Man In The Maze

by Rich Luhr, Editor of Airstream Life magazine

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Just call me angel of the morning

My life has been a series of one-night stands lately … but in a good way.

When we are housebound, it’s really nice to have “Airstream friends” come by with their trailers and spend a night or two parked in front of the house.  Having people come by and talk about where they’ve been, and where they are going is almost like traveling ourselves.  There’s the inspiration and excitement and new ideas that come from minds that have been out exploring the world.  All of that rubs off, like pollen from a bee’s legs, when they drop in for dinner.

 

In the post-Modernism Week letdown, I was expecting that nothing interesting would happen except work, but even before Brett mounted his 737 to return to Tampa we got a call from Erica, who was one of the exhibitors at Modernism Week. She was passing through Tucson her way home and so we immediately invited her to come courtesy-park for a night with her exceptionally cool 1948 Airstream Trail Wind.

It’s not every day you see a 1948 Trail Wind.  Very few were made; even fewer are road-worthy today.  I have seen only two: one shell needing complete rebuilding, formerly owned by Brett; and Erica’s totally tricked-out and modernized geek showcase (I mean that in the best possible way, being sort of geeky myself). So I had to convince Erica to stay in front of the house, and in the morning I snuck out shortly after dawn and caught a few pictures of this rare trailer while she was still half-asleep inside it.

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That was cool, and I told Brett that I wished everyone from Modernism Week would come by and spend a night at the house.  I didn’t really expect to see anyone else, as the group was quickly dispersing to all corners of the planet (Kristiana and Greg, for example, are now in Nepal). So I was very pleasantly surprised when John Long call me late yesterday from the road to ask if I was free for “a coffee” as he was passing through Tucson.

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Well, needless to say I convinced John to stay for dinner and park in front of the house — because I’ve got to build up my collection of courtesy parking photos, and the 1935 Bowlus he owns is a truly spectacular trailer that in my opinion blurs the line between industrial design and art.  You just don’t see trailers like this every day.  Heck, you’re lucky to spot one of these every few years even if you are looking for one.  John estimates that there are less than twenty that are road-worthy, and while he is too modest to say it, his is the nicest Bowlus you’ll probably ever see.  (If you are at Alumapalooza he’ll likely be there with the door open!)

John and I were up to well past midnight talking trailers and all other things, but when I awoke at 6 a.m., both he and the Bowlus were gone, slogging down I-10 in an attempt to make Austin TX by Wednesday. Yet another one-night stand, but I’m OK with it.  Can’t wait for the next one to come by!

Insane

OK, I’ll keep this short and sweet.  All of the time I run into people who are full-timing in an RV, and who don’t have health insurance.

Sure, you may be young and healthy.  Sure, it’s expensive. But you have to keep something in mind:  our health system is insane.

We were lucky during our three years on the road.  Our medical issues were few.  But nothing lasts forever.  I went to see the local doc for a routine checkup in December.  No procedures were done.  I had a 15-minute exam and some blood tests and urinalysis, all routine stuff.

The physician’s office billed my insurance company $1,046.09 for that.

No typo.

We are still in the deductible of our “high deductible health plan,” so theoretically we’re on the hook for the whole thing.  But there’s a trick.  Simply having health insurance, even if it isn’t covering your bill, is what’s really important.  See, the insurance company has negotiated rates with the medical providers (meaning in this case, the doctor’s office).  Their pre-negotiated rate knocked the bill down to $238.00.  That’s what we’ll actually pay.

So what happens to the $808.09 that the doctor’s office forgave?  No worries — it will get passed on to some poor sap who doesn’t have medical insurance.  Sooner or later they’ll find someone who doesn’t have a negotiated rate, and if necessary they’ll garnish his wages to get it.

That’s why people who don’t have health insurance in this country are screwed.  A huge percentage of bankruptcies in this country result from being what is termed, “medically indigent,” meaning sucked dry by medical bills.   No health insurance?  You’ll go down fast.  At the rate of $1,000 per simple office visit, it won’t take long. Imagine what happens when you get hit by a car, or have a heart attack.  You’ve never paid as much for an Tylenol as you will when you buy one from a hospital bed.

Don’t kid yourselves.  Get health insurance and join the club of people who pay 80% less.  This has nothing to do with “socialized medicine,” or Obama — it has been the system for decades.  The health care system in this country is rigged, and the only way you can survive the cost is to join the game.  Or, you can move to France.

Winterizing in Tucson?

We have never winterized our Airstream Safari.  We took delivery in October 2005 and from there on we made a point of keeping it out of winter weather.  Sure, there were chilly nights below freezing on many occasions (usually at high altitude in places like Yosemite) but with the furnace or the catalytic heater running the trailer would never get anywhere near the freezing point.

Years before, when we lived in Vermont, “winterization day” was an unhappy day for me because it meant the end of the camping season.  Winterization is the process of preparing the trailer for months of freezing, by removing all the water and replacing it with pink RV anti-freeze.  Once you’ve done that, you’ve admitted that there’s no chance of going camping again for months.  For me, up in Vermont, it meant the start of a long season of staring out the window at my poor Airstream, frozen over with snow and ice like a sad aluminum popsicle.

Once we bought a house in Tucson, I knew we were home free.   Never again would I face the end of the season, because it doesn’t freeze here — much.  I have not winterized a trailer in six years.  Even on those occasion winter nights when the skies are clear and the wind is high, and the temperatures dip below freezing for a few hours, the Airstreams don’t get cold enough to require winterization.

And so you can imagine my consternation this week as Tucson, deep in the Sonoran Desert, is facing deep freezes three nights in a row this week.  Not the mild sort of freeze we toy with for fun, just to be able to say, “Hey, it’s cold here too,” to our northern relatives, but a real frigid, put-on-the-long-johns kind of bitter cold that lasts all day and all night.

I know you folks up north and east aren’t too sympathetic, given that you’ve been getting pounded by snowstorms and all that stuff, but really, we can’t take it.  Our house is a barely insulated stack of adobe blocks with drafty single pane windows.  The cactus will die, the citrus will wilt, and worst of all our Airstreams aren’t winterized.

This horrible thought struck me this evening as we were heading for yet another cold night, this time all the way down to 20 degrees.   No longer could I scoff at a light freeze — this is cold enough to turn the water pipes in our Airstreams into solid blocks of ice, splitting them open and causing all kinds of other damage.  Just a little ice in the electric water pump is enough to wreck it.  So this evening I grabbed an electric heater from the house and stuck it in the Airstream Safari that sits in our carport.  Running all night, that 1500-watt unit should be enough to keep the interior of the trailer safely warm.

The Caravel, however, is away from home in a locked indoor storage facility.  I debated whether to go over and give it a heater too, but eventually decided that the storage unit probably wouldn’t freeze … until about 11 p.m., at which point I couldn’t sleep for wondering if I could be wrong about the storage unit.  Finally I got dressed and drove over to the storage facility with another heater, just to be on the safe side.

As it turned out, the interior of the Caravel was a balmy 43 degrees, but I was still glad I had gone over to give it a heater too.  Tomorrow night we are expecting 18 degrees — another record low — and I think by then the storage unit will have chilled down quite a bit.

Well, at least it’s no worse than that.  In a few days this strange weather episode will be part of meteorological history and I can go back to pretending that it never freezes here.  I won’t have to buy RV anti-freeze and  my record of never having winterized the Safari will remain intact.  I guess there’s no place in the USA completely safe from freezes except Hawaii (and ironically there are no campgrounds there), but at least our frigid season is limited to just three days.

A freezer full of memories

Some people collect postcards when they travel, others collect rocks.  Some collect t-shirts, pins, or admission tickets.  We collect food.

Food is a great souvenir.  It’s usually fairly portable, completely practical, doesn’t collect dust and endlessly renewable.  You don’t have to worry about finding a shelf to display it forever — just a little space in the freezer or pantry. Some of our best gifts while on the road were food items given by thoughtful friends and courtesy parking hosts who knew we had limited space in the Airstream to store things, but unlimited space in our stomachs.

Food is one of the few things you can buy that is truly made locally.  How many times have you discovered a souvenir plastic trinket really came from some overseas sweatshop?  A nice fresh salmon caught in the river next to your campsite in Washington state, or a bottle of ale from the local microbrewery won’t have “FABRIQUE EN CHINE” stamped on the underside.

Every food item we’ve bought has said something to us about where we were.   In central Florida I used to like buying little round jars of Honeybell Marmalade.  The Honeybell orange has a very short season and (I think) makes a unique marmalade.  I still have a few jars here in Tucson for special occasions.  Spread it on a warm English muffin with a touch of butter and it brings me right back to happy winter days among the Florida orange groves.

For a trailerite, the fact of a tiny RV freezer is an asset.  If we could take everything delicious that we’ve found along the way, we’d need a Sub-Zero in the Airstream, but realistically we can only collect about 2 cubic feet of souvenirs before we have to start eating them.  This meant that we typically can keep frozen items for about a month, just long enough for the place where we bought them to become a fond memory.  Breaking out the chow usually means an easy meal or two and a chance to re-live the tastiest highlights of our visit.  Then of course, the opportunity to collect new souvenirs begins anew.

Food is also a cheap and guilt-free souvenir.  Even paying a little more for the local version still works out as a great economy when compared to useless “stuff” that will only clutter up your house later.  I’d rather pay $7 for a $3 jar of marmalade that I’ll savor slowly, than $5 for a t-shirt that says “I SURVIVED XXXX CAVERNS.”  A t-shirt will never nourish me, nor is emblematic of the local culture that we were able to touch while traveling by road. But even an overpriced edible memory yields value in every mouthful, and there’s a small joy in knowing you supported local farms and producers.

I like food souvenirs for their remarkable ability to evoke long-lost memories.  Every time I eat something we bought on the road, I can think back to the time when we found it, and what life was like then, and what age Emma was, and the things that were on my mind.  An old t-shirt can’t do that.  This week we took a bit of beef brisket out of the freezer, that we had put away during our recent trip to the Texas Barbecue Trail.  Eleanor warmed it for dinner and the aroma of it instantly triggered a scene where we were meeting our friend Gunny at Rudy’s in Austin.  It was a chilly night but we stood around Gunny’s truck after dinner and gave leftovers to his dog, and talked until I couldn’t stand the cold any more.  All of that came rolling back the moment I opened my mouth and smelled the unmistakable smoked essence of the brisket.

Tonight we took out some bratwurst that we bought in the late summer of 2009 as we were passing through Minnesota.  It was one of those impulsive roadside purchases that I had long ago forgotten, but in the recesses of our deep-freeze it has maintained perfect flavor.  Tonight it finally found its destiny on my Weber grill, and over dinner we talked a little about our trip to Minnesota.  Alas, not everything keeps as well as the sausage.  We carry Vermont maple syrup at all times, and it lasts forever, but the fresh and wonderfully complex local root beer that is only sold at the Burlington, Vermont Farmer’s Market has to be enjoyed immediately.

Also in the freezer I can see a more recent acquisition, a frozen ready-to-bake apple pie from Julian, California.  That one will not sit for a year waiting for the oven.  Sure, they make apple pie everywhere, but it is the signature dish of Julian and that was a good enough reason for us to buy one.  Just knowing it came from there will make it taste better, because (in a small way) eating it will be a chance to travel back there.

Not far behind the apple pie is a very well-wrapped turkey sausage that we bought at Vencil’s in Taylor, Texas. I have no idea how Eleanor plans to serve it, but I can be assured that the moment it hits the table I will see in my mind’s eye that shabby (but hallowed, by Texans) building down by the railroad tracks where we bought it, and the friendly guy who chatted us up and gave us a copy of the newspaper reprint about Vencil himself.

Once it’s gone, I’ll want to go back and get more, and so from the little crumbs of our consumable souvenirs a new trip plan will gradually grow.  And that’s probably the best part of collecting food while we travel.  Local flavors still exist in this country, despite the homogenization of towns by food chains, and those flavors inspire us to keep seeking out more of the little, local, and often-overlooked parts of America.

A food souvenir is a treat, both in the finding and the consuming.  By embedding themselves in the darkest recesses of your caveman memory, they capture a piece of your visit in a way a photograph can’t.  Try it sometime and see.

Why we picked this home base

After we sold our home in Vermont and started traveling full-time, we had the entire country to consider as a future residence.  We browsed and briefly lived in something like 46 states before we made our choice. So it’s understandable that one of questions we get asked most frequently is “Why did you pick Tucson?”

Really, the criteria was rather mundane:  we liked the desert climate (good for SAD and good for allergies), the cost of living is reasonable, we could buy a “lock and leave” house that wouldn’t need winterizing or constant air conditioning while we were gone, there’s year-round outdoor activity for adults and children, and Tucson has everything we need.  Having spent most of my life in rural country, I appreciate the convenience of living in a city even though it’s not as quiet as what I’m used to.

We don’t pretend that our criteria makes sense for anyone else, so after answering this question I am always quick to point out that it’s really up to everyone to figure out what’s important to them.  I probably don’t need to do that, since most of the folks asking the question are themselves frequent travelers and they tend to be very independent.  Of all the people who have asked the question, none of them have settled here. They’ve all found their own favorite places.

But we like southern Arizona a lot, especially for the diversity of things to do in the area.  Take Saturday, for example.  We decided that our mission would be to browse the Asian food markets in town.  Tucson doesn’t have nearly the Asian population of the California cities, but enough that we can easily find the exotic ingredients that Eleanor likes to use occasionally in her cooking.  We googled up a few likely spots and read the online reviews (mostly useless, as usual), and eventually came up with a list of three targets.  Right there, that’s a win — because in many other cities we’d just be plain out of luck.  I like the fact that I can find almost anything here.

tucson-leelee-market.jpgHaving just put some money into the Mercedes 300D for front end work last week, I wanted to give it a run. So we loaded up into the “Stuttgart Taxi” and cruised to our first stop, the Lee Lee Supermart in northwest Tucson.  This place tries to cover most of the major countries of far east Asia, so you’ll find Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, etc., all through the store.

I’m always intrigued with the strange and interesting new foods and ingredients in Asian markets.  It’s a temptation to start buying a little of everything, just to try it out.  But since we had three markets on our program for the day (two Asian and one “other”), we tried to be moderate in our choices.  I could easily see us filling the roomy trunk of the Stuttgart Taxi with a pile of groceries worth more than the car itself.

tucson-vermont-curry.jpgAnother fun part of this type of shopping is finding truly odd or confusing packaging.  There are things both lost and gained in translation from Asian languages, and sometimes the results can be laughable.  This keeps both adults and kids entertained.  Our first find was “Vermont Curry,” as seen here. Now, I’m from Vermont, and I can tell you that “Vermont” and “curry” go together about as well as “Kansas Lobster.” These days Vermont actually has a few ethnic restaurants, thanks to an increasingly diverse population, but as a child I remember that pizza was about as exotic as it got. If there were such a thing as Vermont Curry, it would probably have maple syrup in it.

tucson-steamed-potato.jpgAnother minor oddity was the House Of Steamed Potato brand kimchi crackers. Apparently this is a major brand in China, with several flavors.  I’m sure the name makes sense in Chinese, and I’m sympathetic to the problem of translation.  I wouldn’t want to try to translate “Ritz crackers” or “Count Chocula” to Chinese.

tucson-mang-gong-cake.jpgBut our favorite was found at our second stop, the Grantstone Supermarket: Mang Gong cakes. Nothing odd here, until you look closely at the bottom of the package. It reads, “The False Packing.”  It’s hard for an American to make any sense out of that.  Given the volume of illegal Asian product knock-offs, is this simply a pre-emptive attempt to admit that these are not real Mang Gong cakes? Perhaps in truth the package contains Nike sneakers.

Sometimes you can figure these things out by playing with synonyms of the words.  For example, could “false” be an attempt to say “low-cal”?  Or perhaps “imitation,”  “see-through,” “empty,” or “absent”?  Likewise, “packing” could mean “packaging,” or “wrapper”?  Maybe this is an attempt to advertise the see-through outer wrap, or to suggest that this has a decorative wrapper for gift-giving.  We need a good Chinese translator to help figure this one out.

tucson-biodiesel-fueling.jpgIt’s amazing that we managed to kill most of a day browsing Asian markets, but we did.  We are, as I’ve said before, easily amused.  I suppose the prospect of eating whatever Eleanor whipped up with the ingredients was helpful in keeping our patience in check too. By 3 p.m. we were wrapping up and heading home with the trunk only 1/4 full of groceries (fortunately for the budget).

There was just one more stop to make, at the Arizona Petroleum depot off 22nd Street, for biodiesel. I have been wanting to run some biodiesel in the Taxi, since it has an “old tech” engine and can eat almost any type of oil.  A little biodiesel helps clean out the fuel lines since it has higher solvency properties than dino diesel.  This pump dispenses B5, B20 and B99 (5%, 20%, and 99% biodiesel respectively) for $3.25 per gallon, which is about in line with local diesel prices at conventional fuel stations in Tucson right now.

I bought five gallons of B99 to mix with the 15 gallons of dino diesel in the tank.  It made the exhaust smell like a restaurant with a fryolator, which is actually quite pleasant.  Most cars I have smelt running B99 exclusively have exhaust reminiscent of french fries, and instead of annoying people, it usually makes them hungry.  I’d like to run this in the GL320 as well, but its super-high-tech engine and exhaust system are restricted to B5 at the most.

That’s not an atypical day for us, on a winter weekend in Tucson.  That’s why we like it here.  If we want to go to a festival, a farmer’s market, go for a hike or bike ride, attend a gallery opening, take sunset pictures, do some gardening, work on the car, roam the gardens, take a class, whatever — there’s always something.  You really can’t go wrong in Tucson this time of year, with lots of things happening and fantastic weather almost every day.

That’s our criteria for a place to live, perhaps because it closely mirrors the kind of life we had when we were traveling.  For me at least, once I had tasted the diversity and excitement of constant travel, I couldn’t fathom settling back into a town that didn’t have something going on all the time. No wonder it took years for us to find a place to buy a house.  Future full-timers beware: life on the road may be your dream, but keep in mind that you will face a tough job finding the ideal place to live afterward.