Sep 14 2011

Challenges along the way

For those who idolize the traveler, I feel compelled to occasionally offer tidbits of reality. It’s not all fun and freedom out here on the road. Our past couple of days have been pleasant enough but certainly not free of worry.

We left the Buffalo area with a bit of a problem. Emma’s ultra-fancy orthodontic appliance had come loose from her left molar. On Friday we found a local orthodontist who gamely re-cemented the thing but warned that another tooth was causing interference, and the temporary repair might not hold. It didn’t. Saturday it popped loose again while we were in Toronto. It doesn’t cause any discomfort or trouble eating, but it needs to be fixed soon.

On Monday we were due to head south through the rolling hills of southwestern New York and western Pennsylvania to Penn Wood Airstream Park, which is one of the parks that advertises in Airstream Life magazine. Our home-base orthodontist was out on Monday, so we set the problem of Emma’s appliance aside and started towing.

Arriving at Penn Wood, I remembered that the park and the surrounding area is a total no-Verizon zone. Our Verizon Internet didn’t work either, even with the rooftop antenna, but fortunately the park has wifi. Sometimes it’s nice to be isolated by a lack of communication, and sometimes it isn’t. On this occasion it didn’t matter much since we were only there for an overnight. We met up with Alex K and whipped up a big dinner in the Airstream.

There was one task I needed to complete in the morning: deposit a check. Our checking account was nearly depleted and we were going to need cash soon. This is where modern technology really helped me out. I have an app (from USAA) on my iPhone that allows me to deposit checks simply by taking a picture of them with the phone. I walked over the park office, where the wifi signal was strongest, and in less than a minute I had turned the paper check into money in the bank. Gotta love it.

Earlier I mentioned doing maintenance on the road. We’re still finding things that need a little help after the summer of storage. The bathroom was a bit funky so Eleanor did a thorough cleanup while we had the luxury of full hook up at Penn Wood. In the process, she noticed that the sink drain was leaking. It needed plumber’s putty, and I didn’t have any. We asked Alex, who has every repair tool & supply known to man stored in his shed, and he came over immediately with a golf cart and a tool kit. A few minutes later we were good to go.

Leaving the park on Tuesday morning, the first order of business was to get diesel. I hadn’t noticed that we were at a quarter-tank when we arrived at Penn Wood. We began hunting the moment we left, but unfortunately our route took us further into the boondocks of Pennsylvania, where gas stations are few, diesel stations are fewer, and ones that have both diesel and room to fit our 48-foot rig are rare indeed. In retrospect I should have ignored the GPS and gone directly back to the Interstate where fuel would have been much easier to find. It wasn’t long before I regretted heading into the rural country with insufficient fuel.

The problem was made much worse by the incredible rolling hills in that area. We were crossing perpendicular to the ancient flow of glaciers, which meant that we were climbing and descending steep grades repeatedly. Where we would have gotten 13 or 14 MPG, we were getting 10 on average, and the fuel gauge was dropping rapidly. At one point the car’s computer was estimating about 30 miles to empty and the nearest major highway (where we would be likely to find fuel) was 18 miles away, but soon the computer gave up and simply defaulted to saying “RANGE” with an alarming picture of a fuel pump. That’s its way of telling us that we’ve pushed the limit too far and we are now officially into the “reserve fuel” allowance.

This has happened once or twice before when we’ve failed to plan ahead, and it’s always unnerving. (Read: on the way to Banff, in the Adirondacks) We got to the point of looking for a place to ditch the Airstream but there were no available flat spaces. Finally, with 8 miles left to go before the highway, we stumbled upon a miraculous fuel station in the middle of nowhere that had diesel and room for us to pull in. Saved again! The tank took 27.7 gallons, and the manufacturer’s stated capacity is 26.4 gallons, so we had consumed all of that and were well into the 3.4 gallon reserve. I can’t really complain since we got 430 miles out of that tank (which included some non-towing time up to Toronto and back). I had just gotten too comfortable with the enormous range of the GL320, and suffered the dread that results from complacency. Like the license plate we saw (PB4UGO) you need to fill up before you tow.

We are now courtesy parked at Bobby & Danine’s house in Virginia. Once again, Verizon doesn’t work at the house but I’ve got their wifi, their house phone if I need it and Skype. The bigger challenge here is the sloping driveway. Bobby lent us a bunch of wood and extra plastic blocks, and we’ve managed to get the trailer close to level. (Still, it’s a big first step up to the entry door.)

So you can see that there are always challenges along the way. Plans get changed for you, glitches happen, things break, and sometimes the trailer ain’t level. The point is, it’s all small stuff, and you know what they say about that. Don’t sweat it. We’re still having a good time even if things don’t always turn out the way we expected.

Congrats to Airstreamers David & Ariadne on the birth of their new baby!

Sep 12 2011

Toronto

Our decision to head immediately west toward Buffalo NY turned out to be a good call. I was tempted to do the coastal route (as we did last year), and hit a few beaches along Massachusetts and Connecticut, but the massive rains from Irene and Lee would have made it an unpleasant week. Even central New York and Pennsylvania suffered from flooding, whereas we were just west enough to avoid most of the problems.

Our friends in Virginia, where we have planned to courtesy park later this week, emailed us this picture of our courtesy parking spot. It is not looking good in this photo, but the rain abated last Thursday and this weekend gave us all a chance to dry out. I think it will be fine when we get there.

We left the Airstream in a secure location near Buffalo on Friday morning and took a weekend jaunt up to Toronto, where a sort of magical Canadian weather pattern had set up, bringing us sunshine and 75 degrees every day. It was the sort of perfect late-summer weather that Canadians and northern Vermonters live for.

Our trip was ostensibly to visit John and Helena, good friends with endless hospitality and a home conveniently located walking distance from downtown. Eleanor feeds them as a way of saying “thanks” for the stay, but really she appreciates having an audience to cook for. It gives her a good reason to browse the ethnic sections of town for interesting food items.

Tim Horton’s is not my idea of ethnic food, but it has been a serious stop for Eleanor ever since she discovered “Timmy’s” coffee (she and Tim are on a cozy basis these days) and the fact that her beloved “Dutchie” donut is apparently not sold in the USA. Thus, every trip to Canada involves a stop for two pounds of coffee and a few Dutchies. It’s a good starting point.

Our big goal for Saturday was to walk the city. Emma was intrigued by the tall CN Tower (1,100 feet at the observation level, with a glass floor) and it was the weekend of the Chinese Moon Festival so we figured we connect the two with a little street hiking. John started us off with a short toodle around town in his Citroen Deux-Chevaux (2CV), a tiny French car with a 29-horsepower two-cylinder engine – great fun with the canvas roof open — and dropped us off near Kensington, where the good food shopping is found.

We had skipped breakfast that morning in anticipation of a big pig-out at one of the many restaurants along Spadina that advertise “DIM SUM ALL DAY.” Usually dim sum involves a series of carts filled with strange & wonderful things. You point at what you want from the cart when it rolls by, and the waiter hands it over, then marks a tally sheet with everything you ordered, for a (usually) shocking total at the end.

This restaurant took a more expedient approach, since it was too small for the carts. We got a single-sheet menu of items, picked three each, and gradually they appeared on our table as we noshed our way from pork & shrimp shumai to red bean “cake”. If you want to know what else we ordered, simply read the bill pictured below (click to enlarge).

At the end of the meal, the waiter rolls up the entire contents of the table, dishes and all, in the plastic tablecloth and hauls it away. I’ve never seen that maneuver before, but I have to admit it makes for a quick turnover on the table. We were also encouraged not to linger after the bill was paid by a waiter who posted herself directly adjacent to the table and wouldn’t leave until we did. Ah, well, the food was very good.

Eleanor didn’t want to buy all of her food items early in the day and then have to haul them around Toronto, so we gave the Kensington area a quick look (in Eleanor-culinary terms, which means about two hours) and made notes of places we’d want to return later in the day.

The rest of our day was spent walking all over downtown Toronto. We dropped by the CN Tower but did not go up — Eleanor and I had done it before and these days it would be about $65 for the three of us to ride the elevator to the top — and we dragged Emma past various places that were probably not nearly as memorable to her 11-year-old brain as they were to us.

We found the very grand Fairmont Royal York hotel and reminisced about our first visit to Toronto in 1995. It was an unusual week. Eleanor and I had tent-camped in the Adirondack Park (NY) on a 14-degree January night, then we drove up to Montreal for a night at the Hilton Bonaventure where we swam in the heated rooftop pool during a snowfall, then took VIA Rail’s “Blue and Gold” service to Toronto and spent two nights in the Royal York living large. Things were quite different back then — no Airstream, no kid — but I think we travel better now.

One thing that stays the same: we walk a lot. This weekend it felt like two more miles of hiking before we got back to Chinatown, with a break at a Second Cup cafe in the entertainment district.

We hit Kensington again and bought a selection of dessert pastries, three cheeses including a very challenging Spanish blue cheese called Valdeon, vegetables for a big salad, and two kinds of fresh bread. This was later made into dinner for the five of us back at the house.

By the time we got back to Kensington we were starting to drag: we’d been out walking for over six hours. Fortunately Toronto’s efficient public transit (streetcars and subways) got us within half a mile of John & Helena’s home. A note was on the door: “R&E&E: Back door is unlocked. Call us when you get in.” That’s a Toronto thing. People leave their homes unlocked all the time and don’t worry about it, even in the city. Crime is remarkably low, the city is very clean, and every time we come here we walk everywhere and never encounter a place that we feel unsafe. It’s like New York city if it were run under contract by Disney.

We slept in a bit on Sunday, and John made waffles for a late brunch with strawberries & cream & maple syrup, and Canadian bacon. I don’t eat that way very often anymore, but how wonderfully Canadian it felt, with a copy of the Globe & Mail lying nearby and the front door unlocked. But that was the end of our Toronto jaunt. We were soon off, down the Queens Expressway back to the USA, with — of course — one last stop at Tim Horton’s north of the border for a few more Dutchies.

Sep 07 2011

Launched in New York

We are now officially back on the road. For how long, I can’t say. We have a trip of about 3,500 miles planned, and that’s if we don’t dip into Florida (then it becomes closer to 4,500 miles). At our pace, that’s a good long time in the Airstream — at least a month. I’ll get back to my usual posting schedule as long as we are on the road, which means several times each week.

Our last days in Vermont ended with a weather whimper. There was a final respite of passable weather on Sunday for the belated birthday celebration (maple themed edible gifts abounded), and then the beautiful late-summer days faded into steady cool showers that lasted all of Labor Day, while we took care of the final Airstream packing chores. Then the remnants of Hurricane Lee slid up to New England and the result has been three days of fairly continuous rain, which is something nobody up here needed. Flooding became a threat again in many areas.

Despite that, we had set a schedule and so we left on a chilly Tuesday morning, with wet decaying leaves stuck to our feet and tracked all through the inside of the Airstream. I normally like to leave with the trailer interior cleaned up, but it was not possible under the rain forest-type conditions, so we’ll do a better job on the interior floors if this endless rain ever lets up. Once I had pulled the trailer off the leveling blocks in the driveway, I could see the rear dome for the first time in months (it had been obscured by trees) and it looks miserable, stained with tannin and leaf mold. Another roof washing session is due, but I think since we are on the road it may become a job for the Blue Beacon boys.

I am very pleased that all systems seem to be “go” with the Airstream. After three months of sitting in fairly inhospitable conditions you might expect a few problems to crop up, but we’ve been lucky and found no major issues. Even the Michelin tires held their pressure at exactly 50 psi each. Sitting is really one of the worst things for an Airstream (or indeed, any brand of RV). That’s when the rodents get in and start nesting. That’s when spiders and mud dauber wasps begin to clog the furnace vent and water heater venturi. That’s when water from a small leak gets a chance to cause rot, unnoticed. Left without exercise, tires fail more quickly, axles stiffen, batteries go flat, wires get chewed … I always recommend that anyone who has to store their trailer for long periods of time make a point of getting inside regularly to check things out, sniff for strange smells, inspect for signs of insects or critters, etc.

Using the trailer is a good way to find issues, if you don’t mind fixing them as they crop up. So far we’ve found the need to lube the entry door hinges and entry step with silicone spray, replace a cabinet latch, and replace a couple of light bulbs. Nothing really of consequence. I expect to replace a lot more of the bulbs soon, since they are mostly original and reaching the end of their expected lifespan. I’ll buy a 6-pack of the 1141 bulbs and a few of the 10-watt halogens at the hardware store next time we go by. The darned cabinet latches are another story: they wear out with distressing regularity and so far the only source I’ve found for replacements is Airstream and Airstream dealers, at $7-10 per latch

Our route has been conservative, at least initially. With flooding closing many lesser roads, I opted to take the safest possible route via the Charlotte-Essex ferry, I-87 (the Adirondack Northway) and I-90 (the New York State Thruway), connected by Rt 8 through the Adirondack Park. This kept us away from detours but it wasn’t particularly exciting since we’ve covered that route many times in the past.

At least we ended up at a different place, Verona Beach State Park on the shores of Oneida Lake. On prior trips passing through New York we’ve tried many state parks, including Cayuga Lake, Delta Lake, Letchworth, Darien Lakes, Fish Creek Pond, Mills-Norrie, Thompsons Lake, and Watkins Glen. They’ve all been good. New York has a great & huge state park system, so there are still dozens more to visit, even if we are trying to stay within a reasonable distance of the Thruway.

I had no idea when we randomly picked Verona Beach that it was next to the famous old Sylvan Beach, with the small but active downtown (at least during summer) and the old-time Sylvan Beach Amusement Park. It had stopped raining for a while, and I didn’t feel like unhitching the trailer for just one night, and we needed some exercise after being in the car for five or six hours, so we hoofed it about a mile and a half from the state park to downtown Sylvan Beach and found Eddie’s beckoning to us with a giant neon sign. There wasn’t much else open in town, being a gray cool day after Labor Day, but even if there were I think we would have had to try Eddie’s for dinner just because it’s a historic piece of Sylvan Beach.

Camping and traveling in the off-season like we are right now, is a bit of a crapshoot. On the plus side, reservations are generally unnecessary, crowds are absent, and we can be as spontaneous as we want. On the negative side, the weather can be iffy and lots of attractions are closed or have severely reduced hours. Arriving at Verona Beach we found the entry building unmanned, so we just picked out a nice site and settled in. No camp host or ranger was evident, and the park was about 90% empty. In the morning a nice lady came by in the pouring rain (“and I’m driving an electric golf cart!”) and accepted our check for $22.75 for a night of camping near the shore of the lake. Even with the steady rain it was a nicer experience than many a peak-season summer stay I’ve had in other places, just because it was quiet and uncluttered.

Tech note: I’ve been trying out some apps on the iPhone to see how they help us on the road. GasBuddy (free) has been pretty good for us, usually allowing us to find diesel at $0.20-0.40 less than the going rate without detouring more than five miles. This morning it directed us to the station closest to the state park and we saved about 20 cents per gallon on the fillup compared to the stations along the Thruway. It hasn’t been 100% accurate, since the fuel price reports come from ordinary folks who sometimes get it wrong, but I’ll trust it enough to go a few miles out of my way.

The other app I’m evaluating is the Allstays Camp & RV app, which costs a few bucks. So far I am finding it interesting but I need more time to be sure if I can recommend it. Like GasBuddy, some of the data comes from volunteers and so may not be entirely accurate. It’s useful for finding campgrounds, Wal-Marts, and various other popular stops for RV’ers.

We’re going to hunker down near Buffalo for a couple of days to get some work done, and then continue onward on Friday. It won’t be an exciting period, but hopefully we’ll wait out the rain and have nicer weather for the next few stops that are planned.

Sep 04 2011

Last tasks in Vermont

We’re getting serious about gearing up for travel now. The Airstream has been stored all summer in the most unfavorable conditions: exposed to sun, rain, falling tree branches and leaves, in a humid environment, and used essentially as a giant storage locker. It is our joint mission to turn it back into a habitable travel trailer in the next 48 hours.

It’s always best to work from the top down, so I started with the roof disaster. The debris was so thick that the first step was to get on the roof with a broom and sweep away most of the accumulated branches and leaves. It was pretty nasty up there with older leaves that have composted and filled every possible corner and crevice — worse than I remember from the previous year. I think an extra layer of tree bits landed in the past week thanks to Irene.

Then I got into the detail work, using only water and a soft brush. I never use soap on the roof because there’s too much chance of slipping off. Working outward from the centerline is most efficient, as things tend to wash down to the sides.

It took quite a while to clean up the detail spots, like beneath the TV antenna, under the solar panels, the upper gutter of the awning, and around the refrigerator vent. The work would go faster if I wasn’t working on a wet sloped roof with numerous delicate obstacles (like plastic roof vents) and hardly any open space to stand. I recommend extreme caution if you ever do this.

The rear solar panel was so obscured by tannin from decaying leaves (far more gunk than you can see in the top picture) that I had to spend several minutes scrubbing it. A small amount of brown stain on the glass can have a large impact on electrical generation capacity.

Once the roof was done, I gave the rest of the trailer a conventional wash. I got the bulk of it with a telescoping brush and Eleanor followed up with a plastic scrubber, cleaning up the details. Even after our efforts, the trailer will win no prizes in a Concours d’Elegance but at least it is no longer embarrassing. If I have time today, I’ll also wax the front dome, as that seems to make it easier to clean off squashed bugs later.

Getting ready to go is obviously important. (I spotted a tree turning color yesterday — a warning sign from Mother Nature that the cold weather is coming.) But we’ve got other important things we must do before we leave, including eating birthday cake.

We missed the normal time to celebrate my birthday (in mid-August), because I was in Tucson. Being of a certain age, I am not really all that hung up on birthdays, but for some reason my birthday is a well-attended event every year. I am pretty sure that the entire family takes an interest in my birthday primarily because Eleanor always makes a special cake with butter-cream frosting, and each year the cake is different. Usually a few weeks or months prior, I dream up a rough idea and then Eleanor figures out the details.

The cake this year stems from the fact that I am an admitted and unrepentant maple fiend. There is no ten-step program for people like me and if there were, I wouldn’t follow it. The Addison County Fair (held in August) is my annual maple pig-out, but again, I was in Tucson and missed it this year. You have no idea what a serious loss that was to me. The Fair has an entire building dedicated to all things maple. Maple frosted donuts, maple milk, maple creemees (“soft serve” to the rest of you), maple milkshakes, maple bread, maple candies, and this year they added some sort of baked confection that had walnuts on top. Having been entirely deprived of all these goodies in maple-free Tucson, I requested a maple-walnut cake for my late birthday celebration.

So Eleanor did some research and has developed her own recipe, which starts from scratch. Some of it is roughly based on an Italian cream cake recipe that we got from (believe it or not) our insurance company USAA some years ago, but at this point Eleanor has modified it so much that it is truly her own. The cake contains about $30 of ingredients, as real maple sugar and such things are rather expensive, but as I often point out to anyone who will listen, I’m worth it.

The cake, which you can see here during construction, is not only maple-flavored batter with fine-chopped walnuts, but between layers contains a whipped chocolate ganache with maple flavor. (If you’ve never tried maple and chocolate together, you need to. I can recommend the maple crunch chocolates from Lake Champlain Chocolates as a source for aspiring addicts.)

The final layer is a maple butter-cream frosting that literally melts in your mouth, leaving a buttery coating and a strong desire for more. So we’re looking at triple maple cake with walnuts and chocolate ganache. Talk about decadence … there will be no leftovers.

There are a few other rituals that we must complete before departing. Last night, for example, the humidity and temperature rose and so I was finally motivated to go jump in the lake. Lake Champlain is running a bit cooler than normal, due to all the rain and storminess (which stirs up cold bottom water). It’s a “refreshing” lake at the best of times, usually peaking around 68 degrees, and I think yesterday it was a few degrees cooler than that. But this is what I grew up on, and I’m used to it. On a sticky afternoon it’s just right — a thrillingly icy splash as you dunk under for the first time, and then in just a few minutes your body core is cooled down and it feels like no amount of heat and humidity will ever bother you again. Emma and I got in and played a few splashing games.

With that, another summer tradition has been accomplished. Only a few things left to do. It looks like we’ll be ready to hit the road by Tuesday.

Birthday menu:

lobster ravioli with an orange saffron cream sauce
mushroom ravioli with browned butter & sage sauce
grilled asparagus with lemon & parmesan shavings
endive, mushroom, & artichoke salad with mustard & white wine vinaigrette
maple walnut cream cake

Orange Saffron Cream Sauce for Seafood Pasta

Ingredients:

1 tablespoon olive oil
3 thinly sliced strips of unsmoked bacon, most fat removed, cut into 1/4″ dice
1 small shallot, minced
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
zest and juice of 1 orange (preferably Minneola Tangelo or Blood Orange)
saffron threads (about 6, crumbled)
12 ounces light cream
freshly ground black pepper
kosher salt

Preparation:

add saffron to cream & set aside.

heat oil in saute pan.

add bacon, cook until crisp & brown. remove bacon from pan.

add minced shallot to same pan. stir until coated with grease from pan.

add butter & stir until foaming subsides.

add about two thirds of the orange zest & cook until shallot is soft & translucent.

deglaze pan with orange juice; reduce to a thin layer.

whisk in saffron cream in two separate additions, allowing all ingredients in pan to be completely incorporated after each.

simmer – do not boil – and reduce until lightly thickened, whisking constantly.

add pepper, whisk & taste. add salt if needed.

*pour over cooked, hot, lobster ravioli. sprinkle cooked bacon and remaining zest over top and serve.

Sep 02 2011

Readying the ship

OK, let me get this out of the way before I say anything else: WE ARE FINE.

I continue to get daily emails from folks who are concerned that we might have been affected by the recent storm. The media frenzy about the “devastation” in parts of Vermont has painted a really distorted image of the situation here, especially up in northern Vermont where it’s hard to find visible impacts from the storm. At our current base of operations, the worst thing that happened is that my brother had to pull up the dock and boat lift due to Lake Champlain rising a few feet.

My previous blog entry was intended to make it obvious that we were relatively unaffected, but it seems to have backfired. One friend even wrote, “OK, I read the blog. You are safe, parent’s house is fine, the trailer is fine, All sounds good. Now, what’s the rest of the story?” Sorry, that’s all there was. Any further drama will have to be self-created, and believe me, we’re good at that.

On Wednesday I took a roadtrip up to Plattsburgh NY, fifty miles away by car and ferry, to make a client visit to Colin Hyde Trailer Restorations. About two years ago Colin opened up his own trailer restoration shop and has been doing quite well with it. I spent a few hours checking out every Airstream in the shop and catching up on everything. In the afternoon Colin donned his bunny suit and demonstrated how he can paint an entire chassis (in this case the restored/improved frame of a 1953 Flying Cloud) in less than an hour with just one quart of POR-15, using a sprayer and his “rotisserie” set-up. The rotisserie allows the frame to be rotated in the air for ultimate convenience. This is a much more efficient method of painting a frame than the old “bend over and brush” technique that many people still use.

It’s interesting to me to note how the vintage trailer restoration business has matured over the past several years. When I started the magazine in 2004, there were only a handful of restorers out there and most of them didn’t know what they were doing. They’d come out of the hotrod business, or evolved from trailer repairs, and frankly there was a lot of overpriced hack work going on. Only a few really understood how these trailers were intended to work (from a design perspective) and so I saw a lot of horribly botched trailers coming out of “professional” shops.

Actually, that still happens quite a lot. It’s pretty easy for anyone to hang out a shingle and say they are in the trailer restoration business, with no licensing, no real knowledge, and little accountability (since the customers themselves generally only see the surface of the work). There are still a lot of hacks out there. But a few have studied the history, engineering, design intent, period materials, and even philosophy of Airstream and other vintage trailer manufacturers. Those people are doing the good work these days.

I’m very happy to say that most of them are advertisers in Airstream Life. As one non-advertiser put it, “Being in Airstream Life sort of says you’ve ‘made it’.” We don’t vet the advertisers for quality but I do find that when they are willing to make the investment in advertising their business, it indicates a seriousness and professionalism that usually carries over to their work.

Being at Colin’s shop (and MEL Trailer, C&G, etc., a couple of weeks ago) has reminded me of the work I want to do on the Safari. After 100,000 miles of towing and six years, it has accumulated a bit of wear around the edges. I want to replace all of the flooring with Marmoleum, refurb the Hensley (again), add another Vista View, wire in an inverter, convert to LED lights, re-upholster the dinette, rebuild our microwave/laundry storage, replace the curtains, repaint all of the steel (A-frame, bumper compartment, entry step), re-caulk all the roof openings, upgrade the stereo with MP3 input & better speakers, etc. This will not be a quick or cheap refurb, but in the process I expect to renew the trailer so that it is ready for our next 100,000 miles. As I’ve written previously, I see no reason why a new Airstream can’t last a lifetime with proper owner maintenance (including annual leak tests). Like an airplane, a periodic refurb is to be expected.

This week, however, I just need to get ready for our upcoming trip. The Safari has been stored all summer, and now it is covered in spider webs and debris from the cedar trees overhead. I’ll need to get on the roof and wash it down, lube & inspect the hitch, check the tires & reinflate as needed, re-organize tools that have gotten spread out over the summer, and re-stock. That process has already started, and we’ll finish this weekend so we can depart on Tuesday.

The trip plan is already growing. I had planned to zip back across the USA in a relatively straight line to economize on fuel (diesel is running $4+ per gallon up here) but there are too many things to do. I like to treat every trip as if it might be our last, just so there are no regrets. Or to put it another way, I’d rather regret spending a lot of money on fuel than regret passing up once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunities. So our route currently brings us west through NY state, briefly into Canada, then down to western PA, near Washington DC, a stop in NC for service, a quick stop in central AL, and then Florida. From there, we may spend a few weeks in Florida or we may head west toward home, depending on circumstances.