Dec 01 2008

Blog meets blog, again

The phenomenon of people starting travel blogs has really gained steam since we first started ours back in October 2005. Just counting the current Airstream travel blogs, I can easily find dozens. To keep my blogroll under control, I only list the blogs of full-time Airstream travelers (you can see the links at right), but there are many more.

Usually we meet the fellow bloggers after they have been traveling for a while, but in this case we found the opportunity to meet some future Airstream travelers/bloggers before they actually got on the road full-time. The blog is called Malimish.com, and it is the product of a nice family of three from California. At this point they’ve only had their Airstream for two months (traded up from a T@b trailer), but they seem to already be in love with it and are planning to hit the road full-time in the spring.

Our luck stems from the fact they they like to go to Tucson for vacations, and so through a series of fortunate coincidences we discovered they would be at Catalina State Park this weekend. So they popped over for dinner last night and we got to meet the entire crew (except for the cat) plus Carrie the guest traveler.

It’s amazing how much we always have in common with other young full-timers. (Hey, no cracks about us being not-so-young-anymore!) I like to share the knowledge and experiences we’ve accrued with other people, in the hope that they’ll go out and have even more fun than we did (by avoiding our worst mistakes). Honestly, I think a year on the road is something everyone should experience in their lifetime. Whether you do it all at once or a month at a stretch, full-timing will change you for the better.

I am especially impressed with the fact that these cool folks are doing it with a cat and a toddler. That might seem scary, but most kids seem to thrive on travel, and it’s not really much harder than raising a toddler at home in my opinion. We started traveling with Emma up to five months per year when she was just three years old.

The cat, I’m not so sure about. I’ve never had a cat or dog that didn’t get sick in the car, or howl incessantly. But hey, if your cat travels well (and I’ve seen many that do), who am I to say anything against it? Our friend Sharon (see The Silver Snail blog, linked at right) travels with both a cat and a dog. So it can be done successfully.

We may encounter the Malimish crowd again in January, when we are roaming California, but there are no specific plans yet. I am very interested to see how their blog shapes up once they start full-time travel next year.

This week my focus is the annual RV Industry Association trade show, which is always held in Louisville KY around this time of year. This blog entry comes to you from Las Vegas airport, where I am awaiting a connecting flight. I’ll be at the show Tuesday and Wednesday, then fly home on Thursday assuming nobody has managed to give me a cold. The RVIA show is where the manufacturers show their new products and try to get orders from dealers. It’s also a major opportunity to conduct all kinds of RV-related business, which is why I’ll be there with Brett. We are going to try hard to get some new advertisers.

Believe me, little else could get me out of Tucson and into the snowy/rainy gloom of Louisville this time of year. Tucson is a paragon of sunshine and pleasantness this time of year, while Louisville is facing that grim “mixed precipitation and high winds” sort of forecast that makes my skin crawl. Just call it “40 to 60 percent chance of blecccch,” and you’ve got the concept. But I’ll be indoors all day, roaming around under the giant tungsten lights and washing my hands after every handshake, so for the most part I won’t notice. Wish me luck.

Nov 29 2008

Random photos, part I

Writing this new, randomly-posted blog instead of my daily Tour of America blog has caused several curious dilemmas for me. One, for example, is that when I don’t write every day, a week later I often can’t remember what I did. With the old blog, I could just look it up, but now days disappear from time to time. I seem to have a choice: write daily or accept that some days will blur into the past.

Another dilemma is that photos are piling up on my computer. Taken with intent, but unused, some of them deserve a better fate than to sit on a hard drive awaiting the rare possibility that I might need them for an article in the future.

To resolve this, I have decided that every few weeks or months, I’ll pull out a few of my favorite images and run them all together as “Random photos.” Not only will I be able to share a few possibly interesting images, but I can document a few small events that otherwise might not have made the record.

Here’s the first installment. (All photos are by me unless otherwise noted.) Click any photo to enlarge it.

Air Force jet

I was at March Field with Terry and Marie last month, touring the aviation museum, when this large jet began practicing touch-and-go landings. At some points the jet was close enough that with a 200mm lens it felt like I could reach out and touch it. I haven’t bothered to research the model of the aircraft; perhaps a reader will identify it for us.

Home invasion

We don’t have a cat, but this one has been showing up in the backyard occasionally. That’s a neat trick considering our backyard is entirely surrounded by 5-7 foot walls. Eleanor, being a major softie for cats (but allergic to them), left the window open with the hope that the critter would visit.

The cat thought she was being clever, but I caught her in the act. Once she saw my camera, she ran like a Hollywood starlet spotted in Wal-Mart.

New cushion fabric

The blue-and-cream “Beach Club” fabric that came with our Airstream turned out to be wholly impractical. Not only did it immediately start to darken with dirt, but it seemed that there was no stain which could be cleaned off it. After three years of spaghetti sauce, kid feet, and several unsuccessful attempts to wash it, we finally gave up and asked our friend Greg to make covers for us from a more kid-proof fabric. The result is the brown Southwestern themed cushions you see in the photo.

And what did we do with the old “Beach Club” fabric? Why, we gave it to the guys pictured at right. They managed to get it clean and make nice chairs out of it. (Not my photo.)

By the way, Greg says if anyone comes to Tucson to visit us and stays for at least a few days, he’d be willing to make a set for them while they wait. We’re probably going to ask him to recover the rest of the dinette as well.

Turkey slicing

Since I’m usually behind the camera, this is a rare photo. You can see how I dressed up and got my hair coiffed for Thanksgiving. Emma is peering over anxiously to make sure I cut plenty of dark meat for her. Later, when she’s a teenager and utterly rejecting us for our meat-eating barbarism, this photo will be useful blackmail material. On the wall between us is a black-and-white photo of Eleanor’s grandfather, Martin Manzonetta, during his reign as Head Chef at Boston’s famous Locke-Ober restaurant. You can see him at right in a scanned image from a magazine article, showing his famous dish Lobster Savannah (still served at the Locke-Ober today).

Rainbow palm

Tucson is not a place known for thunderstorms in November, but we had a few beauties around Thanksgiving, and one of them resulted in a spectacular rainbow just to the north of our house. Emma spotted it and I got a few great shots. In Hawaii, a rainbow over a palm tree is a common sight, but here in Tucson it’s more like getting snow at Christmastime.

To my mind, it’s better than snow at Christmastime. A palm tree swaying in a gentle warm breeze is exactly the symbol I want to remember this Thanksgiving.

Nov 27 2008

Building a new Thanksgiving tradition

It is Thanksgiving Day, and for the first time in three years, we are not in our Airstream. We’re in a house, trying to build a new tradition.

With fuel prices collapsing below any level we saw during our full-timing years ($1.75 a gallon for unleaded is easy to find here in Tucson), it seems a lost opportunity not to be wandering off for Thanksgiving. The Airstream is completely packed and ready to go at any time, but for some reason we don’t feel compelled to go anywhere. Our preceding three holidays are all easily remembered for their differing locations: one in the California redwoods, one with a group of similarly homeless Airstreamers in Tampa, the last in Riverside CA with an old friend. This one will be remembered for being the first in our Tucson home.

Along with building new family traditions, we are preparing for the desert winter. As you might guess, there’s not much preparation needed. I won’t be mounting a snow plow to my truck or stocking up on home heating oil. Our preparations involve trying to get this completely uninsulated house to be a little warmer. The house is basically a stack of adobe bricks on a concrete slab, with a flat roof. It’s wonderfully cool even on 100 degree days, but in the 40s, 50s, and 60-degree days we get in December and January, it is completely unheatable.

Being Tucson, where nobody wants to invest much in heating, the heating system uses the same ceiling-height air ducts as the air conditioning. So when we turn on the heat, we get a blast of hot air up around the ceiling while the floor remains chilled to the ideal comfort level of penguins. I did not think when we moved southwest that I’d still need my Airstream slippers in the winter.

Our fireplace in particular is a disaster, from a heating perspective. It is pleasant to look at and practically in new condition (the first owners of the house never used it in over 40 years of ownership), but as Shakespeare wrote, when lit with a raging fire it provides “sound and fury, signifying nothing,” especially not heat.

There are various home improvements we could install (ceiling fans, better windows, fireplace insert, etc) but for now we are being cheap about it and simply buying a few rugs and extra blankets. It’s a good excuse to pick up a couple of the Pendletons we’ve been eyeing. (On eBay you can often find bargains on them.) I’m not particularly motivated to start piling more money into this house. If things go as planned, we won’t even be here in January.

The other winter preparation, if you can call it that, will be to pick the grapefruit. I have been reading about citrus cultivation and care for the past few weeks, because later I hope to install one or two more citrus when we finally get to re-designing the back yard. The one grapefruit tree we have has responded nicely to the emergency care I gave it last year, and has rewarded us with a heavy load of over 90 fruit. They’ll be ready for picking in December. I may wait until we get a freeze because people say the fruit sweetens after a light freeze. It never freezes here for more than a few hours, but there’s a good chance we’ll get a short one overnight in late December.

Looking forward to next summer, I’m also working on plans to get our 1968 Caravel back on the road, if not entirely restored. Those of you who read the Tour of America blog might recall that last July I built most of the interior furniture and delivered it up to GSM Vehicles in Plattsburgh NY for storage and eventual installation. The list of things the Caravel needs seems to be getting longer rather than shorter as I approach the supposed end of the project. Last night I was tipped off to a good deal on a replacement refrigerator on eBay (a slightly scratched unit being sold off by Airstream), so that was purchased and will soon be freighted up to GSM Vehicles as well.

With the refrigerator in place, we can finalize the kitchen cabinetry and start installing. I’ll get back up to Vermont in July and finish the remaining interior parts before it’s time for the Vintage Trailer Jam. I may start a mini-blog just on that topic later, to document the last phases of the Caravel’s restoration project. By the way, the Vintage Trailer Jam 2009 is likely to happen in August — bigger & better — but we are currently negotiating with venues, so an official announcement is still several weeks away.

That’s all far away stuff. Right now our consideration is simply Thanksgiving Day, but looking at all these things I see that we have much to be thankful for. We still have the freedom to travel, happy things coming in the near future, a fun place to live, good family life, health, and even a few interesting challenges to solve. The concerns we have can be shelved today, and the things we might view as negative can be turned into positives.

In addition to being the first in this house, this Thanksgiving may also be notable for the thunderstorms. All night it poured hard, a rare event in southern Arizona this time of year. The humidity this morning is an astounding 89%. All the dust has been washed away, and for one day it feels like we are in Houston. It’s a novelty here, since we have not seen anything but sunshine in the last six weeks.

Eleanor’s major goal today is to make the house feel like a home by spending the entire day cooking a massive meal for six people. We are not expecting any guests, so that means we’ll be having Thanksgiving for two days. Emma has been recruited to help on the pie. My job is technical support, which means making appropriate playlists for the iPod (you need a certain type of music to cook by, says Eleanor), looking up technical turkey details on the Internet, hauling off vegetable scraps to the compost bin, and answering the phone on Eleanor’s behalf while her hands are deep in various mixtures.

I had thought that ideally we would have hosted some guests for Thanksgiving, as we usually did when we lived in a house in Vermont. Eleanor loves cooking for large groups, especially when they are known “eaters,” meaning people who will appreciate everything she puts on the table. But as Thanksgiving approached it became clear that we wanted to just be together. Friends would have been welcome, but being new to this house and this town, we are just as happy to spend the time with just each other.

Together we can live completely in this moment and think of nothing else. That’s where the most memorable days come from, when you are completely absorbed in the moment and letting all the other things go. To my mind, Thanksgiving is not a day of obligation but a day for self. The outside world has gone away. It can come back some other time.

Nov 26 2008

Wally and the spammers

Last year, when people were talking about putting together a 50th anniversary Cape Town to Cairo Airstream caravan for 2009, somebody also came up with the idea of reprinting Wally Byam’s book “Trailer Travel Here and Abroad.” Published in 1960, the book has long been out of print and copies are very difficult to find. As with almost everything written from the glory days of Airstream in the 1950s and 1960s, that book is considered highly desirable by Airstream aficionados.

One of the organizers approached me to see if I could help. He would donate a sacrificial copy of the book if I could work out how to scan it, reprint it in limited quantities, and distribute it to all of the caravan members. I say “sacrificial” because in the process of scanning it, the book would likely be severely damaged or even cut to individual pages.

The problem with this idea was that there really is no good way to reproduce old books. You can copy the pages and reprint them exactly as they appeared (smudges, tears, and all), but this generally results in something fairly crummy looking. It also forces you to use exactly the same page proportions as the original.

Another method is simply to have a person re-type every word of the book. That process is so expensive that it usually doesn’t make economic sense for purposes of reprinting an old book in small quantities.

Or, you can try Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to try to turn the printed words into a word-processing document, which can then be edited and reformatted. But this also doesn’t work well, since the state of OCR technology is far from perfect. Error rates are often high, which means a human being must go over every word to fix all the errors, and that can be just as bad as re-typing the whole book.

Interestingly, the wizards at Carnegie-Mellon University have found a great solution. They’re getting you to help with the OCR process. And they’ve gotten me to do it. And millions of other people have been recruited as well. In fact, so many of us are helping that up to 150,000 hours of work can be contributed to the project every day.

You know those little text puzzles you have to solve before you can post comments on a blog, like the one above? They are called “captchas.” The Carnegie-Mellon kids are using them to digitize old books and newspapers. One word in the puzzle is known to the computer, the other one is a word from an old book that the OCR software couldn’t recognize. When you type the correct answer to the “known” word, the computer assumes your answer to the other word is also correct. Then it checks your answer against other people’s answers. When enough people confirm the word, it gets added to the digitized version of the book.

Distributed computing projects like the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have been commonplace for years. Those projects rely on thousands of people allowing their personal computers to be used to solve tiny bits of very large mathematical problems. But this is a new sort of distribution: Instead of computers being recruited to do the work, it is being distributed across millions of humans, most of whom have no idea that they’re working on a greater project.

What incredible irony. We’ve developed a massive computing network that spans the globe, linking billions of people and enabling incredible capabilities, and we’re using it to facilitate a job that only humans can do. When you solve the captcha, you’re becoming the ultimate worker bee, working toward the greater good but ignorant of the exact nature of the final project. You have to wonder, are the computers working for us, or are we working for the computers?

I suppose another way to look at it is that we are all contributing a tiny bit to eliminate the need for good typists. Thirty years ago, the job of re-setting the book would have been handed to a bunch of typesetters (a job title that no longer exists in the modern age). But instead of hiring them, we are getting the job done for free by using the Internet to make use out of what would otherwise be wasted effort.

Another irony is that this wouldn’t be possible if the spammers hadn’t forced the need for captchas in the first place. By relentlessly harassing websites, spammers have enabled this book digitization project. Next time you encounter a spammer online, remember that someday Wally’s books will be available in print again and it might be thanks to them.

Nov 24 2008

De-regulated toilet paper

We had the first visitors to stay in the Airstream in its new role as occasional guest house. A family of five came down from Vermont on a bargain airfare and four of them inhabited the Airstream for a long weekend. Being in the Airstream as it sits in the dark carport is not nearly as interesting as camping somewhere scenic, but it does have certain advantages for both hosts and guests.

I know this because the visit was successful despite four small children. I generally am leery of situations where the children are equal or greater in number than the adults (you never know when they might band together and take over), but these were good kids. Giving them their own space in the Airstream was instrumental to my perception, I’m sure, since they were out of sight and mind late at night and early in the morning. Regardless, a good time was had. In gratitude, they left Emma with the traditional Vermonter’s present: a cold.

So Emma is sniffling and honking all over the house now. I’m trying to avoid that cold because I have to fly next week to the major RV industry trade show in Louisville KY. If I get a cold, I can’t fly. In this case, I am somewhat split on the prospect. If I get the cold, I miss an important opportunity to sell advertising and meet our current clients. On the other hand, if I get the cold, I don’t have to go to Louisville in December. (“Second Prize: A Trip To Louisville in December! First Prize: You Get to Stay Home!”)

I don’t have anything against Louisville per se, but I do hate flying this time of year. Flights tend to be crowded, winter storms are always a threat, and if I don’t get a cold from some visiting Vermont child I can be virtually guaranteed of getting one from a sneezing Rhinovirus Ronald on the airplane.

Plus there’s that oh-so-fun airline service. Susan and Adam flew home for the holidays yesterday, and their report from that experience reminded me of the travails of traveling by air these days. I’ll let Susan’s email speak for itself:

Our tickets to Portland, Maine, via Charlotte, North Carolina, cost $300 apiece. Leaving Tucson, we asked to check bags to Charlotte where we planned to spend a few days, then go on to Newark. “Can do,” says [name withheld], and it will cost another $500 apiece to do so. Despite Charlotte’s closer proximity to Tucson, it costs more to get there. Or costs more to get our one bag there because we could just get off the plane…

Okay, so Portland it is and that costs us another $15 to check the bag. For passengers traveling with large overstuffed roller bags and bulging knapsacks and who carry all this stuff on board, luggage is free!

On board there are no services and nothing is free. No free coke, tea. Water costs $2. Flight attendants are now in retail, hawking drinks and snacks at price points ranging from $1 to $7. Do they get bonused on sales? Other than than, they don’t seem to have any duties connected with making us feel comfortable and loved.

Oh there is one other duty to perform. In the last 20 minutes of the flight, we’re subject to a commercial announcement, offering us a great deal on the US Air credit card with Bank of America that earns us great freebies on this self-service airline. Who says that credit is tightening? I’m able to obtain it as I’m sitting on a jetliner on its final approach to Charlotte.

I long ago gave up expecting anything but basic transportation from the airlines, but things have sunk below even my low expectations. I’m usually content when they just leave me alone, but that is too much to ask on many airlines that insist on bombarding me with loud audio-visual messages hawking their junk. Ever notice how the intrusive announcements always start right when you are drifting off to sleep after takeoff?

But what should I expect? Today’s domestic air carriers are what you get when government agencies (TSA, FAA, NTSB) intersect with accountants. Those are the people who really run things now. The pilots and flight attendants are (excuse the pun) just along for the ride. I think a few airlines could do better hiring psychologists and Disney “imagineers” to redesign their procedures and policies. Then they might realize that blaring obnoxious messages above my head, on speakers than cannot be silenced, is what really forms my opinion of the experience of flying their jets.

I don’t care if they serve blue chips or pretzels, Coke or Pepsi. I just want to get there with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of relaxation. Leave me alone to read my book. Tell me how to buckle my seatbelt if you really must, but otherwise please sit down. They won’t do that, so I bring an arsenal of counter-annoyance equipment: ear plugs, eye shades, snacks of my own, a distracting book, bottled water. (An airline that offers complete sedation during the flight, like dentists, might be popular someday.) For this trip, maybe I’ll add a surgical mask to the kit in case they seat me next to Ronald.

The airline business is just one of many things I don’t understand. Here’s an example of something that should be dead simple, but isn’t: Toilet paper doesn’t come in a standard roll size.

I’m serious. On our big trip to IKEA last month, Eleanor bought a pair of SAGAN toilet paper roll holders. Then she discovered that the Scott’s Single-Ply paper we used successfully for three years in our Airstream (because it dissolves nicely in the black tank, don’t ask how we know) doesn’t fit on the roller. It’s just a tiny bit too wide.

But another version of toilet paper fits just fine. This was a clear indication that we needed to Google “toilet paper roll size” and find out the story. Turns out there’s no such thing as a standard toilet paper roll width. It commonly runs from 3.9 inches to 4.5 inches. Buyer beware.

This is probably because we’re not as big on standards and regulations in the US as they are in other parts of the world. I’d bet the European Union has very specific guidelines for toilet paper rolls, but here in the US we like to let the free market decide. That’s why wireless LAN technology languished for a decade before manufacturers finally agreed to let their equipment interoperate with other brands. That’s why Europe had, for many years, a far superior cellular phone system (despite the fact that cell phones were invented here). That’s why Alan Greenspan had to eat crow in October. And that’s why we are paying $15 for checked bags and $2 for water after we pay for airline tickets.

I like free markets too, but it sure would be nice if my toilet paper fit and my retirement fund was still intact. A few boundaries and guidelines are not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe we could work up one that prohibits hawking credit cards above 10,000 feet, too.