Sep 21 2013

Valley of Fires State Rec Area, NM

As we continue our march toward home from Lake Meade State Park in Kansas (spot “A” on the map), you might notice that we haven’t exactly plunged headlong toward Tucson. New Mexico is really drawing us in, in a way it has never done before. The last time we were so enchanted by this state was in early 2000, when Eleanor and I flew in (pre-Airstream) with Emma due to exit the womb in a month or so. Eleanor was so visibly pregnant that the ranger didn’t want her to climb ladders at Gila Cliff Dwellings, but Eleanor did it anyway (and all other challenges that came her way). Every time we come to New Mexico I think of that trip.

It’s a great place to tour, made even greater by the truly amazing great late-summer weather we’ve had. Yesterday’s drive took us a mere 80 miles to Carrizozo and an island in the middle of a 40,000 year-old lava flow, upon which a campground has been built. This is the Valley of Fires State Recreation Area. (Not to be confused with Valley of Fire State Park near Lake Mead in Nevada.)

This campground is unique, in that your campsite sits atop a literal island, surrounded in all directions by tortured black lava rock and a few hardy plants and animals that have managed to colonize it.

The centerpiece of the rec area is a fantastic walking path that winds through the lava field and offers interpretive signs along the way. You can walk on the lava if you want, but it’s sharp and deeply convoluted, so it’s really more of an effort than you might expect.

The only negative we found about this park is the gnats. Strong winds yesterday kept them at bay but in the morning they were back, and a few snuck into the Airstream as we were getting ready to go. The park volunteer camp host showed me a bottle of 100% deet and a headnet that we wears when running the weedwacker.

I wouldn’t let that dissuade you from a visit. You can always come in the winter months if you really can’t stand the thought of bugs. Keep in mind that this spot is at 5,200 feet elevation so it probably gets pretty cold.

Tech report: Verizon signal was fairly good thanks to the ground elevation of the campground/island above the surrounding lava flow. Most of the sites have water and electric, too. Overall, a very nice place and we were glad to have stopped there. If we were planning to do some serious hiking out on the lava we would have stayed a second night, but alas, our trip is winding down so it was just a one night stand.

The trip plan from here is even more vague than before. We have two more stops in mind, and after that we’re just going to see how we feel about things. Tonight’s stop is designed to keep us away from populated areas since it’s Saturday night (and popular campgrounds might be full), and that’s perfectly fine with all of us. Se we have headed to yet another remote part of northern New Mexico. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

Sep 16 2013

A slow roam through Kansas

It wasn’t long ago that I wrote the advice to aspiring Airstreamers that they should “make a [trip] plan, then plan to change it.” That’s exactly what we’ve done, and it has worked out nicely.

In the previous blog entry I noted that we were watching the storms in Colorado and trying to time our arrival to miss the rain. But once we got onto the road in Missouri (departing Stevyn & Troy’s place) Eleanor suggested we just slow down and forget all the interim goals I had in mind. I thought about it for a moment as we were chugging west on I-70, then agreed. We would just take it one day at a time.

This led to another decision: forget about Colorado this time. The rain on the eastern side of the Rockies was persisting and we were just going to end up mostly re-tracing routes we’ve driven before. Looking at the map, we saw lots of routes and stops in New Mexico that we had never explored, and suddenly we heard New Mexico calling to us. One spot led to another, and soon we had a list of potential places to visit.

So we are still winging it with a rough plan that changes daily as events (weather and interest level) warrant. We’ve abandoned the Interstate for “blue highways” across Kansas and that decision alone has made the trip significantly more interesting. There was one long day in there on I-70, ending up in a restaurant parking lot for the night, but since then we haven’t seen the Interstate and certainly haven’t missed it. It may seem strange to slow down in Kansas, a state that usually causes people to speed up, but a slow meander across the countryside does reveal a lot of rural charm (and occasionally interesting mid-century architecture) for those inclined to see it.

After that overnight in Junction City KS, we wandered southwest past Dodge City. Eleanor has begun training as a driver of the Airstream, and this relatively quiet route gave her a good chance to drive 120+ miles, for which I am proud of her. She didn’t enjoy it much, especially the construction zone … and the rotary … and a few other things … but she did very well. The Airstream has no damage and I found it so relaxing to have her drive that at one point I nearly fell asleep.

Quite a while later, with Eleanor recovering in the passenger seat, we ended up at a remote oasis in amidst the sorghum fields called Lake Meade State Park. Whoever thought of damming this little valley and making a park out of it was a genius, because it’s just a wonderful thing to find a lake nestled amongst tall shady trees after hundreds of miles of flat vast dryness. We celebrated with a turn on the swingset by the lake shore.

And better still, since it’s off-season we were virtually alone in the place. You have to want to go here, since it’s many miles off Rt 54. Put it this way, it’s about mid-way between Dodge City and Liberal KS, and if you want to go get a quart of milk you need to drive about 16 miles just to get to the highway. Sometimes the places that are incredibly inconvenient are great.

Today was another long leg, but we’re already slowing down. While at a fuel stop in the small town of Hooker, Oklahoma, we encountered the principal of the high school. Emma was snickering at the sign across the street which identified Hooker as the home of the “Horny Toads” (a sporting team), and he said (good-naturedly) “Are you making fun of our town?” I thought it would be a nice ice-breaker to ask where we could get lunch in town, and he not only directed us to a good spot, but actually led us with his truck to a place on we could park the Airstream. I wasn’t entirely sure we needed to stop for lunch, but this was a local recommendation and a red carpet to boot, so we had lunch in town and ended up killing over an hour of the day.

After lunch we cruised through Oklahoma’s panhandle and toward the continental divide to Capulin, NM for a visit to volcano country. There are supposedly something like 200 extinct volcanoes here, but the best known is Capulin Volcano National Monument. The plan at the moment is to explore this area for a while and then meander down into New Mexico further. That’s as far as it goes. We’re all cool with that.

By the way, if you are in Tucson in early October, check out Tucson Modernism Week. It’s a relatively new event, only in its second year, but already growing and full of interesting talks, architectural tours, parties, and exhibits. I’m not one of the organizers (friends are), but I will be speaking at the event on Oct 5 on the subject of “Amazing Vintage Trailers,” and I helped them get started on a Vintage Trailer Show too. (If you have a trailer that might be good for the show, check their ad on Craigslist to get an application.

Sep 13 2013

Steep learning curve

Roadtripping is never great when you’ve got too many miles to cover, so I had not expected much from our day on the road from Jackson Center OH to New Florence MO. Usually I arrived bleary-eyed and cramped, fatigued from too many hours of staring at striped concrete, and wondering how the long-haul truckers do it day after day.

But this road trip was a little different. Even though we started late (9:10 a.m.), and despite intermittent rain for the first two hundred miles along I-70, things proceeded smoothly and eventually I was pleased to find that we were in St Louis right on schedule. Sixty miles further west was our goal: an offer of courtesy parking with our friends Stevyn and Troy.

Like a lot of courtesy parking offers, this one was over a year in the making. It takes a while to swing by any particular spot in the USA, and even though Stevyn had tempted us with colorful descriptions of a bucolic country paradise, I wasn’t sure when we’d next by driving through Missouri to take advantage of the stay. But it was well worth the wait, because we found pleasant hosts at a peaceful little homestead atop a hill surrounded by forests and fields, and a grassy spot to park the Airstream (with 30-amp power nearby).

There was only one problem: getting up the driveway. Stevyn had advised that there were two hills along their gravel driveway, and I thought it rather odd that she suggested All-Wheel Drive or 4WD might be helpful. How bad could they be? We soon found out.

The photo really doesn’t do it justice. You have to look closely to see that there’s a point at which the road disappears from view because of the first drop-off (I can’t call it a hill, since it seems closer to a cliff). It was so sudden and shocking that I tried to brake the Airstream to a stop, but it slid over the loose gravel surface and continued down the hill anyway. There was nothing to do but release the brakes and keep steering as we plummeted down what I later estimated at a 20% grade.

It was a mistake to lose the momentum, because at the bottom we faced another hill of equal steepness. The AWD system in the Mercedes was flashing yellow warning lights on the dash to let us know that the highway-oriented performance tires were slipping in the gravel, but fortunately the diesel engine produces great torque and with four wheels pulling we still climbed steadily to the top.

(A side note here: Anyone who still thinks our car’s 3.0 liter V6 turbodiesel is “underpowered” is invited to pull a 7,500 pound trailer up this hill from a stop with your tow vehicle.)

At the top of the hill we found Troy waiting by the side of the road with words of wisdom: “You have to drive it like you own it.” Sage advice indeed, since ahead of us was yet another nearly identical slope, and I immediately knew what he meant. Full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes.

We climbed the second hill as well, and found ourselves in a tiny paradise. Again, the photo doesn’t do justice the scene. Imagine being parked on an 80-acre hobby farm, on grass and beneath a large shady tree. Nearby is a vegetable garden overflowing with produce.

Chickens and peacocks are roaming around. To the east is a pasture with a dozen or so head of furry cows. A lovely house is across the driveway, with an outdoor patio that has a view to the ponds, and a firepit. Trails head off across the meadow and into the woods, and the sun is shining on a perfect late summer day.

It has been quite a while since we had weather so perfect that every window and vent in the trailer could be opened. The vent fans blew out the hot air that had been trapped in the Airstream during our low tow, and filled the interior with clean country air. We slept with the windows open, and I even opened the one by my head just so I could hear the crickets all night long.

It didn’t take much to convince us to stay two nights instead of just one. This morning we had breakfast with the entire family (nine in total counting us, which consumed quite a bit of the egg-laying output of the hens). I got some desk work done in the morning, and then while Eleanor and Emma were working on school I got a tour around the property from Troy in their 4WD utility vehicle. I also popped into the car to store this location into the “Favorites” of the GPS. The rest of the day we just spent talking, petting the farm cat, playing with the dog, and chilling out in the shade of an oak tree. Eleanor used the opportunity of the afternoon to make up a huge and complicated salad for everyone to share at dinnertime.

We could stay here very comfortably for a while, but we know we need to get moving west. The big rain system that has flooded parts of Colorado will be here in a couple of days. After considering the options we’ve decided to drive through it (via Kansas) and arrive in Colorado hopefully around the time the storm system is exiting. So in the morning we will hit the road just to cover some miles, and leave this lovely stop behind, at least for now.

Sep 11 2013

Two days in JC

Trundling over to Jackson Center, Ohio, is a pretty routine experience for us these days. We get here every year, and sometimes twice a year. And yet, it’s still sort of exciting to visit the home base of Airstream, talk to the people, watch the guys working in the Service Center, and see all the Airstreams coming and going.

Sixty miles out from the plant we started to see other Airstreams along the road, and pulled over in convenient spots for lunch. By the time you get to Jackson Center, which is a small village far from city lights, the Airstreams seem to become as numerous as the soybean & corn fields.

Coming here this week has been quite a different experience from our annual Alumapalooza week. For one thing, it’s very quiet. Only about eight Airstreams are in the Terra Port, and there’s no line at the service center parts desk nor anyone in the Wally Byam store most of the time. I liked it. But still, we never fail to run into someone we’ve met before in the Terra Port. This time it was Jim and Linda and their two cats.

The other thing that is different is communications. Verizon and AT&T are terrible here; non-existent inside the metal buildings and marginal everywhere else. At Alumapalooza we rely on professional-grade handheld radios to keep the staff in touch, but during this visit we’ve just had to act as if it’s 1980 and cell phones haven’t been invented. I haven’t been able to successfully receive a call since I got here, although I can place them if I stand outside in the 93 degree heat (with plenty of humidity).

Ah well, technology will find a way. In this case I discovered that I could make very good Skype calls from the air conditioned Service Center lobby using their wifi, and the rest of the time I just told people to email me instead. That’s good enough for a couple of days.

Our primary purpose in being here was to have a few meetings with Airstream staff, but also to pick up some parts. The Safari’s silver beltline and propane tank lid look just awful as a result of UV exposure, so I bought replacements for those as well as a few of those small parts that are so necessary but you can never find on the road when you need them, like various sizes of rivets.

(I got up early this morning and installed the replacement propane lid before the heat built up outside. The job involves drilling and riveting, and took about 30 minutes not counting the run to the parts dept. to get another size of rivets.)

One of the Airstreams I spotted here was Wally’s “gold” Airstream, a semi-famous trailer that we wrote about in the Summer 2006 issue of Airstream Life. It’s a 1957 tandem axle custom that went to Mexico and Africa on some of Wally’s last caravans. The anodizing process used to give the trailer its gold color was never really ideal, and would deteriorate periodically leaving the trailer looking pretty awful, so this time Airstream decided to paint it gold instead.

The new paint job looks just spectacular and should last quite a long time. If our trailer starts to look ratty (many years from now) and we want to keep it longer, I’d seriously consider a silver paint job on it. I’ve seen other ones and if it is done well it looks great.

Jackson Center is a very quiet little village these days. There’s not much here to do, but people are still making an effort to keep the village alive. The Elder Theater just successfully completed a Kickstarter to raise $25k to get a digital projector and so the town’s one-screen old-school cinema will be able to continue. The Verandah, the best restaurant in town for years, was closed but now is advertising for staff again, so we have high hopes for its return soon.

This may be our last night in a convenient full hookup spot, so we’ve made the most of it. That means running the A/C, watching a movie on the TV, taking long showers, using the microwave, making repairs, and even a late-night final laundry run.

We’re done with work now, so it’s time to move on. Tomorrow we are going to make the major sprint of our trip, hopefully ending up somewhere past St Louis MO by the end of the day (over 400 miles). That’s a big one for us, and we’ll be starting early to make the most of the day.

Sep 08 2013

Back into the routine

Sometimes the best part of a long drive is the chance to think. The road through the Adirondack State Park region of New York is scenic and winding, but also familiar, so as we meandered through on our way down to the I-90 tollway and Eleanor and Emma became engaged with their books (and in Emma’s case, Nintendo games) I had the chance to explore my own thoughts without much distraction.

At first I was mostly concerned with “feeling out” the Airstream. Sitting for a long time means little surprises can crop up, and although it towed as nicely as ever and my pre-flight checks turned up no problems other than rusted hitch pin (which I replaced), I was on alert for anything unusual. We weren’t even one mile down the road before I realized something odd was up with the braking; the trailer wasn’t stopping as well as normal.

At first I assumed it was rust on the brake discs, but after the rust wore off there was still a feeling that the trailer wasn’t braking as hard as it should. I also got a bit of a sideways push on hard braking, which is sometimes a hint that the Hensley is not aligned perfectly straight. That happens when the hitch is removed and re-installed, but we had already aligned it on the way east in May, so the theory didn’t fit. The hitch alignment is a “set and forget” sort of thing. You don’t need to re-align it unless you remove the hitch head from the trailer, but just to be sure I stopped on level ground and tweaked the adjustment a couple of times.

That didn’t seem to fix the issue. I realized the off-center push would sometimes happen to the left and sometimes to the right, which actually suggests that the hitch head alignment is fine. (A minor off-center push in either direction is normal, caused by uneven road surface when you are coming to a stop.) But I never had any type of push before, so what was up?

After about 80 miles of towing and fiddling, I realized the cause in a “DUH!” moment. The Prodigy brake controller had somehow gotten set to a lower maximum voltage. This reduces the braking action, which allowed the Airstream to push the Mercedes a little, and thus allowed the Hensley to articulate to one side or another in a stop depending on the slope of the ground. I checked and the Prodigy was set to a max 8.8 volts where it should have been set to 10.0 volts at least (on our trailer, yours will likely be different). I have no idea how it got altered, since the setting can’t be changed without the trailer attached, and the Mercedes hasn’t towed the Airstream since early June.

Once I corrected that, we had the normal sensation of the trailer brakes leading the car, which prevents the “Hensley bump” and returned the confident braking feel I’m used to. Other than the brake issue, the Airstream seemed to be perfect, which was great.

That’s not to say we don’t have “squawk list” of things to attend to. The silver beltline trim around the lower body edge has faded to chalky white, and in one place has peeled loose. I’m going to get a big roll of the stuff and replace it (an easy job). The plastic propane tank lid is deteriorating from UV exposure and although it’s only cosmetic damage, I’m tired of looking at it peeling up like a bad sunburn, so I’ll probably replace that too. Both of these items can be picked up at Airstream when we drop in next week. We’ve got two more Hehr window gears that are stripping and I only have one spare, so I will be ordering more of those soon, too.

Lest we die of boredom with the I-90 NY State Thruway slog, we detoured up through Rochester NY and to the shore of Lake Ontario for an overnight stay at Hamlin Beach State Park. It was a well-reviewed park, with manicured green lawns and good access to the shoreline, with nicely forested campsites in several loops. Being the week after Labor Day, it was barely occupied. Since we arrived at sunset, the entrance gate and offices were all closed, but a friendly staffer passing by said to just grab a site and pay in the morning. I appreciated his helpfulness, although we would have done that anyway.

After a long period of sitting, the Airstream did experience some internal discomfort in its black water holding tank. The motion of a couple hundred miles of towing stirred up things inside the tank and the result was a pretty awful smell from the plumbing vent when we stopped. The antidote is easy, a triple dose of enzymatic tank chemical and plenty of water—the travel trailer equivalent of Pepto-Bismol.

Two days of towing has brought us to Lou & Larry’s home near Cleveland. This is the best courtesy parking spot in the entire USA, with full hookups, wifi, level ground, and lots of hospitality from our hosts. We’ve come here many times over the years. This time Larry took me to a real camera store—quite a rarity these days—and then his daughter and our friend Loren took us to Cleveland’s Westside Market.

When we are in cities it’s a big treat for Eleanor to hit the markets like this. There are a few in the USA that always are worth a stop, such as Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market, Boston’s Haymarket, and Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market. Cleveland’s Westside Market is definitely on that list.

For me the attraction is both the food and the architecture. I love looking in the glass cases at the abundance and variety of food, but I often spend as much time looking for photographic subjects in the buildings themselves. Westside Market has a nice feature in its tiny upstairs gallery that gives a great view of the hustling activity below. The building looks almost like it was re-purposed from an old train station, like the Musee D’Orsay, and I love just looking at the fantastic arched ceiling.

Eleanor of course scored a few interesting things that will pop up on our table in the next few weeks. I don’t know exactly what she bought; I’d rather be surprised.

For now, we can’t seem to eat much of our own food, since Lou & Larry keep hosting parties every night. Last night we had a birthday party for a relative, with about 14 people attending and countertops buried in tasty stuff, and tonight we’ve got more guests coming for corn on the cob and whatnot. We just try to calmly accept the constant flow of friendly faces, meals, and conversation. This is what you have to put up with sometimes when you courtesy park.