I wish I could have managed to hold my camera while driving I-80 from Joliet IL to Gary IN yesterday, but I was too busy juggling the steering wheel and the walkie-talkie. The pictures I would have captured would show an uneven concrete jungle crowded with speeding 18-wheelers, bridge construction, sudden slowdowns, and in the midst of it all, an Airstream trying to avoid being smashed from three directions at once and a tiny Mazda Miata cowering in terror, dwarfed even by the wheels of the trucks.

It was a final test for Eleanor, who has borne up well despite 1,900 miles of bone-rattling driving across the country in a ragtop car that has no soundproofing.  The I-80 assault was noisy even in the pampered environment of the Mercedes.  (I almost had to increase the volume on my iPod, boo hoo.)  In the Miata it was a deafening rumble of tanks crossing the desert sands of Iraq, a bladder-loosening flyover of B-17s in diamond formation, and a 7.5 earthquake in Japan, all at once.  After nearly an hour of physical and mental abuse, we reached the relative peace of the Indiana Toll Road and pulled out to a rest area, where Eleanor collapsed for half an hour in bed.  But she survived, and recovered well enough to drive the last fifty miles.

And now we are here in South Bend, parked on carefully-laid pavers next to an antique farmhouse, surrounded by a few well-manicured acres of grass and horse pasture.  The contrast from the noisy, smelly, crowded, and cracked I-80 Death Race Challenge is so dramatic as to seem unreal.

The 34-foot Excella belonging to Charlie and Lynn is parked with us, stocked and nearly ready to go for their upcoming trip to Minnesota.  We have been here many times before, and it has always been an oasis for us at the intersection of Chicago, Michigan, and Airstream.  We’re ready to relax and catch up on things for a couple of days.

This is great, and crucial, because I am supposed to have the Fall 2011 Airstream Life magazine completed for layout by next Wednesday. That isn’t going to happen, because Alumapalooza makes it impossible for me, but I at least will get 3 or 4 articles in process so that the entire magazine isn’t held up until I return to it.  Today and Friday will be dedicated in part to getting a bunch of editorial work done.  Fortunately, I have been greatly assisted with this issue by Associate Editor Tom Bentley, and at this writing I am also working to bring another Associate Editor up to speed for Winter 2011.

You may have noticed that photos in the blog for the past week have been of lower quality than usual.  That’s because I have been experimenting with using my iPhone as my “point and shoot” camera.  It is highly convenient but the photos aren’t great.  In particular the iPhone is very contrasty and can’t handle low light at all.  It also lacks optical zoom, and any sort of manual control over the image.  So when I get to Jackson Center I’ll switch back to the Nikon D90 for Alumapalooza pictures.

We have been granted a huge boon.  Five months of awful weather in Ohio have  finally broken, just in time for our event.  It has rained almost continually and will do so again today, but as of Saturday the sun is forecast to shine — and keep on shining — with very little prospect for rain next week!

Of course, the ground is wet and may not dry out entirely by Tuesday, but we have contingency plans to temporarily park arriving trailers on pavement if needed.  Personally, I think we’ll be fine to start using the field by Tuesday or Wednesday.  The ace Alumapalooza parking team of Lou, Larry, Terry, Brett, myself, Alex, Charon, Laura, Alice and Tim will all be on site in advance to finalize our parking and utility strategy.  Plus we’ve got support from Lisa, Eleanor, Kirk, and several other folks if we need it.  So when 100 trailers arrive on Tuesday, we’ll be ready for ’em.  Look for us in the orange t-shirts, bearing walkie-talkies and trying to look competent.

The forecast suggests the usual JC weather pattern next week.  It will be damp and cool in the mornings, so you’ll come out of the trailer dressed in long pants and a jacket.  Shortly after, the fog will burn off and you’ll be roasting hot in the sun, so you’ll have to change clothes and find some sunscreen.  That evening, the temperature will drop suddenly after sunset.  At least once during the week a shower will pop up with little warning, too.  It definitely is a place where the old adage is true,  “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a while and it will change.”  Keeps things interesting, I say.

You really can’t travel through the central states this time of year without encountering some thunderstorms, and this year they are popping up like spring mushrooms.  Last night was our first encounter, starting with an enormous BANG at 3:25 a.m. that woke us all up. It was one of those “way too close for comfort” sort of lightning strikes, and I won’t be surprised if later this morning I discover a shattered tree in the campground.

In these situations an Airstream is a great shelter, being an aluminum shell, so unless there is an imminent threat of tornadoes, we just unplug the laptops from the local power grid and check the Doppler radar to get an idea of the severity of things.  Last night’s line of storms was pretty active and some tornado damage was reported, but from the radar view I could see that we were getting just the southeastern end of the line.  By the time we were awoken by the Big Bang, the worse was over.

We’ll see more rain today on the highway toward South Bend — it’s virtually unavoidable.  Once we are moving I’ll be watching for high winds and suspicious cloud formations.  If it gets funky out there, we’ll pull over and try to park the Airstream in the lee of a large building or under an overpass.  Hail is the most typical cause of severe damage, but you can never find a shelter when you need one, so the primary consideration is just staying alive if the weather really turns nasty.

We’ve had a few close calls in the past.  I remember caravanning north on I-75 through Michigan after Airstream’s Homecoming 2005, and Eleanor watching the weather radar on the laptop as we rolled north.  Ten minutes before a major line of storms blew through, we exited the highway and found a relatively sheltered spot for the Caravel, then watched the drama unfold from the safety of a nearby restaurant, complete with flying tree limbs.  In 2008, we had a tornado blow right past us and had to take shelter in a Wal-Mart.  A Class A motorhome in the same parking lot as our Airstream blew over onto its side in that episode.  We were also threatened by tornadoes at a rally in Myrtle Beach SC once, and spotted a nice little tornado spinning by at Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Colorado. Hail has hit us in at least three different states, but never large enough hail to dent the trailer fortunately.

OK, so let’s look on the bright side.  Today will hopefully be much less eventful.  The Airstream has now had the last of the Arizona dust washed off of it, including the solar panels, so I don’t have to climb on the roof to clean them.  We have no leaks, unlike last year at this time.  And the weather forecast in Jackson Center seems to be FINALLY turning to sunshine for all of next week, which will be great for Alumapalooza.  A dry week in Jackson Center would be a very welcome miracle.

It seems that every year about this time I end up writing the same “gearing up” sort of blog entry.  It’s a little disconcerting to me that we are becoming predictable, but here we are in May once again packing up the Airstream for the summer of travel, exactly as we have done for the past two or three years.  Of course, it’s wonderful that we are about to launch the Airstream again, and our summer plans look very exciting, so I shouldn’t complain.

Even though the general goal is the same, our process and specific tasks are always a little different.  With a growing kid and growing businesses, we have to re-pack and re-think almost every choice as we gradually stock the Airstream.  We have very detailed “pre-departure” checklists that we carry over from year to year, which cover the basics, and we modify those lists as circumstances change.  The lists cover everything:  what we need to pack, preparing the house and cars for storage, notifications, medical reminders, Airstream maintenance, etc., but they can’t account for the changes that happen in our lives over the course of a year, so the lists are constantly mutating.

This year we have several factors adding complexity to the process.  For example, we bought a car to take with us to Vermont, a 1999 Mazda Miata.  Eleanor will follow the Airstream all the way to Vermont in the Miata (stopping every 200 miles to refill the tiny gas tank).  The plan is that she will have the car to use while she is in Vermont for most of three months, and then she’ll sell it as an “Arizona rust-free car” to a northerner who is desperate for an older sports car not riddled with rust.

This of course means that we’ve had to get a 12-year-old car in shape for a cross-country trip. The last few weeks I’ve been sorting it out, and I think I’ve just about got it ready now.  We’ve been driving the Miata daily for purposes of “debugging” it, which has been fun.  A couple of weekends ago Eleanor and I zipped up the curvy Catalina Highway to about 7,000 feet elevation to escape the Tucson heat.  We just talked in the shade of the tall trees for an hour or so, feeling the blissful cool pine-scented air blowing up the mountainside.  There’s nothing like a convertible for moments like that.

Another major factor in our trip prep has been Alumapalooza.  We have so much gear to bring on site that Brett will be towing a filled U-Haul trailer behind his motorhome from Tampa.  Even with that, I’ve got a bunch of stuff to wedge into the my Airstream for Alumapalooza, including Wally Byam books, Newbies Guides, leftover Alumapalooza t-shirts, and literally dozens of door prizes.

Add to that a bit of extra cooking gear, this year.  Eleanor will be doing a cooking demo at Alumapalooza on Saturday, using an actual Airstream galley (stove/oven/sink) on stage.  Her menu will feature pork medallions in a cherry port sauce, along with sides and dessert.   The interesting part is that she’ll prove that anyone can make such a meal, by producing everything right in front of you and explaining how it’s done.

Alumapalooza is as “locked down” as we can make it right now.  Registration is closed, and the schedule is finalized, but of course little surprises keep popping up to keep our lives interesting.  We did have the usual cluster of last-minute cancellations, but mostly for medical reasons rather than high fuel prices.  While nobody is happy about the current fuel prices, it doesn’t seem to be keeping Alumapalooza attendees away.  We will still have about 200 trailers on the field at Airstream during the event.

Also, Airstream came to us at the last minute with a request for a “Product Feedback Session.”  You won’t see this on the schedule posted online, but it will appear in the final printed program that we’ll hand out at the event.  It should be interesting.  They will run two separate sessions for men and women, one hour each, to hear what people think about the current products.

Of course over the past few weeks we’ve been doing the usual trip prep stuff: mapping out possible routes, looking for interesting stops, contacting friends and acquaintances who might be along the way, and dreaming up crazy ideas of things we might want to do.  Most of the good stuff will have to happen after Alumapalooza, since the initial legs of our trip will be rather rushed.  We should have left a week ago, to allow a really nice meander through Utah and Colorado, but there were just too many things to do here in Tucson first.  So we’ll make a beeline — or at least, what passes for a beeline in our world — to Ohio, with relatively few chances to stop and browse.  We’ll make up for that later.

One of my pre-trip projects has been to upgrade the software that runs all of the Airstream Life websites.  We just completed that task this weekend.  Although not much is different from your perspective, I now have the ability to post and edit blogs from my iPhone (among other improvements) which I hope will make it easier for me to blog daily during the busy times.  As you know, I’ve also set up Twitter so that you can follow quick updates from the road and from Alumapalooza, and if you use Foursquare on a mobile phone you might even find me there, too.

We’ve got three days to go before launch and many things yet to accomplish … but I’ll post again this week as the process continues.