Sep 07 2012

Switching to project mode

We are back at home base. And this time, it’s going to stick, because there’s much to do over the next few months.

The first job is resolving our tire situation. We got back on the road after two days of waiting, and while it was pleasant in Camp Verde and swim in the RV parks’ pool, this isn’t a situation I want to find myself in again. We might have been on a schedule to get somewhere, or in some lonely place where tires aren’t easily located. We need a better solution.

The Discount Tire store in Prescott AZ worked with the Discount Tire store in Tucson to work out our immediate problem. The Prescott store gave us four new Nitto tires (not run-flats) to get us home, and that worked out fine. I’m not wild about them, as the handling is poor and they are noisy, but it was what they had in stock. The Tucson store will take them off tomorrow and exchange them for four new Bridgestone run-flats that I ordered a few days ago.

The really nice part is that they’ll give me 100% credit for the returned Nitto tires, even though I’ve used them for 200 miles. Kudos to Discount for going out of their way to take care of a customer. This is the kind of service that has caused me to buy tires from them exclusively for the past few years.

Since we got the Merc we’ve always had two plugging kits and a tire inflator in the car at all times to handle typical punctures. That’s not good enough for our needs. This episode demonstrates that other things can happen to a tire that you can’t fix by the roadside. We’re hard on our tires, towing many miles in southwestern heat with a heavy trailer, and so I’ve concluded that we need to get back to a full-size spare when we are towing.

The solution I outlined in the previous blog is still the plan. We’ll remove the Airstream’s spare and put a Mercedes spare in the carrier instead. The Michelin tires we put on the Airstream have proved their durability, and the Airstream can be towed on three wheels in a pinch, so I feel pretty confident about going without a spare on the trailer. The car, on the other hand, would be “interesting” to drive with only three wheels.

The challenge is that the car tires are much larger than the Airstream tires. The Airstream tires (with Michelin 235/75 R15) are 28.9″ diameter and 9.3″ wide. The Mercedes tires are about 33″ diameter and 11″ wide, so the spare carrier will have to be modified to allow one to fit. That means I’ve got to find a welder who can either come to the house to work on the Airstream, or has a large lot where I can park the Airstream. I’ll post pics once that job is done.

We’ll also have to do a five-tire rotation pattern from here on, because it’s important to keep all the tires worn evenly (this is an AWD car). It’s a small price to pay for the convenience of a full-size spare. When the car is being driven without the Airstream (and hence no spare tire nearby), it will still have the backup capability provided by the run-flat tires, just like millions of other cars.

We finally pulled into Tucson late Wednesday night. We’re still in that phase where we are living off the remainders of our Airstream supplies, until Eleanor gets a chance to replenish the house food. But we have landed lightly, without too much fuss or inconvenience, and are settling into our home-based life for the next few months. I did a calculation and found that so far this year we have towed the Airstream Safari 7,582 miles, which is about average. The image above shows our approximate route in 2012 (but not every stop).

Since we are going to be at home base for at least a couple of months, this is a good time to take on projects. We still need to get on the Airstream interior renovation, although budget is a challenge. I plan to kick that project into gear fairly soon. I’m also working on Alumafiesta in Tucson. We’ve confirmed that Stevyn Guinnip will be joining us at Alumafiesta to lead morning exercise sessions, and Bert Gildart is likely to lead some photo safaris in the great southwestern outdoors. I’m working on lots of other good things for that event, which will be announced as they get solidified.

E&E have taken on a new project too. To abate Emma’s lust for a pet, they have taken training at the nearby Humane Society and are now official foster parents to a pair of kitten brothers, one orange tabby and one solid black. For the next three or four weeks, their job is to convert these malnourished, underweight, frightened and slightly feral kittens into adoptable, people-loving cuties. The kittens are living in Emma’s bathtub with all sorts of comforting things to assuage their mental anguish, and several times a day they are held and fed. Although already this project has meant lots of cleanup and midnight attention, Emma and Eleanor are having a great time of it and I’m sure that when the time comes it will be hard to say goodbye to these little beasts.

Our next planned Airstream travel is not until after Christmas, although you never really know for sure. A trip opportunity may present itself in the near future, and the spare Airstream (the ’68 Caravel) could yet be outfitted for some adventure in southern Arizona this fall…

Aug 02 2012

Somewhere in this pile …

At one point we had thought we might be leaving for Colorado today … but it became very apparent last week that I had absolutely no chance of being ready to hit the road anytime soon. Everything is happening at once, and I’m locked down in Tucson until I can get it under control.

For years I advocated how you can work from the road, and that’s still true. In fact it’s even more true today than ever before, because the Internet-based software tools and connectivity options have improved dramatically. But “from the road” doesn’t really mean from the road, it means “while parked somewhere in your RV.”

To really get serious work done, you have to stop driving, stop sightseeing, and just do the job. The fantasy of working from your Airstream while the scent of pine trees wafts in your open window, and the Grand Canyon looms just a few feet away, is replaced by the reality that the best place to get work done is often an RV park in a city, with the doors & windows shut. And if you’ve got to get somewhere in a hurry, it’s pretty hard to get much of anything done. I’ve never mastered the technique of driving and typing on my laptop at the same time.

I realized that with all the things I need to get done, it was pointless to hitch up the trailer. We’d just end up driving 300 or 400 miles and then sitting there while I pounded away at the laptop keys and raved about lousy Internet connections. Eleanor and Emma would have to find something to do, perhaps not in an ideal location, and all told we’d probably be less productive than if we just stayed here a few more days. So we are.

The Fall 2012 magazine got done last week, and is off to the printer, but that didn’t end my work on it. A few other things have to be checked off the list before I can forget about it, such as cutting a postage check (a painful moment; postage is my second-highest expense), invoicing the advertisers, invoicing subscribers, updating the online store, updating the website, building the Online Edition, cutting mailing lists, and a few other jobs. Most of that is now done. I’m working on the Winter 2012 and Spring 2013 issues when I have time. Fall should be in the mail by late next week.

We launched Alumafiesta last weekend and that is going well. People are signing up quickly, which is great to see. I think we’ve got a winner there. I’m working on the schedule now and hope to have something to release in draft in about two weeks.

We’re going to have a Track A/B/C system for Alumafiesta. Track A events will be “active”, meaning hiking, bicycling, and walking. Brett and I will lead most of these personally. Track B events will be physically easier stuff, mostly museums (like Pima Air & Space) and parks (like Tohono Chul) with guided tours by docents and volunteers. Track C will be “self guided” suggestions for each day, including driving tours, tourist attractions, and gem show venues.

This will all be in addition to the usual daily get-togethers, evening seminars, meals, and entertainment on-site. I’m having fun picking out and researching the activities. Today we are going out for lunch to see if a particular 4th Avenue restaurant will be suitable for an optional lunch get-together for our group, and this weekend we will go check out a park or two and inquire about guided tours. In September or October, when the weather is cooler, I’ll ride some of the local bike paths to scout out a route we can do, with lunch stop built-in.

The Airstream renovation project is plodding along when I have time to think about it. The upholstery shop came by for an interior tour, and their quote on re-doing the dinette came in at $1,728 (with new foam, and fabric assumed at $37/yd). It turns out that the dinette will use about 14 yards of material, which is more than I had thought. So upholstery is going to be a huge part of the budget. We will probably try to cut that by shopping fabrics carefully, and getting a competitive bid. Tom M tipped us off to NewToto.com, where we can get Ultraleather at about $21 per yard. That alone would save us $224. But no question, it’s going to be tough staying inside of $6k for the whole project. The Marmoleum floor is looking like about $900 for the material, and I haven’t yet got a quote on the installation.

Alumafandango is in the final stages, with far too much happening at the 11th hour, but the bulk of the details are now complete. Over at Lakeside they’re racing to finish clearing up the site and installing the power system. Of about 91 trailers slated to arrive (as of today), more than half need/want 30-amp power, which caught us by surprise. The hot summer in Denver has really freaked people out. So the local electrical shops are being cleaned out of connection boxes by our electrical crew. Brett & I bought the old power distribution system that was owned by the Vintage Trailer Jam partnership (2008-2009) and that’s being cannibalized to distribute power at Alumafandango too.

We had a serious monkey wrench tossed in the works a few weeks ago. A micro-burst thunderstorm hit Lakeside Amusement Park and washed out our camping area. An estimated 300 cubic yards of material was relocated from the main parking area, through our campsites, and into the lake. It also washed out the track for the steam train that circles the lake. Brett H of Timeless Travel Trailers led the heroic effort to recover the park as quickly as possible. They’ve brought in several 4-yard front end loaders, various other machines, and 90 cubic yards of crushed concrete. There was a lot of stored old park “stuff” that got flooded, and as a result over 30 dumpsters full of soggy material have been hauled away.

All in all this has turned out to be a good thing for us. The campground will have little grass this year, but we will have a fresh new surface, graded with a swale to prevent future wash-outs. A lot of eyesore debris is gone, many dead trees have been removed, and overall the camping area will be considerably nicer than it might have been. Work is still ongoing and things are a bit messy at this point but it should be done well before the event starts on August 21. We’re in daily contact with our people at the park, and revising the parking map & schedule of events a couple of times a day just to keep up with all the new information. I would rather this was all done months ago, but who can tell a thunderstorm when to hit?

And then there’s the “miscellaneous”. I’m supposed to be giving a presentation on “my favorite mobile apps and tools,” which I have yet to begin writing. We’re still recruiting volunteers. The t-shirts need to be shipped tomorrow. We need to build the geocaches, confirm the ice cream vendor, publish the Survival Guide, pick up the awards, build a temporary dump station, finalize some catering details, order the volunteer shirts, …. At times it does seem endless.

So life is temporarily a little crazy. We’re trying to do the work of two dozen people with a skeleton crew. It’s all I can do to keep my desk functional. I have lists upon lists, just to keep all the ideas and tasks straight. Somewhere in the pile of data that is my computer’s desktop I actually have a list of lists. There are photos and maps, spreadsheets and layouts, online registration systems (two separate systems covering four events), custom reports, and all sorts of shared documents in the cloud. If I lost my laptop this week I might as well just move to a country with no extradition treaty because there would be several dozen people looking to kill and/or sue me. (Which reminds me, I need to do a hard drive backup today.)

This would be depressing except that I live for challenges like this. Brett and I wouldn’t kill ourselves putting together these events if we didn’t really enjoy it. The standard we set for ourselves is high, but when it comes together at the end and people say “You guys did a great job!”, it all seems worthwhile—and then we start planning for the next year.

In the meantime there are sacrifices, and the primary one right now is that we will not be able to get into the Airstream until at least sometime late next week. I haven’t begun packing yet, although Eleanor has done much of the household stuff. My packing should be simple, since I didn’t take much out of the trailer when we got home a few weeks ago. I’ve got a small pile of clothes to add from the laundry and then my office stuff (laptop, cameras, etc). Over the years I’ve gradually accumulated separate “Airstream clothes,” and “Airstream equipment,” so for example I don’t have to load in my flatbed scanner or printer because the Airstream has its own that never get unloaded. This saves a lot of time. And that’s a good thing, because time is definitely something that is a bit scarce right now.

Apr 01 2012

Faux Japan … In Phoenix

I wasn’t kidding in the last blog when I said we needed to go somewhere to make up for the loss of our trip to Hawaii and Japan. With Emma feeling a little better, we decided that we could take off for a 3-day weekend in Phoenix.

This became one of our non-Airstream trips. Eleanor booked us into a downtown hotel and we just decided to wing it from there, with no particular plan. As it turned out, the weekend has been a tiny taste of the trip we had planned, kind of like visiting Epcot Center is like traveling to foreign countries. Certainly not the same, but at least you get to eat the food.

The first stop was the Japanese Friendship Garden, called Ro Ho En. It’s a tiny oasis that sits almost above the sunken part of interstate 10 near downtown Phoenix. Inside the garden fence is a beautifully landscaped 5 acres with pond, waterfalls, koi, and desert-adapted plantings. It invites pausing and contemplation. I particularly like the way that the landscaping is designed so that every fresh angle of view provides yet another perfectly proportioned composition.

We were riding Phoenix’s smooth and modern streetcar system, which connects downtown Phoenix with Mesa and Tempe. I noticed that the streetcars themselves were Japanese, made apparently by Kinkisharyo. We might as well have been riding the trains of Tokyo, if we sort of squinted and pretended that our fellow riders were fashionable Shinjuku girls. At this point it seemed we had a theme going, so I pointed this out to e&E and we resolved to keep it going all day if we could.

From there we rode another 3 stops to downtown, and walked over to the Science Museum to take in an IMAX movie. The title was Coral Reef, and the underwater sequences reminded me that we would have been snorkeling on Oahu or Maui if we’d gone. I couldn’t decide if this was a sad thought or a happy one at first, but ultimately I realized I was happy to see colorful reef fish even if I wasn’t actually dipped in salt water myself.

At this point we weren’t going to let go of the Japan/Hawaii theme, so I pulled up the Yelp app on my iPhone and found a sushi restaurant nearby. Sorry that all the good stuff was eaten by the time I got around to shooting a picture with the phone. I warned Emma that our next steps might be to sleep on tatami mats on the hotel room floor, and order raw fish for breakfast. She drew the line at that.

Instead we decided to take the train back to our hotel, and the car across town to the Chinese Cultural Center. This was the closest thing we could find to a Japanese market. Eleanor spent a happy half hour browsing the aisles and then we hit the bakery for dessert. Actually, several desserts: red bean paste mochi, custard cream filled cream puff, flaky lotus yolk pastry, red bean sesame bun, cream horn, mango mochi, and something called a flaky wife pastry. (Yes, we made all of the obligatory jokes.) We took them all back to the hotel and shared them with hot green tea.

I would happily have sushi for breakfast tomorrow, but the hotel’s breakfast buffet comes with our room and the offerings are entirely American. But perhaps tonight we will dream of adventures on the other side of the Date Line, and at least have a few hours more of our faux Japanese vacation.

Feb 20 2012

Guest house Airstreams

I occasionally think that we have too many Airstreams, but sometimes we don’t have enough. This is the time of year when people tend to come visit (guess why) and the Airstreams become very useful as guest houses.

We live in a three bedroom house that is in a perpetual state of construction and has only two usable bedrooms, and 1.5 usable baths. I don’t even have an office that I can use, just a desk in the corner of the living room. So we aren’t well set up for having overnight guests, at least not indoors.

This has never been a problem for the dozen or so houseguests who visit each season, because the Airstream makes a far better place for them to stay. We tell prospective visitors that they will be welcome to stay “in the Airstream in the carport.” This is a sort of test. Those who are intimidated by the idea of sleeping in a trailer, parked next to the car and tool shed, would probably be happier in a hotel. Most of our friends have the opposite response. They say, “Oh cool, I get to sleep in the Airstream?” and then we know that they’ll be great house guests.

This week we have a full house. Lou & Larry have arrived in their 30-foot Airstream and are parked in front of the house. We have courtesy-parked at their place in Ohio many times, and this is the first chance we’ve had to reciprocate. They will be here a couple of nights and then head to California to visit Bert & Janie at their boondock site in Anza-Borrego (and Michael Depraida at his spot at “The Slabs” near the Salton Sea), and then come back here for a few more nights.

Tomorrow, a long-time friend of Eleanor’s will fly in from the northeast, and she’ll be accommodated in the Safari. That trailer is like having your own apartment, since it is roomy, stocked with everything you could possibly need, and fully hooked up to utilities. The same day, Brett will fly in from Florida, and he’ll be set up in the smaller Caravel. So we’ll have four guests at once, across three Airstreams.

This works out really well. Everyone has a space to call their own. We don’t have to worry about whose towel is whose, or when people like to get out of bed. Everyone has their own refrigerator, stocked with the things they like to eat. Everyone has their own bathroom, and can set the temperature where they like it. Lots of those opportunities for friction (even between good friends) are eliminated, and we all get to focus on the good parts of visiting.

It’s financially very practical too. We don’t need a big house just for those occasions when people visit. There are no unnecessary rooms to dust or pay taxes on. When our guests are gone, the “guest houses” revert to being our vacation and business vehicles, or I can use one of them as a private office when I need a quiet space to work. The Airstreams make our little house much more flexible and affordable.

I may someday get a plaque for our Airstream Safari’s bedroom that lists all the people who slept there. (That ought to freak a few people out during tours.) I think a few of them stayed specifically because they could sleep in the Airstream. It is an attraction, to some folks.

Long term I would like to buy a few more Airstreams, set them up luxuriously, and place them on a piece of property, for rental to the general public when visiting Tucson. This is a popular idea, which we’ve documented several times in the magazine. There are spots all over the world where you can spend the night in an Airstream “hotel room.” I feel like I’m nearly in the business already, especially this week, so it would probably be fun to do for real someday …

Jan 06 2012

Spreading out

We’re still not in the Airstream but life at home has been just fine. There’s snow up in the Santa Catalina mountains, which has afforded Emma the chance to use her Hammerhead sled with friends at 7,000 feet elevation, and down here in the valley we’re been having days warm enough to have the windows open every afternoon. I like the dichotomy of snow up above and palm trees swaying in the breeze down below this time of year.

The Airstream is slowly getting unpacked, as we pull out things that we would have used during our 10-day trip. Every day we go “shopping” in the Airstream for whatever we need: clothes, frozen food, a movie, some tools, etc. Mostly we’ve been taking out food since Eleanor had a program of meals planned for the entire trip.

The Dutch Oven has been fun for both of us, even though our second attempt at cooking was disastrous. We tried apple crisp, a favorite of mine (traditional up in Vermont, where I grew up), but naively followed the recipe in the “Dutch Oven Cooking 101” booklet. We should have followed our instincts instead. The recipe called for way too much nutmeg and not enough brown sugar. It smelled fantastic as it was cooking out in the back yard, and we were drooling with anticipation, but when we sampled it after dinner the taste was repulsive. Nobody could even finish their serving.

It was a complete loss, and things got worse the next morning. Disappointed with the outcome, I left that terrible apple crisp in the Dutch oven overnight rather than transferring it immediately to the compost bin. When I scooped it out in the morning the bottom of the crisp had an absolutely incredible skunk smell that nearly drove us out of the kitchen. Some sort of chemical reaction occurred, a final insult in the apple debacle. Fortunately, after cleaning the oven didn’t retain the smell.

Cooking-wise, the oven has done a good job. I stacked up some leftover flagstone to make a temporary windscreen, with an aluminum turkey pan for the coals, and it worked so well at retaining the heat from the oven that it may become a semi-permanent feature of our back yard. (Someday I’d like to build a permanent brick & stone oven that we can also use for pizzas, but that’s way down the home improvement plan.)

Even though the potato recipe we tried earlier did work fairly well, it was a bit on the greasy side and there was more bacon in it than we would have preferred. So based on that and the apple crisp we’ve learned that the booklet recipes are really just starting points. From now on, we are going to modify the recipes as we go, using Eleanor’s culinary experience and training as our guide. Tomorrow the plan is to make “Chisolm Trail Blueberry French Toast Cobbler” from a different recipe book as a special Saturday morning breakfast.

We’re also going to break out one of Eleanor’s Christmas gifts, a deep fryer. Now, some of you are probably thinking, “You got your wife a deep fryer as a gift? What’s next, a vacuum cleaner and a scrub mop?” But don’t worry, Eleanor loves cooking tools. I once bought her a second refrigerator as a Christmas gift and it was probably the best received thing I’ve ever given her. She’d rather have a new oven than a diamond ring (and the oven she wants costs about the same as a 1-carat diamond).

All of this cooking is a way of maximizing the value of our staycation. We would have used the Dutch oven once, maybe twice, and the deep fryer not at all if we were in the Airstream. The fryer is just too big for our style of travel, especially with the gallons of oil it requires. Dear old Vince Saltaformaggio would have brought it all—and more—but we don’t have a separate trailer just for the cooking gear, as he did. So we’re taking full advantage of being at home by spreading out and getting into messy projects.

Until Tuesday, things were nice and quiet. With the New Year everyone has come out of the woodwork. Suddenly I’m getting calls about Modernism Week and Alumapalooza again, I’m getting article pitches from PR agencies and freelance writers, advertisers with shiny new budgets are looking to spend money (yahoo!) and people I call are actually answering their phones again. This has impacted the vacation aspect of this week but I can’t complain because stuff is getting done.

Even Carlos called, wanting to shoot some neon this week. In the past two years we’ve documented just about every historic sign in Tucson, and certainly all of the “live” ones (those that are still operable). These days we are just picking up the remaining “dead” signs, like this one. The upholstery shop is moving and the long-dead neon sign will likely be torn down, so this photo shoot was slightly urgent. This particular sign doesn’t look like much because the neon is broken and the background was repainted. In its original form it looked like a ribbon and was undoubtedly considerably more attractive. We’re trying to locate a historic shot that shows the original design, for inclusion in the book.

The brake actuator problem is on its way to resolution. I have decided to get a Dexter replacement, which is currently on order and should arrive fairly soon. The replacement unit has a good reputation, takes up about the same space, and requires only four wires. I’m hoping to install it later this month with Eleanor’s assistance. As Jim & Debbie pointed out in a comment earlier, installing it ourselves means we’ll know that much more about our Airstream, which is very useful when you are on the road and something goes wrong.

@Alicia Miller: We hope to be more skilled with our Dutch Oven by Alumapalooza time, but in any case both Eleanor and I hope to attend the DO cooking class this year. I’m pleased to say that Lodge is going to be a sponsor and so we’ll have a few pieces of their cookware as door prizes too!