Aug 08 2016

Down the UP, to Door County WI

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Wisconsin always remind me of Vermont. There are no mountains here, but the abundant scenic byways, small towns, and long stands of forest are comforting. Except for a few minutes of highway construction in Green Bay, the drive from De Tour Village MI to Sturgeon Bay WI was easy and quiet.

Along the way we stopped in Escanaba to snag a few pasties for lunch, and before we could get out of the car we were visited by two enthusiastic Airstreamers-to-be, who exclaimed “We’ve been following you for an hour!” At first I thought this might set a record for aluminum stalking but really they were just heading the same direction along Rt 41. By the time we all pulled into the parking lot at Dobber’s Pasties they had figured out who we were, and we had a nice chat before going inside to get lunch.

Pasty, by the way, does not rhyme with “tasty” although it should. They’re like calzones on the outside, but without tomato sauce on the inside. Instead they’re filled with diced potatoes, meats, cheese—all kinds of things depending on which type of pasty you choose. Unfairly, the name rhymes with “nasty,” but let’s overlook that.

They’ve been beloved by Yoopers for generations. We get them whenever we are up here, and clearly from the sign (above) Dobber’s knows it.

The trip plan I posted in yesterday’s blog shows that this dip down to the Door County peninsula is a pretty big detour. We’re doing it for our kid. These days there’s a lot of fear about the perverts and weirdos who kids might meet online, but our experience has been different. Emma has been videochatting online with some pretty cool kids for a couple of years now, and we vowed that we’d make the necessary side trips so she could meet them in person. We met Hannah in Indianapolis on our way to Alumapalooza, and now we’re here to meet Emily from Sturgeon Bay. Both visits have been spectacular successes.

The parents are always a little skeptical at first, which is natural considering what they’re faced with. A strange family that lives in a trailer and wanders the country like gypsies is going to drop in for a visit? Imagine what would go through your head. Lock the doors, keep an eye on their hands, and make sure the ammo is dry, I expect. But all the parents have been great, quickly seeing that we’re only a little weird, and the girls always have a great time.

This time we met them at the Door County Fair and spent a couple of hours on the classic fair rides, and checking out the 4-H exhibits of poultry, rabbits, horses, and an amazing array of baked goods (which inspired me to get back to bread baking when we get home).

While the girls were hanging out, Eleanor and I had a chance to roam up the peninsula to Egg Harbor and walk the town and marina. We were surprised to see the population listed at merely 201 people.

It’s a small town, kind of like an outpost on Martha’s Vineyard. Tourists outnumber the locals by a fair amount. I was expecting something bigger and more touristy. It’s actually nice to see that much of Door County is quieter and smaller than I expected.

OK, having seen more of the countryside I can see that it’s definitely different from Vermont in a lot of ways (we don’t have cherry orchards, for example), but there’s still a nice country vibe. My one suggestion to Door County: get rid of the billboards before they take over, like Vermont did in 1968.

We like Door County enough that we have decided to spend another day here, roaming around and picnicking at one of the sandy beaches, before resuming our northern trek through the national parks. Tomorrow we’ll head back up and spend the next five or six days around Lake Superior.

Aug 06 2016

Up and over the Great Lakes

It’s August, and for us the summer travel adventure has finally begun. It has been a great summer in New England, but the Airstream has been stationary since early June. It’s time to put all thirty feet of aluminum to full use, back on the road.

As always, we have an ambitious plan and not as much time as we’d like. There will be compromises and missed opportunities, but we can’t dwell on that. The trick to pulling off a really massive trip in a time crunch without regret is to make the tough choices and focus on the good stuff that’s left.

Our first “leg”, if you can call it that, is from Vermont to Seattle WA, which will be 3000+ miles. I have charted a route that hits about six national park sites along the way, plus visits with friends and detours for varied reasons. There would be no way to accomplish everything we have planned in just six weeks without cutting a few corners, so we elected to blast through the first 800 miles by taking the shortcut from northern New York through Ottawa and the province of Ontario, and over to Sault Ste Marie, MI.

This cuts off a lot of territory that we’ve traveled many times (NY, PA, OH) in favor of a quick and scenic drive through Ontario. Not much to regret there, except that Eleanor was kind of eyeing a stop at Niagara Falls this year (we’ve been there before and we’ll hit it another time).

And if you had a reason to travel long distances through Canada this summer you couldn’t ask for a better combination of low fuel prices and favorable dollar exchange rate. A few years ago we would have paid the equivalent of US$5.00 or more per gallon for diesel; this August it was about US$2.60.

Normally I would want to take a few days to cover 800 miles but this was one of the compromises built into the trip. By covering this leg quickly we bought time to spend in the Great Lakes and western National Parks. We ended up in Sault Ste Marie MI on the second night and ran into our friends Leigh & Brian there, which was a bonus. I posted reviews and photos of the two campsites we used along the way on Campendium.

I’m always suspicious of everything on the Airstream after it has been sitting a while, so I gave it a good inspection before we left Vermont and took some time along the way to check the Hensley hitch and other components that we’ve touched this summer. Everything has been perfect, except for the annoying mice. They love the Airstream when it is parked in Vermont, and because they’re very destructive we have to trap and remove them all summer.

This summer Eleanor trapped at least six, and there was still one left when we started towing, which turned out to be a mouse corpse decaying underneath the furnace. We found his remains by the smell and left him resting in peace at a roadside stop somewhere in Ontario. Mice are cute but when it comes to your Airstream a “zero tolerance” policy is best.

Now that we’re back in the USA we’ve had a chance to settle in for a few days while courtesy parking at the summer home of our friends Charlie and Lynn. This is a half-visit, half-working stop.

Actually, mostly working for me. From prior visits we know that there’s good cell service here, a 30-amp plug, and I can hear the waves splashing on the shore of Lake Huron just outside my dinette window, so it’s an excellent place to do some work.

There’s no high-concept entertainment in the area, which is just fine. This park of Michigan is quiet, decorated with evergreen forests and farms and very few people. Our big activities have been a trip to the sandy beach with our host family, a church supper, walking the Gogomain Bridge, and talking with our hosts. Tonight we’re going out to Raber Bay for some of the local whitefish.

From here we’ve got a long list of stops: Sturgeon Bay, perhaps Apostle Islands, Grand Portage National Monument, Isle Royale National Park, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and many other places on the way to Seattle. It’s going to be an interesting trip, culminating in Alumafandango in California on September 20.

Aug 05 2016

The fall of TBM and the resurrection of the hitch

“What ever happened to TBM?” I’ve been getting this question a lot lately. I have hesitated to tell the truth because so many millions of men around the world look up to him —but the awful truth must come out.

TBM was vanquished by work. Yes, that killer of adventure, soiler of fantasy, shroud of exploration … sheer, overloading obligation. I tried valiantly to break away for a few days of tent camping in the cooler mountain elevations of northern Arizona, and some day trips, but again and again I was restrained at my desk by 1,001 projects that all needed attention.

Well, don’t feel too badly for TBM. I still ate out at a few favorite restaurants, watched a few guy movies, met some local friends, went to a car show, etc—so it wasn’t all bad. And to rationalize the situation, I resolved that in exchange for a late summer of Airstream travel (which we have since begun) it was a reasonable tradeoff to spend a few weeks in advance chained to a desk.

I also resolved that this won’t happen again if I can help it, so I’m cutting back on various obligations and hiring some more people to help. A new Associate Editor is taking off quite a bit of workload on the magazine, and I’m drastically reducing my involvement in events since they take a massive amount of time. (But don’t panic—Alumapalooza will be back in 2017!)

Back in New York at Colin Hyde’s shop, our Hensley hitch was being refurbished, and boy did that turn out to be an eye-opening experience. You might recall that we disassembled it and found many more worn parts and cracks than expected.

As Colin predicted, Hensley replaced the entire lower unit under the lifetime warranty rather than trying to repair it. When Colin’s shop got the unit back, they scuffed the paint and then repainted everything (top, bottom, bars, etc) with a really good automotive enamel so it will hold up better than the paint Hensley uses. (The orange in particular is famous for fading quickly and deteriorating.)

All the new parts were installed, and then of course we greased it, installed it, and adjusted it. It looks better than new now, which is good because the grand total for this job was more than half the price of a new one.

The eye-opening part was discovering all the parts that had failed without our knowledge. I knew the lower unit had cracked and suspected that the cadmium-plated steel bushings (“binoculars”) were also cracked. I didn’t know the extent of the cracking—and it was extensive—nor that the steel cylinders where the weight bars are inserted had stretched beyond repair.

The really shocking part was the bearings. There are eight of them in a Hensley, standard automotive-type bearings and races. You’d think that since they barely turn they wouldn’t wear. In fact the opposite seems to be true. Despite being packed with grease, all eight bearings and races were seriously rusted. It seems that the lack of spinning allows water to settle without being evaporated. The “dust caps” on the top and bottom aren’t waterproof, so water gets in and stays there, particularly on the bottom bearings where the dust caps actually trap water.

The picture says it all. Look at the rust on the bearings and the wear marks abraded into the races. These bearings were about six years old. All of them were bad.

The bearings are user-replaceable but the races are not. Colin’s guys found a way to remove the races, which involved welding little tangs on the races so they could be punched out, but for most people the solution will be to return the unit to Hensley under warranty. My recommendation to all owners now is to do five-year inspection and/or disassembly to check the state of these bearings, particularly in a wet climate. When you look at this picture, keep in mind that my trailer spends 8 months of the year in sunny dry Arizona.

The end of the story is simple. I flew back to Vermont in late July, reunited with my family, cleaned up and prepped the Airstream, installed the hitch, and we got on the road. (But in the midst of that, I did manage to sneak out two quick days of TBM activity: motorcycling north from the Lake Champlain islands, up the Richelieu River all the way to the St Lawrence through the beautiful French heart of Quebec.)

We’re now in the Airstream on a two month adventure that will take us from east coast to west, at least six national parks, and many interesting stops. So buckle up: the blog is about to get busy again.

Jul 12 2016

Temporary Bachelor Man strikes again

Right now he is lurking in his secret lair, but soon that superhero of summer, Temporary Bachelor Man will appear.

It has been too long since he donned the Mighty Vest Of Masculinity, slipped on the Sacred Sunglasses Of Limited Eyesight (e.g., ne-cherchez-pas-la-femme), lifted the Flaming Torch Of Bachelor Cooking, and wore the all-powerful Cuffs Of Household Servitude.

Each summer I take a few weeks away from the Airstream to fly back down to southern Arizona and bake in the heat, solo. It’s a great opportunity for me to get serious projects done, since there’s nobody else here and little going on to distract me.

This means I tend to put my head down and tackle those projects that have accumulated in the first half of the year. It’s much like hacking away at an overgrown kudzu in the back yard, except it’s in my brain. After a few weeks, things are much clearer and the mental constipation that comes from having too much unfinished business is gone.

But there’s a real risk of being over-focused. I could easily end up resembling Howard Hughes in his final days cooped up in his penthouse at the Xanadu Hotel. I get so engaged with my projects that it is easy to forgo the niceties of shaving, eating, and engaging with humanity.

That’s the reason for TBM. His heroic character inspires me to escape laptop computer bondage once in a while, and go explore Tucson for those little details of the city that I would miss in the busier snowbird season. TBM is a mighty tester of local restaurants and food trucks, prowler of odd corners and back streets of Tucson, and watcher of movies featuring absurd testosterone.

In other words, there’s nothing like a little deprivation to make you appreciate what you have. “Nothing going on” means there’s reason to go digging a little deeper, which means just going out and poking around until something (a historic building, a cultural event, a rattlesnake) emerges.

Tucson is a curious city and most people miss that fact. It’s the only city I’ve ever seen that has dirt roads and horse ranches right in the middle of everything. It has all kinds of strange and historic neighborhoods that are so cut off by latter-day road projects that you almost can’t get to them without knowing the secret route. In a country driven by chain-store development, the illogical corners and little urban mysteries are exactly what I like about the place.

Last Sunday I picked up my buddy Nate for a day of cruising the parts of inner Tucson that we had no business visiting, looking for interesting things. It was perfect weather for it: 107 degrees and blazing sunshine ensure that very few other people will be out, so whenever we found something worth photographing we could simply stop the car in the middle of the road and take our time. It was a uniquely Tucsonian thing to do, and given a liter of water per person for a half-day, I would recommend it to any urban explorer.

One easy aspect of Tucson to explore is food. For such a small city, Tucson has a remarkable range of cuisine. I don’t know why. Restaurants keep popping up and disappearing, so much that I once calculated I could visit a different restaurant five days a week for a year.

Sadly, half of them would be hamburger places. I have nothing against hamburgers but I don’t know why we need McDonalds, Wendy’s, Burger King, Five Guys, In’n’Out, Whataburger, Smashburger, Monkey Burger, Blake’s Lotaburger, Zinburger, Freddy’s, Fuddruckers, Culver’s, Diablo Burger, Graze Premium, All American Burger, and many other local spots. They’re mostly good, but a dozen or so chains selling essentially the same product is not the definition of “variety”. Hamburger joints are second only in number to the Mexican restaurants, but since we are only 70 miles from Mexico I can understand better why those are plentiful.

One of my TBM goals this year is to explore new and different local restaurants. I think the only way to know if you’ll like a place is to actually eat there. Yelp, in my opinion, is worse than useless. Too many of the reviews seem to be from whiny people talking mostly about themselves and complaining in a most disgusting tone of entitlement about how the waiter didn’t bring their ice water fast enough. I have found several real gems of restaurants that I love, and every single one of them is panned mercilessly by the self-absorbed Yelpers, people who think Cajun cooking comes with red sauce because that’s what they get at the mall Food Court.

Whoops, did I just go off on a rant there? I was going to say that my prowl with Nate ended up at a local Indian cafe and market, which wasn’t bad at all for a late lunch, and that seemed like an excellent reward for our efforts. My goal therefore, for the two weeks I have left as TBM, will be to explore other local hidden restaurants as frequently as I can.

Now, I won’t be telling you about what I find unless you come to Tucson. In our new world of crowd-sourced information, there’s benefit to keeping a few things quiet. A quick way to ruin a good local attraction is to tell the world about it. But I mention this as a suggestion to you. If you live in, or near a place that you have never really fully explored, perhaps it’s time to do so.

By this I mean walking or driving through the places you have never had reason to go to, just to see what’s there. Walk along the river that runs through your city (or in our case, the dry washes). Check out that bike path, even if you have to do it on foot. Try a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and banter with the waitress. Waltz into that bookstore in the old brick building. Make a list of odd places you’ve seen and start ticking them off, one by one.

Then you’ll have adopted the heroic and expansive attitude of Temporary Bachelor Man, Discoverer of the Unexpected. It’s just like traveling in the Airstream, only very very local. So I predict you’ll be surprised and somewhat invigorated by whatever you find.

Jul 08 2016

What’s my old watch worth?

Just now I was winding a watch. Remember doing that? Decades ago we all had mechanical watches, and spending a few seconds every day casually winding the little crown was just something you did without thinking much about it.

I like the little break that winding a watch requires. Like pausing to scratch an itch, or sneeze, or tie your shoes, it’s just a tiny moment when you aren’t expected to do anything else, and it buys you a fraction of the day that’s all your own.

That might seem very trite but consider that tennis champ John McEnroe used shoe-tying very effectively to throw off his opponents and grab a mini-break during intense matches. Every moment counts, and some can be made to count more than others.

In the case of this watch, which happens to be a Soviet “Sputnik” (Спутник) watch made in 1958, there’s a comforting little zik-zik sound that I like to hear. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because it reminds me that the watch is a fragment of history in itself, a commemorative item made in the First Moscow Watch Factory near the peak of the Soviet Union. Just knowing that tickles me.

Perhaps it’s simpler than that. I have to admit I like to see the little Sputnik dial rotating as the seconds tick by.

The ticking reminds me that this is an entirely mechanical device—no transistors, chips, battery, LCD display—made from tiny bits of geared metal and even tinier synthetic ruby bearings, lightly lubricated by oil, designed in the slide rule era, and powered by a few seconds of zik-zik every day. Such devices are virtually unknown and unappreciated by most people born in the 21st century, but since they still work (in many cases far better than their modern equivalents) I think we should all remember them.

I’ve written before about my penchant for vintage devices, which seems to have gotten more acute as I’ve grown older. It’s not nostalgia; most of the mechanical things we have were designed and obsolete before I was born. I don’t recall my mother having a 1948 Mixmaster, but I love the one Eleanor inherited from her father. My fascination is probably because of my father, who was trained as a machinist in his early career, and who had a basement full of fantastic devices for turning metal into mechanical wonders.

As a child I could not understand most of the tools. I knew what his lathe could do, but not why I would have any practical reason to spin metal shavings off chunks of metal. I loved hefting the weight of his micrometer and spinning the handle to watch the scale climb with uncanny smoothness. It was a device of intriguing precision (which we associated so much with him that it was brought out at his memorial ceremony). But at no time did I have any idea what I might measure to a thousandth of an inch. I still don’t—but I like that tool.

My father made, among many other things, devices called Goldblatt Clamps. He was so useful at making such things that he was given a deferment from the Korean War for a while (he went later). We still have a box of the clamps, made of precious metals such as silver and gold. I have no use for Goldblatt Clamps but the mere idea of them is strangely compelling.

So perhaps for the reason that I grew up among machines, I have great respect for them. The things engineers made in the 1950s and 1960s blow my mind to this day. (One good example is the famous SR-71 “Blackbird”, which is still the fastest and highest flying aircraft ever made. It was designed on paper, 33,000 sheets of it.)

I can think of another reason I like the mechanical things. I have an extremely close relationship with the laptop computer that I’m currently typing this on. Airstream Life and most of my current life activities would be impossible without it. I spend all day with it, more time than I spend with my family, which is sort of horrifying if you think about it. I spend more time with this thing than I do eating, sleeping, exercising … pretty much everything except breathing.

The computer is a valued tool which I appreciate mostly because it just works for its intended purpose, but it’s essentially a disposable black box. It can be opened but mostly what you’ll see are more black boxes. It works on principles that I intellectually understand but which I cannot touch, and it will inevitably fail for reasons that I cannot determine. When that happens, it will likely not be repairable.

Thinking of that, I look at the watch I’m wearing today. It is the antidote to short-lived black boxes. An assembly line of Soviet comrades made this watch 58 years ago and it still works. It may work for another hundred years, given an occasional cleaning and lubrication.

Sure, it only does one thing, but that’s not its key value anymore. Now it is a bit of history, a reason to take a 30-second break each day, and a spark of perspective to counter the crazy smartphone world we inhabit. That’s worth more to me than knowing the current time with atomic precision.

You might wondering if I’m ever going to talk about Airstreams in this blog. I think I’ll leave making that connection to you, if you see one. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

(PS: Temporary Bachelor Man will be posting next.)