Eleanor and I are trying a new experiment.  No, it’s not one of those experiments to “liven up the marriage,” but just something that we’ve wanted to do for a while.  As we travel, we’d like to periodically produce a simple, low production-value, video blog about food.  So we took a stab at a first episode today, and you can see it here.

We have no particular aspirations for this, and we don’t expect it to be a major hit.  It’s just one of those things we do for ourselves.  Eleanor has a lot of good ideas and a lot of experience at cooking (not to mention a degree in Culinary Arts).  It has been more than a decade since she last worked as a chef, and so the video blog is simply an outlet.  It’s a chance to explain what we eat when we are in the Airstream and how she prepares it. Hopefully it will be helpful to someone else who likes to travel and cook, too.

Right now the video blog has no name, and no home.  If we keep doing them, we’ll set up a website for them.  (Don’t expect anything as professional as The Long Long Honeymoon, however.  Those two are pros — we’re just hacks at this video blog game.) For now, it’s just for fun.  We’re thinking about calling it, “Where’s My Dinner?”

Our drive today was only about 70 miles, from Colorado Springs to Aurora (a suburb of Denver).  We’ll settle in here for a few days to get some work done.  I have plenty to do.  Although most of the work for Alumapalooza was completed weeks ago, we still have lots of small tasks, and as the event date approaches the phone seems to be ringing more.  We have 118 trailers signed up and we expect over 125 in the final count.  About 260 people are signed up to attend so far.  An amazing number of people are flying in, too — I think the Hampton Inn in Sidney OH (our official hotel) is going to be Party Central for all those folks without trailers.  So Brett and I have been very busy trying to make sure everything comes off just right.

The only thing that keeps me awake at night is the possibility of rain in the days before the event.  Everyone hates mud.  Since this is an El Nino year and it seems like it has been wetter than average almost everywhere, we’ve got a tractor on standby just in case things get sticky in the field.  Pray for dry weather on May 29-31 …  but probably it will all be fine.  I’m obsessing a little because I want everyone to have a terrific time.

On the maintenance front, I did get around to lubing the squeaky ball on the Hensley hitch, but I didn’t shoot a video of it.  It would have been a horrible video, because everything went wrong.  I forgot to do the job before unhitching the car, and it’s really difficult to do once unhitched, because the darned thing is so heavy.  I use the car’s receiver connection to support the hitch head (which is what I was going to demonstrate on the video) and of course I didn’t remember until the trailer was completely set up.

So everything had to be done twice, and there were plenty of glitches like the cordless drill battery going dead, and me accidentally smearing the back of my hand with grease.  It wasn’t a pretty scene.  But eventually it all got done and now we are squeak-free again.

This may seem like a small thing, but it’s actually very important.  I like the hitch to run as close to silent as possible.  That way, if something cracks, loosens, or otherwise fails to operate normally, I will hear it and know to investigate.  This turned out to be quite important two years ago when a hitch bolt came loose on our Nissan Armada.  The squeaking of the hitch ball was driving me insane today because it kept setting off my “danger” radar.

One other thing I forgot to mention:  we are traveling with a four-foot long fiberglass greyhound.  It used to hang in the Greyhound Bus station in Phoenix.  I call it “Glassie.”  As pets go, it is pretty good.  No “walkies,” no scooping, no barking, no shedding. I could get used to this but the dog belongs to a friend in the Chicago area for whom we are transporting it.  An Airstream is a better and safer method of shipping a dog than UPS, as it turns out, except that the dog keeps falling asleep on our bed during towing, and I have to evict it to another part of the trailer at night.