), the outside air temp and the cruise control setting (65 MPH). I normally tow a little slower but the speed limit was 80 MPH and I didn’t want to leave a huge differential between us and the rest of the NASCAR traffic. The car tows very nicely in 7th gear at about 2200 RPM at that speed.]

After this expensive day of driving, we decided to cheap out and try parking at the Cracker Barrel again. Actually, we stayed there in the hopes that this one would not catch on fire, thus proving that our experience in Louisiana was a fluke. It didn’t, so we’re in the clear, jinx-wise.

Our final stop before parking the Airstream was the truck wash in Tucson. I was amazed at how much salt and gunk was still on the trailer after our rinse-down in Corpus Christi. Add to that the accumulated bug guts of an 1,100 mile high-speed tow, and you can imagine how the Airstream looked. It deserved a good bath before we put it away, and now it looks shiny and ready for another adventure.

Oct 14 2010

Green Cove Springs, FL

Technically we are in St Augustine, but right on the western edge at the banks of the St Johns River. Just across the river is Green Cove Springs, a quiet small city that happens to be the official mailing address of Airstream Life magazine. I am often asked by people who call on the phone, “How do you like it in Green Cove Springs?” but we’ve only been here once before, and that was for just a few hours. We receive our mail here, and we’re incorporated here, but until this visit it has been just another stop along the road.

It has been a good stop. Eleanor has been making maximum use of our relatively rare full hookup campsite, by making special meals. This means we eat well but also periodically Eleanor has to go out to find unusual ingredients, like apple brandy, which apparently must go into a dish she is preparing. Apple brandy was not available at any of the local stores (on the west side of I-95) so she made a compromise version with a reduction of apple cider and cognac. The sauces required for this dish are now done, but we won’t get to eat the actual meal until Friday, when we will be courtesy parked in Haines City.

I was able to get our tow vehicle serviced, and I’m very glad I did. The dealer in Jacksonville had the car in for its “day of beauty” all of Wednesday, and replaced all four tires, aligned the wheels, flushed the transmission, replaced a blown fuse, and washed it. Although the price of the tires still has me reeling, I have to admit that the car once again drives like new. The worn tires were making a lot of noise and the roadhandling was definitely not as good as it was, plus it was pulling right a little. It may have been my imagination, but I also thought the transmission was not shifting quite as smoothly as it should, with occasional subtle balks and flares. I did a 19 mile test drive on the way back from the dealership and everything feels perfect again.

We had a surprise visit yesterday from a group of manatees, at the Trout Creek that borders the campground. Manatees need warm water, and so in the fall and winter they swim upstream from the salty ocean to fresh rivers where the water never drops below 72 degrees. A group of about eight manatees showed up with a calf, and slowly swam back and forth in Trout Creek past the docks where they made a nice spectacle for the people sitting on the back deck of the main campground building.

Manatees are wonderful mammals that live very placid lives, munching on green undersea vegetation and floating through the water with no apparent goals in life. Little wonder they are often called “sea cows” — they’re about the same weight and definitely have bovine characteristics to their personalities. Their skin is like an elephant’s, and they can grow to be very large and heavy, so although they are quite benign they are also a bit startling when you encounter them while snorkeling.

Their very nature of calmness and lack of fear works against manatees. The big killer of manatees is boat propellers, and it is easy to spot a manatee with a set of slashing white scars along its body from a close encounter with a turning propeller. There are lots of regulations in place designed to prevent manatee-boat collisions but they can be difficult to avoid, especially since they are often interested in checking out what the humans are up to.

We are leaving this site today but will be returning in a couple of weeks. One piece of bureaucratic business remains unfinished, and until a certain official piece of paper arrives I can’t complete it. Coming back here will be a detour from our planned route, but I don’t mind terribly since the campground has been pleasant and Green Cove Springs now feels like a symbolic kind of home.

Oct 11 2010

On the road to St. Augustine, FL

Maintenance complete (or so we thought), we pushed onward through South Carolina. Since the wheels had all been removed, it was incumbent on me to stop and check the lug nut torque a few times as we went. I typically do this around 15 miles, 50 miles, and 100 miles, although it doesn’t hurt to check a little more frequently.

That’s when another maintenance issue cropped up. We’ve had these crummy “capped” lug nuts on the trailer forever (pictured at right). They are the cheap-o version. Instead of being solid metal, they have a thin chrome cap over a steel nut, sort of a “falsie.” The problem with this type is that eventually the chrome cap can loosen and even come off. Super Terry had pointed this out as a potential problem, and honestly I have been meaning to replace all of them for years but just never got around to it.

So of course, about 15 miles out in a lonely piece of rural North Carolina, one of the caps started spinning loose, meaning that I couldn’t properly torque the nut. Now, being a prepared sort of Airstreamer, I carry 4 spare lug nuts, the solid kind. I took them out and discovered that they require a 13/16″ socket, but the largest socket I had is 3/4″. So I couldn’t install them.

After pondering the situation and trying a few tricks (like the car’s lug nut wrench) the ultimate solution was simply to tow to the nearest auto parts store, where I bought the appropriate socket and 20 more of the solid chromed metal 13/16″ lug nuts. I didn’t want to take all the wheels off right there to replace all the nuts, so I installed just the one I needed and tossed the rest in the storage compartment for future use. My idea was to replace them one wheel at a time whenever a wheel needed removing, but of course about 150 miles later when I checked the nuts at the end of the day I found another loose one. So now I have 22 nuts that require a 3/4″ socket, and two that require a 13/16″ socket, which makes it much more amusing to watch me checking the nuts.

The other maintenance item is the tires on the Mercedes. I’ve been watching them carefully for a long time, and was hoping that they’d last until we got back to Tucson. At 29,000 miles, when we had the last dealer service, they looked OK, but now at 33,500 miles it is clear that they need to go. The front end of the car is somewhat out of alignment, a fact that was revealed only in the past week when the right front and left front tires started showing excess wear at the outer edge. I could rotate the tires one more time (front to back) and probably gain another 1,000 or 2,000 miles, but I don’t care to push them quite that far. Towing, as you know, puts high stresses on tires. The last time I tried to stretch a tire (on the Nissan Armada) we had a blowout at low speed. So a set of tires and an alignment are part of this week’s plan.

Our base of operations for the next few days will be St. Augustine, FL. Normally we stay over on the coast, but this time I’ve got obligations in Green Cove Springs, which is west of St. Augustine, so I’ve selected a rustic old campground near the St John’s River.

We have all the little cues that tell us we are Florida. It’s balmy and humid. Everything is green with life, and there’s a particular scent in the breeze that speaks of ocean salt, inland swamps, and natural decay. Spanish Moss hangs from every tree, and grayish sandy soil is underfoot. Eleanor even managed to get bitten by a red ant within 10 minutes of arrival. Ah, yes, Florida. I love it here but you’ve got to watch out — there are more biting and stinging things here than Arizona, by far.

The campground is many decades old. It is a classic piece of “old Florida”: well shaded, unpretentious to a fault, and straddling the line between marginally maintained and moldering neglect. There are ducks and chickens and feral cats all over the place. The river is alive with water birds and fish (and probably alligators). We like it.

The campground is under threat of development, but not any time soon. The owners, who have run various businesses on the property for 80 years, announced in 2005 that they were going to sell the whole thing for condominiums, but so far nothing has happened, so we should be fine for the rest of this week, while we take care of business.

Sep 27 2010

StarFest 2010

It has been cars, cars, cars all weekend. We’ve been attending StarFest 2010 in Winchester VA, which is the annual national event of the Mercedes Benz Club of America.

It’s quite different from the Airstream events we normally attend. Obviously the attendees stay in a hotel rather than in their vehicles. But beyond that, the emphasis is different. Airstreamers tend to focus more on the community of people than the trailers. This crowd is interested in the cars more than anything else: driving them, maintaining them, showing them, and talking about them — especially the exotic, rare, or old models, like the award-winning red 300SL pictured at right.

There was some passing interest in the Airstream, but mostly it was regarded as an amusing curiosity, and again the attention was mostly paid to the GL320 that towed it. At the Concours Award Banquet on Saturday night, I was interrogated by my fellow table-mates about its performance. They appeared to be suitably impressed.

As with the Airstreamers, the crowd was mostly older, but there was a small contingent of young guys who all operated independent shops specializing in 1960-1993 (approx). Mercedes cars — the “affordable classics.” You can still easily find a lot of great old Mercedes cars in good operating condition (cosmetically imperfect) for very reasonable prices, and guys like these will help you keep them on the road forever. I went to a talk given by representatives of the MB Classic Center, and they emphasized that Mercedes intends to keep producing parts to keep old cars on the road, safe and reliable, for decades to come.

There were other interesting talks that I attended (and I got a few ideas for next year’s Alumapalooza, too!) But the big event of Saturday was the Concours show, where we had excellent examples of Mercedes vehicles from seven decades. On Sunday, we dropped in on the Autocross for the morning and watched some of the hotter cars zip around a complex and tight little course. We did the Defensive Driving course again, just for practice.

Wondering why there’s a Smart car in the picture at right? It’s a Daimler product and some Mercedes enthusiasts own them. It’s not for me, but they are awfully cute and I bet this one would have done well on the Autocross if the owner was willing to give it try.

I was pleasantly surprised by Winchester. The “historic downtown” (a phrase horribly abused by some local chambers of commerce) is truly historic. There’s a ton of great Colonial architecture remaining in town, centered on a handsome and vibrant brick pedestrian mall. The city reportedly changed hands 71 times during the Civil War, and the Court House held both northern and southern prisoners. You can still see their graffitti on the interior walls of the building, upstairs.

While a few buildings are in obvious distress, the majority of the downtown is well restored and housing robust businesses. Eleanor and Emma were intrigued by the bead shop, while I was astonished to find an independent old-fashioned third-generation clothing store, the kind you never see in downtowns anymore. The architecture is spectacular, with historic brick buildings, stone buildings, and even a log building. Winchester’s center has a lot going for it.

We have now relocated the Airstream to Falls Church VA, where E&E are courtesy parking with Bobby, Danine, and Elise. We first stayed with them in 2007, then they stayed with us in Tucson in February 2008, and now it’s our turn again in 2010. But I am up in northern New Jersey for an overnight, doing some business, so I’m once again in a hotel. I’ll rejoin the group on Tuesday night and we’ll get back to the serious business of Airstreaming.

Apr 08 2010

Ingo Vision backup camera

If you’re not already sweating with anticipation, just from the title of this blog post, you may wish to tune out. This is a geek session.

I got my IngoVision backup camera installed yesterday, along with the Mid-City Engineering interface module for the Mercedes COMAND unit (that’s the factory-supplied “all in one” box for the radio/CD/DVD/nav/Bluetooth/iPod etc.). The result has been exactly what I was hoping for — a good, clear, full-color rear view while towing.

Here’s how it attaches to the car. The Ingo “PremiumCam” kit includes a very tough external connector which we mounted on a gusset attached to the receiver hitch. It looks just like a miniature version of the 7-way connector for the Airstream.

The rest of the kit (left, click for larger view) includes a coiled cable that runs between the Airstream and the Mercedes, a second plug to mount on the tongue of the Airstream, and a long run of cable that will go to the back of the Airstream. The camera will mount on the bumper compartment lid at the back of the Airstream.

Inside the car, the Mid-City VIM164p interface box was attached to the back of the COMAND unit, and the camera cable was connected to the COMAND’s backup camera input. That part of the installation is completely invisible, since it is all hidden inside the dashboard.

In the picture above at left, you can see all the cables and camera plugged into the Mercedes for a test, since I haven’t yet put it on the Airstream. Ingo mounted the Airstream plug on his propane tank cover, which is very slick and looks like a factory design. I’m mounting mine on the flagpole holder, which is bolted to the electric jack. The cable will run in a protected loom under the bellypan, so it should be a quick installation with some ties and rivets.

Up front, the interface module allows the camera to be tied into the COMAND system as if it were OEM equipment. I just press one button on the steering wheel and there’s the picture from behind the Airstream. It’s a little stretched, probably due to the difference in aspect ratio between the Ingo-supplied screen and the Mercedes screen, but it looks good.

The camera also automatically activates when in reverse. The nagging text you see at the top of the screen is superimposed by the Mercedes COMAND unit, not the Ingo system.

If you have a truck or SUV with more interior space, and don’t go for the fancy integrated nav screen deal that I did, you can get the same camera system for a pretty reasonable price. The IngoVision PremiumCam (two-camera) system runs $599. The BaseCam (one camera) system is $399. That gets you everything you need including the screen. Installation can be DIY, or you can bring it to a local automotive electronics store and have them do it in a couple of hours.

I think this will qualify as a legitimate safety improvement. I’ve seen a lot of Airstreams with backup cameras (usually older models and Classic motorhomes), which suggests to me that at one time it was probably a factory option. Well, those cameras have come a long way since then — they’re smaller, cheaper, and have color, “night vision,” and better resolution. I think it’s time Airstream consider bringing back this option as a way to improve safety for owners.

I can’t wait to get try this out on the road. My first chance will probably be in May when we shove off for the big summer/fall trip. I’ll report on our experiences with it once we get moving.