Man In The Maze

by Rich Luhr, Editor of Airstream Life magazine

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Fast forward through Texas

Hey, a day that went entirely according to plan!  That almost never happens, and especially when the plan includes a nearly impossible sequence of events like today’s did.

I started up at 5:30 local time in Santa Fe (an hour earlier than Tucson time, so 4:30 to my body clock).   I was the first guy at the motel’s continental breakfast at 6:10 a.m.  While I munched a bowl of cereal and yogurt I watched the local weather guru predicting a sharp drop in temperatures, gusty winds, and probably snow showers in the coming evening.  Time to blow out of town, I thought.

And so I did, with the ’56 Bubble complacently tagging along.  The trailer towed like a dream all day, even (once I adjusted the tongue weight and got my courage up) at a rollicking 70 MPH along the byways of west Texas.  I kept checking the tires, the bearings, the hitch, and the lights, but found no problems at all. The only minor issue was that a window cracked early on, which I taped up.  It was probably caused by flexing of the trailer body.  The trailer is known to have some floor rot, which will cause such issues.  I can’t blame it for being a bit crotchety, after all it has been on the road for more than half a century.  Eventually it will be all fixed up and I am looking forward to seeing it.

(Sorry for no pictures.  I was moving so fast and stopping so little that I never broke out the camera.  I wish I had taken a few more shots of the Bubble in action.  This is one of those times that I need a co-pilot just to help document the trip.  I tried to recruit a couple of buddies last week, but nobody was available.)

Fast-forward 520 miles:  I landed at my destination in Texas by 5 p.m., dropped off the trailer, visited with my friends for an hour, and pushed on 100 more miles to Paradise TX.  It was 8 p.m. by the time I arrived at Paul & Anne’s house, pitch-black out there in the countryside, and I found the Caravel neatly parked in the same place we had parked our Safari just about a month ago.  It was plugged in, with a full fresh water tank, and the refrigerator cooling.  After 1140 miles of driving in the past two days, the warm glow of the Caravel was a welcome sight indeed.

Now I’m set up inside, refrigerator loaded with drinks and snacks, my clothes put away, laptop and wireless Internet all set up, bed made — in other words, Home Sweet Home.  But I get only one night to relax because sometime tomorrow I will be hitching up and following Paul, Anne and Pat (in a third trailer) over to do some early setup for a weekend rally in the Grasslands.

The weather is supposed to be abysmal tomorrow (rain, 54 degrees) but who cares?  The early arrivals at these things are always good people to hang with — and if I don’t feel like going outside I can stay inside the Caravel and watch the rain while I do a little catchup work on the computer.  Now that the hard part of this trip is done, it feels like any small challenge I might face in the next couple of days will be absolutely nothing.

Tucson-Santa Fe roadtrip

It has been a good day.  I launched from Tucson about 8 a.m. and figured I had plenty of time to make my 5:30 appointment in Santa Fe.  The weather was as perfect as I’d expect from the southwest in October, traffic on I-10 was light, and at 75 MPH (the speed limit) it looked like smooth sailing.

Alas, I forgot that this time of year it’s an hour later in New Mexico.  Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings but New Mexico does.  Drat.  I trimmed my breaks to the bare minimum and opened up the throttle a tad.  The GL’s great range meant that I wouldn’t have a fuel stop all day, and Eleanor had packed snacks for the car, which meant that in 500 miles I only stopped three times for about five minutes each.  It all worked out.  By 4:30 I was in Santa Fe.

So I was an hour early for my appointment downtown, which gave me time to go check out the Bubble.  It was parked in a storage lot amidst a forest of weeds and sandspurs, which made kneeling down to check the underside a literal pain.  It had a cracked window, a bit of drooping belly pan (which I’m going to keep an eye on), the brakes don’t work, and the interior is gutted.  But it’s a cute little thing, only 15 feet long, and it’s one of those trailers that has obvious potential for an owner who cares to invest a lot of time and/or money.  I like it but I like the fact that the Caravel is done, more.  I taped the cracked glass, attached the temporary Texas ferry permit, and tested the 7-blade to 6-pin adapter to make sure the lights worked.  All good.

Since my next stop was downtown, I didn’t want to take the Bubble just yet.  In town I met Rebecca, who co-owns a food trailer called “Slurp.”  We had a very rushed photo shoot, trying to beat the sunset, and then I headed back to the storage lot to hitch up the Bubble.

It was nearly dark, so I worked by the light of a headlamp.  That’s when I discovered that the hitch mount I had brought was too low for the trailer.  The ball needed to be removed and installed upside down so that instead of yielding a two-inch drop, the mount would give a 3/4″ rise.  They’re designed for that.

I was patting myself on the back for being ready for this possibility. I brought with me a massive wrench specifically for the nut on a hitch ball.  Problem was, I couldn’t get the nut off. I fought with it for a while, and then of course the rain started.  That’s how it goes, from self-congratulation to humbleness in just a few minutes.  Eventually I got the nut off and completed the hitching job, installed the temporary license plate, and gave the whole trailer a good look-over one more time.  Then I slowly towed it through the lot with the windows open to listen for horrible sounds of impending mechanical failure (there were none), paused a few times to check that the umbilical line wasn’t binding, and got going to the hotel for the night.

Tomorrow will be another big day on the road.  The trip plan calls for 520 miles and they won’t be fast ones like I enjoyed today.  The tires on this trailer are from 2004, and atop that I am not yet sure that there’s sufficient tongue weight in the trailer (because it’s gutted).  Insufficient tongue weight can cause a dangerous sway at speed.   I’m going to load all my heavy stuff into the front of the trailer in the morning just to add some insurance, and I’ll be stopping several times in the first hour or two, to check everything over.

But I have to admit that I already like this little trailer.  It’s cute as a button, light as a feather, and it seems to be happy behind the Mercedes.  Tomorrow I wouldn’t be surprised to get a few thumbs-up from people on the highway as we toodle along through Texas.

 

Rockhound State Park, Deming, NM

Once again I am compelled to start the blog with the phrase, WE ARE FINE.  Yesterday some large dust storms swept across I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, resulting in several major accidents, deaths, and closure of the Interstate for hours.  We were 300 miles away at the time.  We are coming home from Texas, and so wouldn’t be traveling that section of road west of Tucson anyway.  These dust storms are a serious problem and I hope that some better safeguards can be put in place for travelers so that we never see such a horrible series of pileups again.

In contrast, we were in west Texas last night and enjoyed a very pleasant drive down the last of Texas Rt 180 to the El Paso area.  Normally I hate going through El Paso with the trailer, as traffic on I-10 can be hairy. This time we were well positioned to try the Rt 375 loop around El Paso through Ft Bliss and Franklin Mountain State Park. That turned out to be a great way to go, except for the grade up the Franklin Mountains on the section known as the “Woodrow Bean Transmountain Drive.”  The GL320 didn’t like that.  Most of the time it does very well but with 7,500 pounds of trailer attached it does tend to bog down on grades over 8%.  Like the diesel Mercedes of the 1970s, it will always get there — just not very quickly.

The best thing about this route is that it drops you off very close to Rudy’s.  This is the last stop for Texas barbecue heading west.  We picked up a couple of pounds of brisket since it freezes well, and a bit more to give to friends in Tucson who have been watching our house.  From there, it’s quick two hour drive across southern New Mexico to Deming, where we have parked at Rockhound State Park, a place we have visited before.

The same weather pattern that brought dust storms to Tucson sparked numerous thunderstorms sound of here.  The campground at Rockhound sits on an amphitheater-like slope which gave us a fantastic view of the lightning all evening.  We got rumbles and a few spatters of rain but otherwise it was just a clear balmy night with a show provided by nature.

Eleanor filled up the memory card of her camera taking pictures of the scene (as you can see here, using the bumper of the car as a platform), and trying to capture some of the lightning on video (unfortunately, not very successful).  It was that kind of photogenic night, but I didn’t take a single photo with the D90.  I just wanted to watch it all happen.

From here our next stop is home.  Work has been piling up on me the past few days, and Emma needs to get her orthodontic repair.  For the last few days I’ve had a list growing of things that need to be done in order to make a smooth transition back to home life, and more things that need doing once we are settled.

From prior years I know that the hardest part of coming off a long trip is the psychological aspect.  It’s jarring to suddenly be parked at home after weeks or months away.  Nowhere to go, nothing new to see, just the routine of suburbia.  It can be a little depressing after the sustained exultation of a new place every few days.

That’s why I develop lists and ideas of things I want to do once we get home.  Being busy upon arrival helps smooth the transition, and the list gives us all things to anticipate.  The season is becoming ideal for travel and exploration in southern Arizona, so we’ll definitely look for outdoor things to keep us busy.

The immediate tasks are less interesting.  When we leave the house I use USAA’s “store vehicle” feature on the cars we’ve left behind, which cuts our insurance premium by 60%.  Now that we’re coming back, I need to get online or make a quick call to restore coverage.  Likewise, I’ll call our DSL provider and remove the “vacation hold” on that service, set up a new mail forwarding schedule with St Brendan’s Isle so that our mail comes to the house weekly, and finally put the Verizon Wireless air card on hold since we won’t be using it for a few months.  These little tricks save us hundreds of dollars every time we go on a long trip (or come home), so it’s worth exploring what services you can suspend when you travel too.

Rt 180 across Texas

With repairs completed, we headed out from Paradise on Saturday morning.  The air conditioner is working well, and the refrigerator seems to be passable.  No cause was found for the refrigerator warming up into the 50s on hot days, but it works well enough when ambient temps are below 90, so we are just rolling with it (literally) for now.

Still, until Saturday we weren’t sure if the thing was just going to croak, so Eleanor kept cooking up things from the freezer.  On Thursday night she fed seven of us, on Friday she did it again, and on Saturday morning we had five for brunch.  It was like we were hosting a small rally, inclusive of meals.   We spent the balance of Saturday morning retrieving all of our stuff, which had become spread out across the Mayeux’s home, their little cottage, and the shop, and got on the road at a leisurely 2 p.m.

With our plans once again in disarray and this late start, we decided to tow just 97 miles to Breckenridge TX along Rt 180 and visit our friends Erica and Jef.  I last dropped in on them in April after dropping off the Caravel.  Once again Eleanor made dinner for all (risotto and salad, simple but great), Erica made brownies for dessert and we topped them with a little leftover chocolate ganache.  In the morning I had wanted an early start for a big day on the road, but with various putterings and ablutions and visiting we didn’t hit the road until well past 11.

So where to go now?  One of our earlier plans had called for going to Carlsbad Caverns National Park for a ranger-led tour of one Slaughter Cave.  This was no longer possible since the tour is offered only on weekends, but we realized that continuing across Texas on Route 180 and stopping at Carlsbad on the way to Tucson was actually 18 miles shorter than sticking to the Interstate.  So we resurrected Plan G (or was it Plan H?) and took the scenic route across west Texas.

Some people might say there’s not much to see along Rt 180, but those would be people who haven’t traveled I-20 west of Midland/Odessa.  It is true that the route is sometimes deadly boring and straight through dry cotton fields, but then it is peppered with little one-stoplight towns (each with a steakhouse) and little businesses that reveal the nature of this land: oil field service, farm equipment, and uncrowded fuel stations with dyed diesel for off-road use.  Crossing into New Mexico there are massive operations for potash, salt, and — in the wide-open spaces of desert & prairie — landfills.  The rest of the road provides plenty of opportunity for conversation with one’s passengers.

I actually preferred the drive to I-20 by a long shot, at least when towing.  The speed limit runs 65-70 most of the time, which is more than enough for the towing purposes, and there are always opportunities for pleasant breaks in the many roadside Texas picnic areas.  If I were not towing and just trying to get across the country quickly, then I-20 makes more sense because of the amazing 85 MPH speed limit along part of the route (75 the rest of the way).

We’ve been here a few times before, so we know that White’s City (which is actually just a small arrangement of tourist businesses at the side of the road just outside Carlsbad Caverns National Park) is the closest camping to Carlsbad Caverns.  The campground is not much, but at least they’ve improved it since the last time we were here. The rusted-out grills have been replaced with new ones and the electric hookups seem to be new (although ours still didn’t work– had to borrow the one from the next site).  Now you’ve got to show up with a 50-amp adapter because the RV area no longer has 30-amp plugs.  Fortunately, that’s part of our regular equipment.

Our plan tonight is just to lay low after the long drive across Texas and get ready to visit the caves tomorrow. I’ll report on Carlsbad in the next blog.

Fahren fahren fahren

Remember that 1970s-era Euro-pop tune by Kraftwerk?  “Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn”  (English: We drive drive drive on the motorway) That pretty well sums up the past two days.

We just needed to get the Airstream from the panhandle of Florida to north Texas as expediently as possible, and for that job there’s nothing like a nice boring Interstate highway.  Load the snacks, the podcasts, and some books and and the Gameboy for Emma — we’re going to check out half a dozen Interstate rest areas along I-10, I-49, and I-20!  Woo-hoo!

After an unremarkable overnight in Alexandria LA, where the height of excitement was discovering that we had accidentally spent the night parked next to a sign that said “NO OVERNIGHT PARKING,” we plowed up through Louisiana and across north Texas into the dark heart of the Dallas/Ft Worth metroplex.  The Louisiana roads were fine, quiet and even a bit scenic, but I do not enjoy the D/FW traffic nightmare when towing.  We encountered about 40 miles of construction zones (narrow lanes, signs missing, Jersey barriers) and the usual maniacal drivers making high-speed radical drifts across three lanes right in front of us while texting.

Twice we were forced off the road by a combination of “Exit Only” lanes that weren’t marked in the construction zones and drivers who would absolutely not let us enter “their” lanes.  At one point I decided to assert the mighty power of a 48-foot rig and almost literally crushed a small econobox that was being obnoxious.  He got the message. But most of the time we played nice and tried to be steady and smooth as much as the twisting and crazy construction zones would let us.

We survived D/FW once again and eventually emerged on the northwest side near Decatur.  We are now parked at Paul Mayeux’s home, where he is running his own 2-man Airstream service center.  Long-time readers will recall that last April I left our Caravel here for repairs and never got back to pick it up. So now we have two Airstreams here at Paul’s, 900 miles from home.

Our primary reason for coming here was to get a new air conditioner installed.  We’re going with a 15K BTU model (high capacity than the 13.5K model it is replacing).  We’re skipping the expensive dual AC/heat pump unit because we hardly ever used the heat pump and we have two other sources of heat anyway (furnace and catalytic heater).  That saves about $450.  Paul and Denver (who used to work on our Airstream when Roger Williams Airstream in nearby Weatherford was in business) will install the AC on Friday.

It always seems that when we get to a service center we find a bunch more things to fix or check.  During our last two days of roadtrip we’ve noticed that the refrigerator has climbed up to 52 degrees during the day.  That’s very bad, because it could indicate a failing cooling unit, which is very expensive.  The fridge has been running on gas during this time, so Paul checked the gas pressure with a manometer first and found that our pressure was below spec.  We adjusted the regulator and left the fridge running in a test mode (basically at top cooling capacity) all night to see if it would cool down.  This morning it is showing 42 degrees, which is better but not yet good enough.

Since it was packed full of food (thermal mass), it may be that a few more hours are needed to reach optimal temp (somewhere in the low 30s).  These gas absorption-type refrigerators are very slow to remove heat relative to your home refrigerator that uses an electric compressor.  That’s why you have to start them the day before you go on a trip.  Today we are expecting highs in the upper 90s, so it’s a good test day. If the fridge continues to cool, we’re fine, but if not, we’ll have to dig a little deeper to find the root cause.

We’ve also noticed that the bathroom vent fan seems to drip a little in the rain even when closed.  It probably has a crack in the plastic, so we’re anticipating replacing it on Friday as well.  That’s not a major job.

Parked next to us is a Canadian couple in an Argosy who are here for installation of solar panels, Marvin and Annie.  We’ve met before, way back in 2005 when Project Vintage Thunder was first displayed (unpainted and incomplete) at the Florida State Rally in Sarasota.  They remembered us and Vintage Thunder.  So it’s like being in a little campground here at the shop.

The best news we’ve had so far is that nights up here are cooling down nicely.  We’re getting 65 degrees by daybreak, and the humidity is low, so even without AC at the moment it’s very comfortable.  We finally used a blanket on the bed last night.  And added to that, we zipped up to Decatur last night and got our first Texas barbecue dinner of this trip, which is always something that makes us all happy.  I don’t know why, I guess it’s just a tradition now.  Memories of other great trips.