Dec 12 2010

Why we picked this home base

After we sold our home in Vermont and started traveling full-time, we had the entire country to consider as a future residence. We browsed and briefly lived in something like 46 states before we made our choice. So it’s understandable that one of questions we get asked most frequently is “Why did you pick Tucson?”

Really, the criteria was rather mundane: we liked the desert climate (good for SAD and good for allergies), the cost of living is reasonable, we could buy a “lock and leave” house that wouldn’t need winterizing or constant air conditioning while we were gone, there’s year-round outdoor activity for adults and children, and Tucson has everything we need. Having spent most of my life in rural country, I appreciate the convenience of living in a city even though it’s not as quiet as what I’m used to.

We don’t pretend that our criteria makes sense for anyone else, so after answering this question I am always quick to point out that it’s really up to everyone to figure out what’s important to them. I probably don’t need to do that, since most of the folks asking the question are themselves frequent travelers and they tend to be very independent. Of all the people who have asked the question, none of them have settled here. They’ve all found their own favorite places.

But we like southern Arizona a lot, especially for the diversity of things to do in the area. Take Saturday, for example. We decided that our mission would be to browse the Asian food markets in town. Tucson doesn’t have nearly the Asian population of the California cities, but enough that we can easily find the exotic ingredients that Eleanor likes to use occasionally in her cooking. We googled up a few likely spots and read the online reviews (mostly useless, as usual), and eventually came up with a list of three targets. Right there, that’s a win — because in many other cities we’d just be plain out of luck. I like the fact that I can find almost anything here.

Having just put some money into the Mercedes 300D for front end work last week, I wanted to give it a run. So we loaded up into the “Stuttgart Taxi” and cruised to our first stop, the Lee Lee Supermart in northwest Tucson. This place tries to cover most of the major countries of far east Asia, so you’ll find Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, etc., all through the store.

I’m always intrigued with the strange and interesting new foods and ingredients in Asian markets. It’s a temptation to start buying a little of everything, just to try it out. But since we had three markets on our program for the day (two Asian and one “other”), we tried to be moderate in our choices. I could easily see us filling the roomy trunk of the Stuttgart Taxi with a pile of groceries worth more than the car itself.

Another fun part of this type of shopping is finding truly odd or confusing packaging. There are things both lost and gained in translation from Asian languages, and sometimes the results can be laughable. This keeps both adults and kids entertained. Our first find was “Vermont Curry,” as seen here. Now, I’m from Vermont, and I can tell you that “Vermont” and “curry” go together about as well as “Kansas Lobster.” These days Vermont actually has a few ethnic restaurants, thanks to an increasingly diverse population, but as a child I remember that pizza was about as exotic as it got. If there were such a thing as Vermont Curry, it would probably have maple syrup in it.

Another minor oddity was the House Of Steamed Potato brand kimchi crackers. Apparently this is a major brand in China, with several flavors. I’m sure the name makes sense in Chinese, and I’m sympathetic to the problem of translation. I wouldn’t want to try to translate “Ritz crackers” or “Count Chocula” to Chinese.

But our favorite was found at our second stop, the Grantstone Supermarket: Mang Gong cakes. Nothing odd here, until you look closely at the bottom of the package. It reads, “The False Packing.” It’s hard for an American to make any sense out of that. Given the volume of illegal Asian product knock-offs, is this simply a pre-emptive attempt to admit that these are not real Mang Gong cakes? Perhaps in truth the package contains Nike sneakers.

Sometimes you can figure these things out by playing with synonyms of the words. For example, could “false” be an attempt to say “low-cal”? Or perhaps “imitation,” “see-through,” “empty,” or “absent”? Likewise, “packing” could mean “packaging,” or “wrapper”? Maybe this is an attempt to advertise the see-through outer wrap, or to suggest that this has a decorative wrapper for gift-giving. We need a good Chinese translator to help figure this one out.

It’s amazing that we managed to kill most of a day browsing Asian markets, but we did. We are, as I’ve said before, easily amused. I suppose the prospect of eating whatever Eleanor whipped up with the ingredients was helpful in keeping our patience in check too. By 3 p.m. we were wrapping up and heading home with the trunk only 1/4 full of groceries (fortunately for the budget).

There was just one more stop to make, at the Arizona Petroleum depot off 22nd Street, for biodiesel. I have been wanting to run some biodiesel in the Taxi, since it has an “old tech” engine and can eat almost any type of oil. A little biodiesel helps clean out the fuel lines since it has higher solvency properties than dino diesel. This pump dispenses B5, B20 and B99 (5%, 20%, and 99% biodiesel respectively) for $3.25 per gallon, which is about in line with local diesel prices at conventional fuel stations in Tucson right now.

I bought five gallons of B99 to mix with the 15 gallons of dino diesel in the tank. It made the exhaust smell like a restaurant with a fryolator, which is actually quite pleasant. Most cars I have smelt running B99 exclusively have exhaust reminiscent of french fries, and instead of annoying people, it usually makes them hungry. I’d like to run this in the GL320 as well, but its super-high-tech engine and exhaust system are restricted to B5 at the most.

That’s not an atypical day for us, on a winter weekend in Tucson. That’s why we like it here. If we want to go to a festival, a farmer’s market, go for a hike or bike ride, attend a gallery opening, take sunset pictures, do some gardening, work on the car, roam the gardens, take a class, whatever — there’s always something. You really can’t go wrong in Tucson this time of year, with lots of things happening and fantastic weather almost every day.

That’s our criteria for a place to live, perhaps because it closely mirrors the kind of life we had when we were traveling. For me at least, once I had tasted the diversity and excitement of constant travel, I couldn’t fathom settling back into a town that didn’t have something going on all the time. No wonder it took years for us to find a place to buy a house. Future full-timers beware: life on the road may be your dream, but keep in mind that you will face a tough job finding the ideal place to live afterward.

Dec 07 2010

Shifting gears

With the mental shifting of gears that accompanies our transition from Airstream to house, I am once again able to tackle the projects that I began this summer while I was alone in Tucson. Working in the Airstream is very feasible and I did it successfully for three years straight, but in those times when we are paused in the house, I find I am able to tackle projects that otherwise would have lain in a heap on the side of my desk.

It’s the long-term projects that suffer when we travel, because there’s a certain workload involved just in the routine of hitching up and towing, researching the next place to go, meeting people, taking photos, and getting to know each new area. That’s all part of the fun, of course, and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but it does tend to infringe on the paying work, and I need to keep an eye on that. After all, I’ve got a kid who is getting braces on her teeth next month.

Besides, being at home means I no longer have to work out of a backpack. I’ve now got my own desk with room for printer, scanner, laptop, project stacks, and a cold beverage all at the same time. Instead of an occasionally dodgy cellular Internet connection, I have high-speed DSL. I can reliably expect my mail to arrive at my door, without having to notify my mail service of a new address every week. For someone who has spent most of the past five years roaming, these things represent real luxury.

The Spring 2011 issue of Airstream Life is at the top of my list, of course. I am particularly excited about this one, because we are in a transition to becoming a much more photo-rich publication. I’ve always been proud of Airstream Life but it has also always irritated me that I have consistently struggled to get decent photography. Finally I’ve been able to establish relationships with photographers and writers that are bringing in more & better images. We’re going to showcase them starting with Spring 2011, by running more full-page photos, and even double-page spreads (kind of like the current “From The Archives” feature).

About 90% of the editorial for the Spring issue is complete, so as it moves into the layout phase, my personal workload will lighten, and that means other projects can get some attention. The hiatus from traveling also is giving me time to think about the personal projects, and various “nesting” activities that we’ve never done before. Being stationary means a new perspective on everything.

In particular, the house is still a half-wreck after three years of ownership because we’ve never been motivated to finish the renovations, while the Airstream has had every possible attention lavished on it. Houses are much too expensive for what you get. When you add in the real cost of maintenance, repairs, utilities, taxes, furnishings, interest, etc., the total gets rather depressing, and that’s when I start thinking about our next trip in the Airstream. But it’s time for the Airstream to sit a little (even though we still have a few things on the “upgrade/fix” list) while the house gets its fair share. Whether the house actually will get any money or effort thrown at it remains to be seen, but at least we have some good intentions …

The Mercedes GL320 will sit, too. It’s a great car for our style of travel, but I find the maintenance costs too expensive to justify using it when we are parked at home. With 38,000 miles on it after only 19 months of ownership, it deserves a rest too. At this rate it will be at 200,000 miles less than seven years from now. So I am making a small investment in the old 1984 Mercedes 300D to make it into a completely reliable backup car. It is in the shop today for front end work and hopefully a tweak to the vacuum system to make it shift a little smoother. There are a few other small things I’d like to fix on it later, as well.

As elderly as the 300D is, with 166,000 miles on the odometer (and many more undocumented miles since the odometer only turns on cold days), it is now my favorite car to drive. I love the way it has that diesel rattle at idle, the serene ride at cruise, and the relative simplicity of a 1980s car. This is one of the last computer-free cars. Everything in it can be seen and felt, like mechanical objects should be, instead of being controlled by mysterious computers that randomly go bad for no fathomable reason. In a world where my printer, television and the other car have to boot up before they are fully functional, it’s nice to have a car in which the pedals are attached to linkages instead of sensors, where the “nav” feature is a coil-bound map book that always works, and there is no “Check Engine” light.

This shift of gears (and gear) will persist for quite a while, but we do have travel planned here and there. In the meantime, rather than mooning on about my home projects, I’ll try to take the next few weeks to muse and comment on Airstreaming from a stationary perspective.

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.