Aug 18 2014

The Plains states turn out to be less plain

I have to admit that while we were in Jackson Center I was feeling a little dismay at the prospects for the rest of our trip toward home base in Arizona. We’ve covered this route so many times, heading both northeast and southwest, that it seems that there is little left for us to see. As blog stalker “insightout” commented, “How many times can you do it before you go insane?”

It is true that we have visited most of the major tourist stops along the way, but it’s perhaps a conceit to think that we have seen it all. Of course we haven’t. Nobody has seen everything in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas, even people who live there.

The real trick for most people seems to be the flattish plains states, which form an unavoidable barrier from North Dakota through West Texas. Kansas and Nebraska particularly have a reputation for dull driving, but really they are all exercises in patience and opportunities for creative distraction. The latter is probably why Kansas boasts many things reputed to be the largest in the world, including a ball of twine, sunflower, and hand dug well. (Not to be outdone, Missouri has the largest golf tee and wind chimes.)

Our solution has been to wander a little off course and seek out state parks that we haven’t previously visited, which usually leads to a local attraction or other sort of tourist site. This idea led us off I-70 to Illinois’ Fox Ridge State Park, which is conveniently near the Lincoln Cabin State Historic Site, which is itself a fine destination for a few hours thanks to an excellent visitors center and a living history farm. I picked up a little knowledge about Dutch Oven cooking from talking to the historical re-enactors there. (It was particularly interesting to me because I’m currently reading “Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is a great biography of Lincoln and his cabinet.)

From there we decided to wander further off the beaten path and meander through soybean farms up toward Springfield. There is a lot more “Lincoln” stuff to be seen in that region (reminds me of the Anne of Green Gables obsession in Prince Edward Island, but at least Lincoln is real). Our goal for the day wasn’t Lincoln but Wright—Frank Lloyd Wright, specifically his masterpiece Dana-Thomas House in downtown Springfield. If you are an FLW fan, this is definitely one to see.

Our camp in that area was Sangchris Lake State Park, about 30 minutes out of town. Like many state parks and Army Corps parks, the one was formed the damming of a river, and then development of a green and tranquil campground and other public facilities. We often are far from the action when we go to places like this, and cellular connectivity is a problem even with the booster and external antenna, but it’s worth the minor inconvenience for a quiet and scenic place to stay.

I was starting to get concerned about the amount of time we had been spending in Illinois, since Arizona remained 1,500 miles away and I do have deadlines that will force me back to home base soon. This wandering path was fun but I could hear the clock ticking. At the end of the month I have to have the Winter 2014 issue of the magazine at least mostly in the hands of my Art Director, and also head to Oregon to run Alumafandango. I’ve been working on both as we go, but it’s hard to stay ahead of ahead of the deadlines when you are also constantly on the move.

So after a half day in Springfield we pressed onward along I-72 through Illinois and into Missouri. This road eventually becomes Rt 36, a straight and quiet divided highway that parallels I-70 at a safe distance from major cities and Ferguson riots. We didn’t choose it because we were afraid to drive through St Louis, we were just trying to find a new path across Missouri. Alas, there’s little of interest along this route and most of the way we had very limited data service (Verizon “extended” network) so it wasn’t a huge hit with any of us, until we pulled into Pershing State Park that night.

Pershing, as you might guess, is in the middle of a hometown region of historical sites honoring General Pershing. I will admit I know next to nothing about the man, but we were all filled up with historical information from the Lincoln region and I was still anxious to make up some time, so the general’s legacy was lost on us this trip. Perhaps another time.

We surrendered to another inevitability however, dropping south to the tedium of I-70 through Kansas, just to speed up the trip a little. This brought us through Topeka and past signs for the Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Site. This isn’t nearly as compelling a name as “Sea World,” but in the grand scheme of I-70 it was enough to bring us to a halt. I’m glad we did.

The site interprets the importance of a Supreme Court decision regarding racial equality and also manages to explore some sensitive racial history and issues in this country without being preachy. We found it to be fascinating, and it also counted as a good piece of homeschooling for Emma. We spent an hour there and would have stayed longer if we had the time. The final stop on our self-guided tour was a pair of headphones, through which Emma was introduced to the music of Marvin Gaye, playing “What’s Goin’ On.” I think she liked it.

I think what I’ve learned is that the mid western plains states are actually less boring the more time you spend in them. It’s racing through that causes the fatigue, because then all you see are the billboards and plains. There are plenty of small things to explore if we can take the time, and I’ll be thinking about that next May when we do this trip again.

Aug 14 2014

From Maumee in the rain

After our tedious crossing at Sarnia, it was getting late so we spent the night at one of our notorious “undisclosed locations,” and in the morning paused to assess our situation.

Our goal was Airstream in Jackson Center OH, to meet people there. At this point it was Saturday, and we had no need to cover a lot of miles to make our goal by Monday. So all we really needed would be to find a decent place (uncrowded, pleasant) to spend a couple of nights on a sunny summer weekend on the way down I-75.

The trick with this of course was that on sunny summer weekends the good spots tend to be booked up in advance by weekenders. This might sound like a nightmare to those of you who are planners, but for me it is a great situation to be in. These days we don’t often have the opportunity to be agenda-free for a day or two. Rather than make a decision right off, we decided to start the day with a big breakfast and then meander out slowly. The weather was fine, the roads were uncrowded, and I didn’t have enormous amounts of work breathing down my neck. We stopped at giant flea market along the highway, and browsed junk for an hour, which is the sort of thing we haven’t done in years. Even with a tedious traffic jam in Detroit, we had a pretty pleasant drive.

I finally realized that if we were going to find a spot that met our criteria, we’d have to go where other people don’t think to go for vacation. Fortunately, we had both Detroit and Toledo on our route.

We eventually settled on spending our weekend in Toledo. Well, not really. We headed for Maumee Bay State Park, which is east of Toledo on the southern shore of Lake Erie in the town of Oregon, OH. Online reviews suggested it was a nice place, and a quick phone call verified that there were plenty of sites available. And it gave us a unique opportunity to visit Oregon and Ohio simultaneously.

Maumee Bay turned out to be a winner. The park is extremely well kept, not terribly crowded even on this gorgeous summer weekend, with great facilities, a beach, electricity at every site, and generally pretty. We snagged a non-reservable site for a night and liked it so much that we booked another day the next morning. Our Sunday was spent lounging around, reading books, and hanging out on the beach for a few hours. The beach had issues with high bacteria counts in the water, but overall the “weekend in Toledo” turned out great, the best I could have hoped for on a nice summer weekend on this route.

By Monday, things changed dramatically. Huge thunderstorms were scheduled to arrive early, so we hustled to get the Airstream packed, hitched, and ready to travel before 8:30 a.m. It’s never fun to hitch up or visit the dump station in the rain, and all the time I was outside I was being urged on by ominous thunder from a bank of dark grey that was sweeping up from the southwest. Literally seconds after we finished at the dump station, the first fat cold raindrops began to hit us.

This brings me to today’s real subject: safe driving in the rain. The heavy thunderstorms we encountered are not uncommon in the midsection of the country during the summer. Anyone who tows regularly will encounter them sooner or later. If you’re nervous about that, good—it means you’re not too cocky. Your first line of defense is always to take a break from towing and wait out the storm. We’ve done that a few times.

It’s hard for some people to accept that strategy, because all the cars and big semi-trailers will stay on the highway and drive at ludicrous speeds right up to the moment that they find themselves in a multi-car pileup. Obviously you shouldn’t go by their example. Your travel trailer may be great in dry weather but it’s no match for a car or a semi-trailer in a storm. Hydroplaning, stopping distance, control, and steering are all significantly worse in a heavy rain with wind.

After a moderately harrowing slalom through Toledo city streets, we were towing on I-75 in poor visibility and heavy rain. The water was coming down too quickly to drain well off the road, so there were pairs of rivers in each lane to increase the hydroplane effect. With a little experimentation (and this is where feedback from the vehicle’s steering is important) I found my most comfortable speed and stayed there until conditions improved.

It wasn’t long before some of the cars and trucks figured out they were going too fast. At every exit, bump, and curve we’d see a flurry of red brake lights. A few miles further we encountered blue flashing lights on the opposite side of the highway; the first, inevitable accident.

Ahead Eleanor spotted a car driving with lights off. We could only see it when it applied brakes; otherwise it was invisible. Later we got a look at it and realized it was red. Red cars tend to disappear the most quickly in fog because water filters out the color red first. (Ask any underwater photographer.) I made a special point of tracking that car and staying far away until it exited.

I was prepared to exit or pull over if the storm or fog thickened. But from radar images on Eleanor’s phone we knew that we were driving out of the storm, so the real task was to hold the course and keep plenty of distance between us and the car in front.

Keep in mind also that the affects of heavy rain can persist even after the storm is gone. Later, making a quick detour in Findlay OH to pick up some documents at the local Staples, I stepped on the brake at low speed and felt the ABS kick on. Why? The trailer’s tires were braking too aggressively for the wet pavement and thus skidding a little. The trailer will push the tow vehicle, and the tow vehicle brakes will have to work harder, which can cause the ABS to kick in on a wet surface.

I don’t mention all this to intimidate people who tow (or who are thinking about towing). It’s just that I get photos emailed to me on a regular basis of “interesting” accidents involving Airstreams, and I’d like to see the number of such accidents decline. This may be something we can help with, in our future special event next July in Ontario. Things are moving ahead with that event, and the plan is to announce details by October of this year.

Aug 10 2014

Hot sauce

I’m sure there’s some great saying to be quoted that ties together travel and adversity, but I’m going to skip the Internet search for clever quotes and just draw my own conclusions. After all, it’s our own voyage and our own adversity to deal with.

Not that this has been a bad trip! On the contrary, we have overall had a very nice few days of Airstream travel. But even on the nice days there is usually some small aggravation or diversion from the plan that has to be dealt with. Perfection, in travel and all other things, is hard to come by.

On our first day we were quite lucky in many ways: we had a pleasant and uneventful drive through the Adirondacks of New York state, west along the Thruway to the Buffalo area, and ended up snagging one of the three remaining sites at Darien Lakes State Park on a Thursday night.

This is a particularly good result considering that the Airstream has sat in Vermont for a couple of months, under trees which rain down an acidic combination of dead leaves, blooms, and branches (mixed with a little bird dropping for extra toxicity). It has been neglected and taken for granted all summer, and then—after a roof wash and a quick inspection—put back into service and expected to operate flawlessly for 360 miles on the first day out.

Since storage kills Airstreams quicker than use, I was pleased to find that all of the critical systems survived and we had no major problems, other than a few mice that Eleanor successfully trapped out in the two weeks before departure.

(You might ask why storage is more deadly than use, and the short answer is that during use the Airstream is maintained and problems are caught early; whereas in storage problems tend to fester and cause damage while your back is turned.)

The plan was to clear Canadian customs the next morning and drive to London, Ontario, to meet Andy Thomson of Can-Am RV. Andy writes the Towing column for the magazine, and we are talking about putting together a very interesting new event with him for 2015. But our travel schedule was tight, allowing us only four hours to get to London, and I was feeling the pressure all morning, probably because I was aware that we really didn’t have a lot of leeway if something went wrong.

Something did go wrong. In Brantford ON we got mired in a traffic jam on the freeway, which eventually ground to a complete halt. We sat there for over 30 minutes, parked among the semi-trailers, reading books while the more agile cars broke loose and took an entrance ramp ahead (going the wrong way) to escape. This was not an option for the trucks and us, being too long to make the 300-degree right turn necessary to get on the entrance ramp. Eventually, all the cars were gone and I realized we now had room to make a three point turn on the highway, drive in the wrong direction down the breakdown lane, and then up another entrance ramp further back in the direction we had come from.

This might seem nerve-wracking but it felt like great fun to me. How often do you get to drive backwards down the freeway—with a travel trailer? Coming up the curved entrance ramp in the wrong direction was a little odd, especially when I came to the police car with lights flashing that was blocking the ramp, but amazingly there was just enough room to squeeze the Airstream through, across two lanes of heavy traffic, and once again into a legal travel configuration.

Eleanor got a really fun part of this. While we were parked on the highway she had gone into the trailer to make sandwiches. A few minutes later I got the opportunity to escape the highway and warned her that we might start moving at any moment, with her inside. I half expected to find her later looking like Lucille Ball in “The Long Long Trailer,” covered with ingredients and bruises from being tossed around inside the Airstream, but when I finally found a parking lot a few miles later and pulled over, she was ready inside the Airstream with three sandwiches neatly bagged up and ready to serve. It turns out that it’s a pretty smooth ride in there.

After our detour and a quick nosh on those sandwiches we were a solid hour behind schedule. We raced up to London, grabbed Andy, and headed onward together to Grand Bend to do some scouting.

Grand Bend is a nice little beach town on the eastern shore of Lake Huron, just about an hour from the Sarnia ON-Pt Huron MI crossing. I’ll talk more about what we found there in a later blog entry, but suffice to say now that it’s a very nice spot and after just a couple of hours of scouting we decided that we definitely are going to launch a new event there for July 2015. I promise that it will be absolutely unique, and if you travel anywhere within 1,000 miles of Michigan next summer you should plan to go.

Andy had to head back home but we spent the night at the Pinery Provincial Park (the equivalent of a US state park). Pinery is a very nice place, quite massive, which feels a lot like an overgrown Florida State Park. There are about 1,000 campsites, all tucked under tall pine trees on sandy spots in a forest. People reserve it a year in advance to get a summer weekend, which is why we could only get Thursday night.

I wasn’t really unhappy about having to leave after one night. The park was too big for my taste, too crowded (even though it covered hundreds of aces and the entrance road was over 4 km), and the campground loop was too tight. We had to do some careful planning to find a route out of our campground loop that would allow the Airstream out without hitting a tree or scraping an overhead branch. In all the hundreds of campgrounds we’ve visited, this one ranked above all others in sheer difficulty to navigate with a 30-foot trailer.

I was also a bit peeved that we had reserved an electric site, paid a total of CAN$56 in fees, and got Dunes site #25 which is marked on the Pinery map as having electric—but did not have electricity anywhere that we could find. If we’d had more time I would have taken it up with the staff but we were again on a tight schedule and in the end it just wasn’t worth the hassle. We had more scouting work to do on Friday before the 2 pm checkout time, so I decided to just focus on work and then head to some place that was less popular.

In our travels we’ve usually had the best times at quiet places, but it’s hard to find campground that is both pleasant and unpopular on a summer weekend in the north. At this point we had no idea where we were going to spend the night. The good part was that we also had no itinerary for the weekend. My next scheduled stop was at Airstream and there was no point in getting there until Monday, and it was only 264 miles away, which meant we could go anywhere we wanted in the meantime.

So after heading southwest from Grand Bend we stopped at Point Edward park under the famous Blue Water Bridge at Sarnia, ON. This is a sweet little spot for a break, where you can watch the gorgeous blue-green water flow by in the river, walk the grassy park, marvel at the enormous bridges overhead, and ogle your first view of America just across the river in Pt Huron MI. We spent the afternoon.

The traffic on the Blue Water bridge is so bad there’s an app you can download to watch the traffic and figure the best time to try to make it through. It’s bad because US Customs is right on the other side, which causes traffic to back up over the bridge and often a mile or two back into Sarnia. At 5 pm we launched into it; at 6:30 pm we finally cleared customs, having traveled a mere two miles or so. It was a frustrating end to the day, but if you look at the bright side, we had a nice long view from the top of the bridge…

So was our trip good, or bad? I say it’s a matter of how you view things. I think (being an optimist most of the time) that it was very good. Eleanor agrees. It wasn’t perfect but here we are, still standing, still traveling, still together, and more adventures lie ahead. My conclusion: a little adversity is the “hot sauce” that makes travel all that much more interesting.

Aug 05 2014

Turtle shells and teddy bears

Let’s see, if this is Tuesday then I must be in Vermont. That’s because last week I was in Montreal and the weekend before I was in Tucson.

Traveling is fun, but too much of it can be overwhelming. Eleanor and I have to make an effort to try to stay grounded when we are really moving a lot. This is a skill we honed during our full-timing period, when the scenery was always changing and the only constant was ourselves and the Airstream. You have to develop a sort of mental turtle shell that you carry around all the time, which is a sense that no matter where you are, you are still safe and still you.

Emma’s pediatrician called this the “inner teddy bear” for kids, but it’s the same thing. Emma developed her inner teddy bear a long time ago and it has served her well since. Kids are far better equipped to build up their turtle shell or teddy bear, if we just let them and don’t fill them with the same fears we adults often have.

I meet a lot of adults who are fearful of travel, and I can understand this because strangeness of surroundings, people, food, languages, climate, etc., is intimidating. But I also feel sorry for the adults who are full of regret for the travel experiences they have not been able to enjoy, because they seem to be unable to find the self-confidence they need to do what they want. It’s harder for adults to change themselves, and yet we must if we are to continue to grow. Having traveled in Airstreams for the last decade certainly has forced us to change.

This summer has gone well so far, meaning that most of the things we wanted to do have come off more or less according to plan, and we’ve had no major disasters. We might regret whatever we haven’t accomplished, but on the whole the positives far outweigh the negatives, and that’s about as close to perfection as real life ever gets. We ran a great event (Alumapalooza) at the Airstream factory, then got to Vermont for nice visits with family, and my motorcycling trip was a success. Eleanor and I got to take side trips, I got to play TBM for a few weeks, and the Interstate motorhome trip through California was pretty awesome. I have a souvenir of the motorcycling, namely a tiny bit of mobility loss in my left shoulder, but that should clear up with time and some more physical therapy.

Today Eleanor is working on getting the Airstream re-packed after several weeks of being parked. As always, our belongings (mostly Emma’s) are scattered all through my mother’s house and the Airstream needs a good cleaning in and out. I’ll be on the roof this afternoon, washing off the accumulated blooms and leaves so that our solar panels will work again. Tomorrow, the Airstream rolls out.

Our itinerary this week includes a stop in Ontario, where we are going to be scouting a site for a possible new event to be held in 2015. After that we’ll drop in on Airstream for a couple of days, and then we really don’t have a plan other than getting to Tucson no later than Aug 24. Might go through Colorado this time, but who knows? After such a rigidly planned summer, I think it will be nice to have a loose schedule for a week or two. The inner teddy bears are telling us that whatever we decide to do, we’ll be OK.

Jul 28 2014

Sleepless ferret time

I left off in the last blog about halfway through my 10 day trip in the Airstream Interstate. … and then, silence. That’s because I got back from the trip and immediately launched into a couple projects atop my day job of being the Airstream Life magazine Editor & Publisher, not the least of which was to write a guidebook about the Airstream Interstate.

Writing a guidebook is not really such a bad job, unless you, for reasons that cannot be fully explained here, have a deadline to complete the entire thing in three weeks. Then it’s an exercise to see how long you can stand to (in the words of Hunter S Thompson) work like a sleepless ferret, and still produce readable prose.

Not only readable, but accurate. These days, in the era of e-books, anyone can be a publisher, and sadly there are a lot of guidebooks available now that lack reliability and comprehensiveness. So I spent the last three weeks gorging on information and attempting to become expert on the intricacies of the Interstate motorhome, while typing out pages as quickly as I could.

So my blog stories of the Interstate trip suffered, but the good news is that I finished the first draft of the book last night. It’s off to my illustrator, and then I’ll run it past a few folks at Airstream and Airstream dealerships for fact-checking. With luck, the ebook can be out in September. It will probably run about 80 pages long in the final version. I’m just glad it’s off my desk and out of my head, so I can think like a normal person for a while.

I owe you a conclusion to the blog series I started. After I finished coastal Route 1 I headed up to spent a couple of nights in friendly driveways in the Silicon Valley area. I have a few friends up there, and one of them had a nice long fenced-in driveway in Los Altos that was just perfect.

After that I took the inland (101) route back to the Murphy Auto Museum Oxnard and spent the Fourth of July having dinner in Malibu with a friend. I’ve never been to Malibu before, but now that I’ve had a chance to see some of the spectacle there (lots of elaborate parties going on, and the people-watching was fantastic) it’s possible we’ll make another visit as a family someday.

On Saturday the fifth I took the Airstream down the coast to San Pedro (where the cruise ships depart Los Angeles) to meet some other folks. I got there a little early, so I found a spot in a Home Depot parking lot where a Mexican food truck was making quesadillas, and had a casual lunch in the Interstate under the shade of some trees. At this point I was feeling completely at ease with the motorhome; we were a team of urban explorers willing to go anywhere.

Tom M, a friend and blog reader, wrote in to ask:

– Was there anyplace that it was too big to park?

Well, yes, you can’t fit a 25-foot motorhome just anywhere. Some friends I wanted to visit in Sunnyvale CA had a driveway that was less than 25 feet long, and HOA rules about “oversized vehicles” being parked overnight on the street, so I stayed in Los Altos and they picked me up. But in Veterans Memorial Park in Monterey CA, there was a rule supposedly prohibiting vehicles over 23 feet or so. Half a dozen white box “Cruise America” rental motorhomes were camped there, all much longer than the limit, so I found a campsite that fit the Interstate and spent a peaceful night. Otherwise, I took it just about everywhere I wanted.

– Was it a hassle to pack-everything-up when you wanted to take day trips from the campsite?

Not for me, but then I was traveling light & solo. You can’t really spread out a lot in a B-van, so getting ready to break camp was mostly a matter of doing the dishes and tossing a few things into cabinets. I was usually ready to go in less than 10 minutes. Your mileage may vary.

The portability of the machine was its best feature, at least to a guy who has spent the last nine years in a rig 53 feet long. I took every opportunity to park it in places I’d never go with our 30-foot trailer, including parallel-parking on the street in Santa Barbara, pull-outs along California Route 1 and Tucson’s Catalina Highway (pictured below), grocery store parking lots, and undersized campsites.

Perhaps my favorite stop was on the coast north of Malibu at Point Mugu. I would have spent the day there if I didn’t have an appointment later that day…

After finishing business in Los Angeles, it was time to head toward home. My conundrum was where to stay. All week I’d been wrestling with this: toward the coast it was pleasantly cool but the holiday travelers had everything booked up in advance, while inland I’d find plenty of uncrowded places to stay–all of which would be scorching hot. So leaving Los Angeles was bittersweet.

I finally opted for heat, but with a compromise. North of Palm Springs is the Morongo Casino, which offers free overnight RV parking. Being a little higher in altitude and not quite as far into the Coachella Valley it was not terribly hot (by my standards) which meant a night around 80 degrees. It wasn’t practical to run the generator all night for air conditioning, so I just lived with it.

The next day was my torture test for the Interstate. Seven hours of driving through 100+ degree temperatures, at 75 MPH most of the way, including a 1000 ft climb where the road signs say to turn off the air conditioning or risk overheating. The Interstate was impressive, and I got 16.0 MPG despite the fast drive. It was too hot in the back, where the dash A/C couldn’t reach, so at one point I ran the generator and the ceiling air just to see what would happen. (It worked fairly well.)

I spent one night at home in Tucson, then took a day to drive up to the peak of the Santa Catalina Mountains to get caught in a thunderstorm, then drove the Interstate to a meeting in town (again no trouble parking) and finally spent the night in Casa Grande AZ before dropping the motorhome off in Scottsdale in the morning. Total: 1,600 miles of driving in ten days.

I’d do it again in a heartbeat. This was a fun trip. People who drive these things really have an interesting range of opportunities available to them. Obviously you give up a lot in terms of space, but on the other hand you get a lot of flexibility.

In fact, I’m hoping to get another shot at it later. Airstream is bringing out a new B-van in September, to be called “Grand Tour,” and it is supposed to be more camper-ish (less seating, more space for living). I want to get my hands on it. That’s going to be difficult for a while, since production will probably be limited and I expect demand to be high.

Now that the Interstate trip is over, and the book is mostly done, what’s next? Tomorrow I fly back to Vermont to be reunited with my family, and in a week or so we’ll start the next adventure, our 3,000 mile trip back to Arizona, via Ontario.