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May 28 2012

The “snake killers” are on the job

One of the important aspects of planning the Alumapalooza prep schedule is to leave in lots of time for “contingencies.” You never know what will crop up, but it’s virtually guaranteed that several things will. The other key is to be surrounded by people who are really capable, so when a problem does pop up, they just jump on it without even having to be asked to do it.

I’m reminded of a quote from Ross Perot, the billionaire founder of EDS, after he got involved with General Motors: “At EDS, the first person who sees a snake kills it. At GM, they form a committee on snakes.” Our core team members are all snake-killers, figuratively speaking.

So when I awoke in the morning to one of the worst sounds you can hear in an Airstream—drip drip drip—I was dismayed but knew I was surrounded by people who could help. The air conditioner had run most of the night to beat the incessant heat and intense humidity, and apparently the condensate drain tube was clogged. This caused an overflow of water in the drain pan, and when that happens you get a light rain shower in your trailer.

One of the many handy folks parked in the Terra Port with us is Super Terry. I threw a couple of salad bowls beneath the air conditioner and went to get him out of bed. This took over an hour since he had slept poorly and had his own water problem to deal with as well. A water line had sprung a leak right underneath his bed, which needed to be fixed immediately. S.T. put a temporary patch on his leak and then came over to help me, a gauge of his Super-helpful character.

The problem was readily remedied by blowing out the drain tube, but as we were in there S.T. spotted daylight coming through. The air conditioner, when replaced last fall, didn’t get a layer of double-sided tape between it and the drain pan. This is not a serious issue, as rainwater won’t normally get through the gap, but in wind-driven rain or while towing we could have a minor leak.

By this time it was 9 a.m. and time for me to join all the volunteers are our little appreciation breakfast at the Verandah. Normally we just treat the volunteers like rented mules, with nary a thank-you card for their efforts sweating in the field all week. This year our hearts softened enough to buy them breakfast at the best restaurant in town, which happens to be a short walk from Airstream. Eleanor and Emma even dressed up a little for the occasion.

Once back, we had to do some prep for the new Backup Derby event. We ran the course several times (with plenty of onlookers) and worked out a nice little routine that took “the Stig” 59.6 seconds. We expect most people will take about 90 seconds to complete it. You can get full details about it by going to the Alumapalooza website. This is going to be a seriously fun event.

Meanwhile, our crack team of volunteers was inside the Service Center stuffing 200 goody bags. We have a rented Gator to shuttle all the stuff around this year, from our U-Haul trailer to the Service Center, back to the trailer, and then eventually to the field. In previous years we used our car, but the Gator is a lot more convenient.

This year we have a nice black zipper bag that even had a little iPod pocket in it. It’s a great souvenir of the event, and it will (as always) be filled with treats and coupons and the all-important Survival Guide.

As predicted, the heat and humidity were brutal on Sunday, but we were ready for it. Brett kept a large ice chest filled with water for all the volunteers, and everyone had their sun hats and sunscreen on. It was only really bad for us because in the middle of the day Super Terry returned (with some of the special double-sided tape) and removed our air conditioner in order to apply the tape. I got up on the roof with him and we managed to get it done in about half an hour.

Of course now the heat was nearing peak and the trailer had become completely heat-soaked, so it would take two hours to cool off again. I say “would” because then Eleanor began cooking an elaborate dinner of beef tenderloin, orcchiette pasta with a smoky mushroom tomato cream sauce, white bean & roasted garlic puree for the bread, and sfogliatelle (an Italian stuffed flaky pastry, courtesy of Elsa) for dessert. All of this meant all three burners of the stove and the oven running for two hours, which completely overwhelmed any good the air conditioner could do. We ended up turning it off and running fans despite the 91 degree temperatures outside. It was actually cooler that way.

Well, dinner was worth it. I mean, really, it was. And since we suffered in a trailer that was hotter than the outside (where the “heat index” was 100 degrees), you know it had to be good chow. But we won’t be eating like that again this week. Too much time involved, too much work. This week we’ll be mostly cooking on the Open Grill with the rest of the people who are coming this week.

May 22 2012

Something stupid under the hood

In the last blog our trip through Colorado was just beginning. Colorado is always interesting for the many mountain passes that offer spectacular views, dramatic climate changes, and occasionally an exploded bag of chips in the closet. Altitude changes everything, especially in a rolling house. For example, we’ve learned over the years to be very careful when opening toothpaste after a tow up to higher altitude, as an air bubble in the container can result in you ending up with a lot more toothpaste than you needed at the moment.

This trip was uneventful except for a strange loss of power when climbing, and another Check Engine light on the car as we approached the Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70. We were at 11,000 feet, but since the car is a turbodiesel the altitude should not have affected the power quite as much as it did. This called for an appointment at the Denver Mercedes dealer, but I also called Super Terry for a consultation once we were settled into our campground.

Super Terry suggested I look for “something stupid” under the hood, so I did and immediately discovered that one of the two cold-air intakes to the engine was disconnected. Our home dealership had just serviced the engine last week, touching this very intake hose. This seemed like a proverbial smoking gun, but S.T. advised having the Denver dealer check it out anyway, just to make sure the problem wasn’t something more serious. The diagnosis turned out as I expected: the Check Engine light was caused by the disconnected air intake, which allowed hot engine air to get in where cold air was expected. The bill for this diagnosis was $132, which I have passed on to the dealer that disconnected the line, for their careful consideration. Ahem. [Update: they agreed to credit us the full amount against a future service.]

There was supposed to be an annular solar eclipse on Sunday evening, but clouds in Denver prevented us from seeing most of it. A shame, as there won’t be another one in North America for many years. We had even built a cereal-box viewer for the occasion.

But our evening was not entirely dull, as we had an unexpected visit from the Zimmer family, local owners of a 1963 Airstream Safari. They were passing through the park and spotted our Airstream, and ended up coming in for a tour and visit.

The big point of coming to Denver was to conduct a site visit of Lakeside Amusement Park, where we will be holding Alumafandango in August. I met up with Brett Hall of Timeless Travel Trailers and we walked every inch of the site to consider logistics such as power, parking, entry /exit points, seminar space, sewage, lighting, etc. There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into prepping for a big event like this, and it’s doubly complicated when you are basically trying to build a campground too. Still, it looks like we’ll be ready in time. (By the way, there’s a new Wal-Mart going in next door but it won’t be open until November.)

One of the nice parts about walking Lakeside in the heat yesterday was the informal guided tour we got from Brett Hall. He has been associated with the park for decades as the Consulting Engineer, and has done a lot of historical research. The place has quite a few interesting stories. Brett will be leading guided tours of the park during Alumafandango so everyone who comes can hear the tales.

Now that the site visit is done and the car is set, we have one day to do work, household stuff, and school before we head east. Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday will be roadtrip days either on I-80 through Nebraska or I-70 through Kansas. That’s a drive of about 1,250 miles. We don’t have any particular plans or stops worked out along that route, since it’s just going to be a slog if we are going to get to Ohio on schedule. I always feel badly about short-changing NE or KS when we go through in a rush, but long-time blog readers know that we did make many stops in those states back when we were full-timing.

Meanwhile, the phone is ringing like crazy lately, as people with last-minute Alumapalooza questions are popping up. Like us, many of the attendees are already on the road, and others are packing to leave next weekend. Everybody seems pumped, which helps us, because as close in on our big week of Alumapalooza, we can feel rising tension and excitement. Alumapalooza is a great week but also a really tough one for those who work the event. It feels to me like the days before the opening of a musical. Despite all the rehearsals and planning, there’s always a fear that something might go wrong … until the moment you open the curtain and realize it’s all going to work out just fine.

Dec 31 2011

Stopped because we can’t stop

Once in a while things don’t go according to plan. Fate has decreed that today will serve as a demonstration of that principle.

We spent the last two days packing for an 11-day trip to southern California. Eleanor hustled mightily to get all her stuff ready for the Airstream; she’s got big culinary plans in addition to the usual challenges of packing up a household and child. I was busy too, packing, testing, filling, tweaking … Around 2 p.m., while Eleanor was making her finishing touches, I pulled the trailer forward a few feet and found that we had no brakes. The disc brake actuator (a hydraulic pump) had failed.

I knew at that moment we were probably screwed, because we’ve had a long history of problems with brake actuators. The unit was made by Actibrake, a company that has since disappeared, and whose legacy is hundreds of brake actuators that are known to suffer sudden failure. This is our third Actibrake, and we have it only because when the prior two failed they were replaced under warranty. For the past three years I have considered preemptively replacing this one to avoid a possible inconvenience, but since a replacement unit would cost $600-700 and this one was functioning properly, I let it go. And so, it died in our carport without even a whimper to warn us.

But to be sure, I ran through the usual checks. I added a little brake fluid, since it seemed low. I cleaned the main ground for the trailer with a Scotchbrite pad. I checked the 30 amp fuse that protects the unit, and all of the other fuses too. With Super Terry on the phone, I verified power was going to the unit and that the ground was good. I power-cycled it by disconnecting the battery. I even banged on it a little. Nothing. Dead dead deadsky.

So I told Eleanor, “We’re not going today,” which was no surprise to her by then, and I got on the phone to see if anyone in Tucson had a replacement unit. At 3:30 pm on a Saturday, New Year’s Eve to boot, I didn’t expect much but I did get one RV parts store that was willing to order in a Dexter or Carlisle replacement actuator on Monday. So the very best I can hope for it is to get one on Tuesday. If I install it myself and all goes well, we could be on the road Tuesday night or Wednesday.

I think the fact that I made reservations for this trip is karmically jinxing us. We don’t usually make reservations, and often when we do, we come to regret it and pay lots of cancellation fees. That’s going to be the case for this trip.

Super Terry pointed out that we have a “backup” trailer, our 1968 Caravel. So I picked up the Caravel from its parking spot and delivered it alongside the disabled Safari, and we started figuring out how to fit at least some of 30 feet worth of stuff into 17 feet. It’s not easy. The Caravel is a weekender. The refrigerator is 1/3 the size of the Safari’s. Storage is extremely limited. It’s so small that when one person stands up to do anything (cook, make a bed, get something out of storage) everyone else has to sit down.

In 2004 we took the Caravel to the WBCCI International Rally in Lansing, MI. That trip was 17 days, our record for length of time in that little trailer. But Emma was a tyke then, taking up hardly any room, and it was summer so we were outside most of the time. (In the photo, that’s Emma at age 4 pretending to be asleep. Don’t be fooled—she never slept.)

Things are quite different now. Emma is over five feet tall, she travels with an immense collection of books and stuffed animals, and we have the added complication that she has a nasty cold at the moment.

Plus, I just blogged about how cold it gets in the desert in the winter, and how sunset comes crashing down early. I’m envisioning ten long nights in a tiny trailer with a sick kid …

But what can we do? If we wait until the new brake actuator arrives, we might be on the road Wednesday. That would cause a huge ripple that would eliminate much of the plan we’ve carefully laid out over the past few weeks. And still something might go wrong that could cause a further delay. Taking the Caravel is the best option we have to salvage at least some of the plan.

So we’re re-engineering everything. About a quarter of the stuff we were bringing along is now staying home (but the Dutch oven is still coming!) The Mercedes will now serve as our outside storage, loaded up with all the things that won’t fit in the Caravel. (I don’t normally like to carry a lot of stuff in the car when towing the Safari because of weight limits, but the Caravel puts very little weight on the car so we are free to pack it full.) Some plans that required big refrigeration are getting scotched, other plans are being modified. We worked on this until about 7 p.m., but we need a lot more time to get it all figured out.

If we can figure it all out by tomorrow afternoon, we’ll get on the road and just miss our first night in the campground. If we need more time to pack or if Emma needs more time to get over the worst of her cold, we might leave Monday instead. All we can do is be flexible.

So tonight Eleanor broke out the cheese fondue that she had planned for our New Year’s celebration on the road, and I’m making popcorn for the movie we’ll watch. It’s an enforced “staycation” tonight. Not the New Year’s Eve we had planned, but a memorable one nonetheless.

Sep 21 2011

Taillight warranty

I don’t blame Super Terry, really.

He tried his best. He spent hours replacing the burned out motor in our air conditioner, and it seemed to work in heat pump mode when we tested it. But as he joked, it had the “taillight warranty” — when he can’t see my taillights anymore, the warranty is over.

We’re 489 miles from his view now, near Birmingham AL, and I just turned on the air conditioner to remove some of the intense humidity we are feeling tonight. It blew warm for a few minutes, cooled down a little, and then started blowing very warm humid air. … sigh…

We did a quick telephone consultation but the consensus is: “He’s dead, Jim.”

(note to non-geeks and those under age 45: That’s a Star Trek joke)

The full post-mortem hasn’t been done but it doesn’t matter, because I’m out of cheap options. We aren’t going to repair this air conditioner at shop rates. At six years old, it has gone Tango Uniform. Farewell, Dometic Penguin — you are already missed, on this humid night in an Alabama state park.

I would like to wait until later this winter to replace it, but we also use the Airstream as a guest apartment and we have people slated to arrive in October, which is still air conditioning season in Tucson. Somewhere in the next 1,900 miles I’ll find a good deal on a replacement unit (probably a 15k BTU air conditioner without heat pump) and we’ll do a swap. That’s a topic I’ll start researching in the next few days.

Sep 20 2011

Maintenance done & rolling again

I hope that this will be the last maintenance post for a while. It’s good to have gotten things tweaked and fixed but I’d rather write about our travels.

Just to wrap up the repair saga, Super Terry came through with an amazing job on the Dometic AC/heat pump. He salvaged the 1/4 hp electric motor from another unit and installed it in ours starting at about 6:30 Monday evening. The job, conducted entirely atop the roof of the Airstream, took until about 9:30 pm, so mostly in the dark by flashlights.

I went up and down the ladder a dozen times to fetch tools as requested, and otherwise just stood at the top of the rungs admiring a mechanic with 30 years of experience solving what appeared to me to be an insoluble problem. That unit is not designed for easy serviceability, and the motor didn’t come out without a fight. But at the end it was in, the whole thing went back together and upon testing it ran like new. I’m amazed and grateful that this effort allowed us to avoid an expensive replacement, which is normally the only option.

For those who suffer this issue, believe your mechanic when he says the best fix is a whole new air conditioner. Counting the time it took to salvage the motor from another unit, Super Terry put in a solid five hours on the job. He did this as a friendly favor, but if I were paying shop rates it would have been probably $500 plus parts, and I’m left with a 6-year-old unit that probably will have some other fatal issue in a few years. At the risk of sounding like an old RV codger, they just don’t make ’em like they used to. Hopefully ours will hold on for a few more years but I’m not expecting decades of service.

With the late dinner and the usual post-dinner conversation it was a late night, and then this morning we had a slow-motion getaway. It was 11 a.m. before we got on the road, westbound for Alabama. We got as far as 30 miles past Atlanta (hit downtown right at rush hour, which was challenging), then stopped for dinner and overnight parking in a private lot. It’s pouring rain tonight, so I’m very glad we resolved the leak in the Fan-Tastic Vent.

Our goal tomorrow is Birmingham. It’s a city we’ve never visited, and there are a few sights we want to see there, which I’ll write about in future posts. From there, our travel plan is basically to head back to Tucson in two weeks or less. We’re going to leave the exact stops loose, but this is familiar territory so if we want something different we’ll have to divert plenty from the beaten path. There are a few days built into the schedule for that.

The big splurge of our two-week return budget is going to be this weekend. I’ve actually made reservations — a rare thing indeed — for a park in the Florida panhandle for four nights. We all want beach time, to fill that piece of our souls and sustain us through the dry interim in the southwest this winter. Detouring to the panhandle will add 300 miles to our route but I’m sure it will be well worth it.

So that’s the sum total of our remaining travel “plan.” Not much, really. Rather than figure it all out, we’ll let circumstances and whimsy suggest the opportunities. In the nearly 1,900 miles ahead, I have a feeling we’ll find more than a few interesting things.