The show is beginning.  We spend all year thinking about Alumapalooza, and when it finally comes together here on a patch of grass in central Ohio, it’s a great thing. Today is the day.

The past few pre-event days have been mellow.  All of the volunteer staff are very experienced at their jobs, and we’ve cross-trained people whenever possible, so if we hadn’t been required to relocate some things as a result of the factory expansion there wouldn’t have been much to talk about.  Everyone would have just gone ahead and done their job without any instruction. As it was, things were still pretty smooth. We’re lucky to have such great people who come back year after year to make this event happen.

A lot of attendees are repeat visitors, too.  We had 25 spots in the Service Center lot for early arrivals to boondock a few nights, and most of them were taken by people who had been here before. They just roll in at their convenience, settle in, and gab with their neighbors. We didn’t schedule anything except a cookout on Memorial Day, but the folks who arrive early generally don’t need scheduled activities to stay entertained.

Jackson Center weather is always tricky this time of year, with frequent and un-forecast changes.  When people ask us what weather to expect, we say “all kinds.”  This year has been a great example.  When I arrived it was dropping down to about 42 degrees at night.  Other years it has been 101.  You just never can be sure what’s coming, despite the attempts of the weather reporters to stay ahead of nature.

This year the major weather event has been wind, lots of it, which finally got strong enough to make everyone take in their flags, awnings, and patio mats (or stake them down very securely).  I was working on the roof of the Airstream with Super Terry over the weekend, scraping old cracked sealant off the aluminum with a putty knife, so that we could re-seal a couple of spots that might have become leaks. When I’d get a small piece of sealant scraped free, it would sometimes blow right off the roof.

Because of the uncertain weather, we decided to keep the job list to the bare minimum, so all we have done so far is replace the entry door lock and replace sealant in six or seven places.  Sometime this week I’m still hoping we can remove the wheels to check the brakes, but now that the event has started it will be hard to find the time. I might have to get to that job at a later stop in our travels.

The big news has been that E&E will miss Alumapalooza. They had planned to catch up with me by flying to Dayton, but Emma got a cold a week ago and still can’t equalize well enough to fly.  Our only good option was to have them fly to Cleveland next week, where I’ll pick them up as I’m heading east with the Airstream. So I’m still solo in the Airstream and will remain so quite a lot longer than I had expected.

Without Eleanor to back me up, I’ve had to make some adjustments and rely on the support of friends. There’s still plenty of food in the refrigerator but friends here have been inviting me to dinner nightly, which means I probably won’t have to go grocery shopping until next weekend.  That helps a lot, because during one of these events my time is always at a premium.  Our friend Mary has volunteered to throw my laundry in with her family’s on Thursday (she pointed out that Eleanor has done the same for them in the past).  Others have offered help, too. It’s nice to have such good friends. In this community you can almost take that for granted, which is a big part of the reason Airstream has been so significant in our lives.

As I mentioned, the factory expansion has changed a few things. We can only park about 50 Airstreams in the main field next to the factory, so Airstream personnel electrified another area closer to the Terra Port, and we plan to put another 50 or so there. This also meant the event tents couldn’t go in the usual spot, but we found a really pleasant location in the shade of mature sycamore trees, right next to the Terra Port.  The grass is nicer, the ground is more level, and we like how it turned out, so we’ll probably do it the same way again next year.

This also means the staff can park in the Terra Port for the entire event. After six years of parking in the field, I think the volunteers deserve the perk of full hookups during Alumapalooza. They work hard, sweating and getting sunburned (or rained on) every day for a week, and at the end of the day they have to haul the gray water from their shower several hundred feet in a portable tank to dump it.  Most of them didn’t get power for air conditioning, either.  We supplied them with ice cold water, laundry service, and a free pass—that’s it.

So now they have a well-deserved better deal. Our new spots in the Terra Port put all of the staff very close to the tents, so they can go back and forth quickly, and if the windows are open you can hear the chatter and laughter of attendees having a good time nearby. It’s perfect.

By 9:30 this morning we had already parked 25 trailers and a steady stream has continued to come in. It’s starting to look like Alumapalooza today, with rows of shiny Airstreams parked in the grass, flying flags and displaying lawn chairs and patio furniture under the awnings. By the end of the day we will have close to 100 parked, and more coming on Wednesday.

One of our special guests this year has been Jessie Kresa, a professional wrestler, who is here to show off her hot sauce. She was featured in Airstream Life in our Winter 2014    issue, and it’s great to finally meet her in person. Tonight she’ll join us on stage and give away some stuff, and then on Thursday she’s off to London England to wrestle someone to the ground. After meeting her, I suspect quite a few guys here are going to wish it was them.

I’ll be running a couple of events later today, so for the morning I’m just watching the parkers and water/electric crew do their job. This afternoon the program starts at 2:30 and runs to 8:00, and then tomorrow we go into it full-tilt starting at 7:30.

After a decade of driving across country to stay in the Airstream Terra Port, it’s amazing I still have anything to say about it.  But every time I get in the last few miles on I-75, or that two-lane country highway that leads straight as an arrow between the soybeans and corn fields, right to Airstream, I feel a little quiver of excitement. Airstream, and the little Village of Jackson Center, Ohio, are as familiar to me as old family members and as enjoyable to anticipate as a vacation cabin.

This year the factory is a little more exciting. Airstream has been booming the past few years. Now there are over 500 employees, and the factory just expanded to try to keep up with demand. A larger office mezzanine has been built above the factory floor, as part of Airstream’s philosophy to have office and management staff stay close to production. There always was an office mezzanine but now it’s big enough to house nearly everyone, and it’s really nice.  (Touring Coach staff are still across the street, near their production line.)

The expansion is good news for everyone, except perhaps the organizers of Alumapalooza. We’ve lost half the field we formerly used for parking trailers, so we had to scramble to re-organize the parking plan and electrical lines in order to accommodate 125 Airstreams. It got figured out eventually, and in some ways the parking plan is better, so in the long run the factory expansion might even turn out to be a good thing for us too.

It certainly will be good for Jackson Center.  We love this town, but the local businesses have often struggled economically and there’s always been the threat that the downtown would go the way of so many others, with empty storefronts and sad remainders. Airstream has been the anchor that has kept JC alive, and now with more Airstreams being sold, there’s reason to believe that JC will get a well-deserved boost.

I was talking with the restauranteur of the beautiful brick building nearby, formerly known as The Verandah restaurant. This old Victorian-era house was once a boarding house that Wally Byam himself stayed in. He told me that he’s been waiting all year for Alumapalooza to come back, since it’s the biggest economic injection the village gets. For the week we are here, he needs extra staff.

That made me glad, because we have always tried to leave something positive behind, and support the local businesses whenever possible.  We buy all our consumable supplies locally, even if we could get a better price 30 miles away in Sidney.  This year the local restaurant will be doing our catering.  Our attendees flood the local stores, watch movies at The Elder Theater (one screen, right in the center of town), attend the JC Community Days fair, walk to town for ice cream, and run in the annual Tiger Trot 5k race.  We donate hundreds to the local Food Bank (proceeds from our charity auction and Gong Show). While we are here, Jackson Center is our town.

I’m set up in the Terra Port for the duration.  Unlike prior events, the staff will stay here until the end of Alumapalooza, so we’re making ourselves comfortable. I put up my new Arizona state flag just to try out the new flagpole. When Alumapalooza starts, I’ll put up the rest of them, including the Airstream Life flag.  I don’t know why, but flying flags is a big part of rally tradition. I like the color and personality flags add to a field of silver Airstreams, so I have a variety.  The “We take no prisoners” Jolly Roger will be flying too.

Today is Friday, four days before the event.  We’re doing some light prep work now, and as the rest of the volunteer staff gather, things will really start to get busy.  Over the weekend we are expecting about 30-40 Airstreams to arrive for a sort of pre-party that we traditionally hold, with a cookout on Memorial Day and lots of socializing.

They’ll mostly be parked in the Service Center lot without hookups, but nobody cares (we’re all in Airstreams, so who needs hookups?).  They’ve come for the fun. That’s what it’s all about. No wonder I like coming here.

This might have been the best Alumapalooza ever.

Going into it, I was thinking maybe it would be a little quiet because we had a smaller crowd this year (about 120 trailers on the field).  But we’d done a ton of work putting together a bigger and better event program than ever before, and that paid off.  We added off-site tours, more vendors, more new Airstreams on display, a kettle corn stand, and new seminars to the old favorites, and Mother Nature cooperated by bringing us nearly flawless weather all week.  I realized we had a winner when people started coming to me on the second day and saying, “We’re having a great time!  Thanks for putting this on.”  Usually it takes a couple of days before the compliments flow.

It was also less stressful than other events we’ve done, because we had an awesome crew of people. There has been some change every year, but most of them have been working Alumapalooza for years and they really know their jobs.  This year we added two new volunteers (Loren & Mike, on parking) and our jazz diva Laura was summarily promoted to “Trash Wench”.  (Her job was to collect the trash in the mornings. Before anyone objects, let me say that she picked her own title.)

There was a nice breeze every day, so we flew the Airstream Life flag for the first time in several years.  It was nice to see lots of other flags flapping in the wind all week as well.  Felt festive.

The events of the week were so complex that I can’t really do justice to them here.  You can download the schedule from the Alumapalooza 5 website if you are interested. Basically we stayed busy from about 8:00 a.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. every day. Big hits included Open Mic night, the Aluminum Gong Show, Happy Hour, Josh Rogan, Eric Henning’s magic, and most of the seminars.

Early in the week, someone spotted a killdeer nest just about ten feet from the vendor tent.  This was staked off immediately and dubbed the “Jackson Center Temporary Killdeer Preserve.”  Momma Killdeer sat on four eggs all week, and on Saturday they hatched—which got a big round of applause when we announced it at Happy Hour.  That was the first birth we’ve ever had at an event.

The photo above shows only about 1/3 of the field.  Since the field was dry, we could spread out and give everyone as much privacy as they wanted.  Most clustered close to the main tent.

Airstream always offers some cheap deals on parts during Alumapalooza, but this year they went nuts and filled a service bay with scratched and used items that were mostly taken off other trailers or returned under warranty.  The bargains were incredible. We scored a convection microwave, barely used, for $100 (retail about $500), which Eleanor will use to develop a convection microwave cooking seminar for future events, and an 18-foot curbside awning for $150 (retail about $900). Why so cheap?  The awning has one tiny hole in it, made by someone with a 5/16″ drill bit.  We’ll patch that easily.

I also got a water heater cover for the Caravel for $5, and a bunch of other $5 items.  Brett landed a nice pure-sine inverter, unbelievably cheap.  (Wish I’d seen that first!)   Super Terry filled his trailer with parts and still couldn’t fit everything he bought. The bargains alone would be worth the price of a trip to Jackson Center.

Since I now had an 18-foot tube in my possession that I couldn’t fit in the car, I needed to get it installed right away.  Fortunately, Jim Webb, the president of Zip-Dee Awnings, and Greg Blue (a Z-D rep) were on site.  They were busy all week with service calls, so they didn’t get to my installation until about 8 p.m. on Friday.  The sun set while they were working, so they ended up finishing the job by flashlight with a crowd of onlookers. A few people couldn’t believe that the president of the company would be doing this … but that’s the kind of company Zip-Dee is, and the kind of guys Jim & Greg are.  They finally wrapped up at about 10:30 pm, just in time for Jim to drive five hours back to Chicago.

(By the way, guys — I love the new curbside awning.)

It was a long week, but also the time flew by.  It ended the way they always do, with lots of people smiling and wishing they didn’t have to go home, a big dinner, a concert, and a slightly sleep-deprived staff.  On Sunday morning we watched all the trailers depart, cleaned up the field, and put away our stuff.

That afternoon E&E and I wandered down to the local one-screen cinema, The Elder Theater, to see Maleficent.  Airstream Life had made a donation to help the theater switch to digital projection, and this was my first chance to see the plaque the theater had mounted on a seat in thanks.  If you go, look for the Airstream Life seat in the center section, about 2/3 down, one seat in from the left aisle.  I was pleased to sit there and enjoy the digital picture, knowing that this old gem of a theater was still able to operate thanks to the financial donations of dozens of people.

That night the Terra Port filled up with people who were waiting for service appointments in the following week, so we just stayed parked in the field alone that night.  Why move?  It was peaceful, and we still had power and water. So while Eleanor and Emma had one last visit with people in the Terra Port, I was able to chill out with a “guy movie” and a Klondike bar all by myself in the green grass, while the sun set beautifully in the west one more time.

And now we are in our usual decompression spot, the driveway of our friends Lou & Larry, near Cleveland.  We’ve got one day here, and then we’ll be trundling east on the final legs to Vermont, to start the next adventures. Coming up: motorcycling through Quebec and New Brunswick.