Dec 04 2009

Snowy and cold on the road

I knew that the logistics of this particular trip would be challenging. Going up to Grand Rapids MI to get a trailer in December is just asking for trouble. I wasn’t expecting sunshine and tropical breezes, but I was hoping for at least a lucky break where there would be no fierce headwinds and no snow. No such luck.

The drive up from Louisville to Grand Rapids was uneventful. I started at 8:30 a.m. under gray scudded skies and occasional light rain, but with temperatures in the upper 30s. The roads that hadn’t yet frozen for the season so there was no risk of ice. I covered the 400+ miles quickly and arrived at Ken’s shop by 4 p.m.

The Caravel was awaiting me in the shop. It looks pretty good. I did an pre-departure inspection and discovered that the refrigerator wouldn’t come on, and the water pump wasn’t connected to 12v, and a few other minor bugs. We fixed the fridge and the pump, found my hitch, loaded the miscellaneous parts & pieces, and I was ready to go. My friend Charlie had come up from South Bend to see the trailer and check out Ken’s shop, and after hitching up the trailer, Ken & Petey invited both of us to dinner at their house.

By the time dinner was done, we had three inches of fluffy powder on the deck. It made the trailer look very picturesque. That’s about all I can say in favor of it. I had planned to tow down to Charlie’s house, to get a jump on the first 100 miles of my trip southward. I wasn’t excited about towing the new trailer in the dark and in a snowstorm. After much consulting of The Weather Channel, we realized that the bulk of the snow was landing away from the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The route to South Bend is mostly along the shoreline, so we decided to make a run for his house.

At first this appeared to be a big mistake. We drove right into one of those horrible blinding snowstorms of fat white flakes that rush at your headlights and obscure the view. Traffic on the Interstate was moving at 30 MPH and the car was getting shoved around by ruts in the snow. I considered heading back but after seven miles things began to clear up, and then as we reached the shoreline the snow ended, just as we’d thought it would.

Still, I wandered around South Bend for ten minutes, momentarily lost, and didn’t pull into the driveway of Charlie’s house until nearly 10:30. We sat up another hour talking and then I settled into their guest bedroom, since the Caravel was winterized and empty of propane.

I got a start on making the trailer habitable today. I filled up the two 30# tanks with propane, and bought some small plastic storage bins to organize my stuff. I also fired up the catalytic heater to see how well it worked (very well, as it turned out). That’s as far as I could go without water. My rule of thumb is that I can de-winterize a trailer (fill the tank, water heater, and plumbing lines with fresh water) if the daytime temperatures are above freezing. That way the trailer won’t freeze while towing. But the temperatures in South Bend were unseasonably low — 26 degrees, with a biting west wind that made it seem much colder.

This was disappointing but not unexpected. It’s cold nearly everywhere in the US today. The only solution seemed to be to drive south and hope for better temperatures tomorrow. So I hauled out at about 2:30, drove about 250 miles, and got a hotel. With a hotel rather than dry-camping in the Airstream, I’ll have high-speed Internet to catch up on work, a hot shower, breakfast, Weather Channel on TV, and plenty of heat. It’s going down to 16 degrees tonight!

Since it’s low season for this particular hotel, I was able to park my rig right outside my window and keep an eye on it during the evening.

From here I have only the vaguest of plans. I need to get back to Tucson fairly soon, to get a pile of work done on deadline. Weather is the dominant factor in determining my route. At this point it looks like the best route will be right through the heart of the country. Once I get to I-40 I’ll have to make a decision whether to go high-altitude through Texas and New Mexico, or dip straight south into Texas for possible warmer weather. I don’t expect really warm temps anywhere in the next few days, so lack of precipitation will be the best I can hope for.

The poor Caravel was looking gorgeous in the shop, but now the front is covered with frozen slush and the sides are streaked with road gunk. The Mercedes isn’t looking too good either. I am dreaming of a warm sunny day in southern Arizona, where I am stopping at a car wash to get all the northern winter grime cleaned off the polished aluminum.

Nov 30 2009

Little Rock AR-Louisville KY

Now remember why some people don’t like roadtrips. Driving all day just to crash, exhausted, at some hotel with strange disinfectant smells, and then having to hunt up some restaurant in an unfamiliar neighborhood, just isn’t fun. It’s work. You might as well be a long-haul trucker and get paid for it.

Which is what I am right now. This is no pleasure cruise, this is a mission. I’m going up to Michigan in December for the only possible thing that could get me to drive voluntarily to the north in wintertime: our beloved vintage Airstream. This week I am a long-haul trucker, and thank goodness, I’ve completed nearly the deadhead portion of my trip. In a couple of days comes the payload.

There is nothing I can say about today’s drive that would be of interest to anyone. Perhaps later I’ll feel differently, but my overwhelming sense at this moment is that I’ll never get those three days back. I should have been listening to my Spanish lessons on the iPod so that at least I’d be getting something out of the time, instead of listening to 300+ songs and seven podcasts. Although I have to admit, Season 2 of The Red Panda is pretty good.

What did we do on long roadtrips before the iPod? Oh, I remember, we would either flick around for tolerable radio stations every ten minutes, or bring a bunch of cassette tapes. In college I had a bag loaded with about 20 BASF Chrome cassettes, each one holding a recording of a vinyl album (approximately, since the tapes were 45 minutes per side and sometimes that wasn’t enough to fit both sides of the LP).

[Editor’s note: Anyone born after 1980, please consult with an older person for translation of the terms “LP,” “vinyl record,” and “chrome cassette.”]

The cassette tape solution was good for the times, but not good enough. During a trip to the Florida panhandle for Spring Break I discovered that my collection of Pink Floyd tapes did not suit my college compatriots, and ended up listening to AC-DC’s “Back in Black”about seven or eight times. I haven’t been able to listen to that band since. My iPod carries about 2,000 songs at present, enough to carry me to the great wet north and back.

One thing I noticed today is that thanks to the Interstate highway system, it is possible to cross this great country not only without seeing anything, but without speaking to anyone. The iPod provides entertainment. Automated fuel pumps eliminate the need to speak to gas station attendants. Pointing and grunting will get you through most fast-food places. On Sunday I didn’t utter a single word to anyone except myself and my wife (via phone) until the moment I checked into the hotel and found myself trying to find my voice for the desk clerk. (No, I didn’t grunt to order lunch … I skipped it on Sunday.) Too many days of that and I’d probably start to lose contact with humanity. I’ll make up for it in the next two days as I contact a whole convention center full of humanity.

So here I am in the final hotel of the trip, facing the same questions I’ve faced the past two nights. Where to get dinner? Why does the room smell like deodorizer? What did it smell like before the deodorizer?

Down the street is a Denny’s and a Cracker Barrel. It is often said that the prevalence of chain restaurants and hotels make all American cities homogeneous, but I’m not fooled. I know I’m not at home in Tucson. (For one thing, I don’t stay in hotels and eat at Cracker Barrel when I’m home.) Identical services across the country are a blessing and a curse. It’s of little comfort to me to know exactly how boring the room will be before I get to it. It’s of no interest to eat the same stuff I could get at a thousand other chain restaurant locations. I’m in Louisville — I want to taste it, smell it, feel it.

But not tonight. Today I have driven 522 miles, watched a whole lot of pine trees and concrete go by, and I can’t stand to drive another inch in search of somewhere more interesting to have dinner, especially not now during Louisville rush hour in the winter dark. I guess that’s what keeps the chains alive. They are convenient, and that’s the blessing.

Tonight I have to go out again, to pick up Brett at the airport. We’ll run down our action plan for the show, and then hit the convention center floor early tomorrow. I will bring my camera, so if there’s something interesting by Airstream on display, you’ll see it here first.

Nov 29 2009

Nuggets of wisdom

The drive across Texas is the source of many comments from those who’ve done it. Mostly people say they can’t believe how long it takes. I think there would be more humorous comments if the drive did not cause one’s brain to turn to mush. That may be what happened to mine, somewhere in the vast vagueness that is I-20 from Midland to Dallas. In any case, I survived but I remember very little about the day other than the fact that it was LONG.

Really long. The car computer says I logged over 650 miles today driving to Little Rock, Arkansas. (For comparison to yesterday, average speed 66 MPH, fuel economy 27.7 MPG.) All I know is that I’m glad it’s over. The day started rough. The hotel room was hot and the air conditioner was ferociously noisy. The discomfort woke me up at 12:30, 2:00 and 4:00. I finally gave up about 5:15 a.m., had breakfast, showered, and hit the road by 6:40 a.m. I figured if I couldn’t get a full night of sleep, at least I could start early. I was on I-20 in the pre-dawn dark, watching the sky lighten to a streaky gray with occasional light showers.

By 9 a.m. I was already flagging and had to break out the emergency can of caffeinated Pepsi. I normally avoid caffeine, since it affects me rather dramatically, completely preventing sleep for up to six hours, but in this case it was exactly what I needed. It took me 90 minutes to finish the can, and it kept me startlingly awake until late in the afternoon. But the downside is that when it wears off, all the accumulated sleep deficit hits. For me, that was somewhere between Texarkana and Arkadelphia, and I had really wanted to make it to Little Rock so I’d have a shorter day tomorrow (522 miles).

I’m lucky to have a good support network. I got Eleanor on the speakerphone and she checked hotels out for me on her computer while I drove up I-30. By Arkadelphia, we decided I could make it to Little Rock and she got me a nice room online at a sweet rate. I made my once-a-day stop for diesel fuel outside Little Rock (25.1 gallons to across most of Texas and big chunk of Arkansas, not bad!) and found the hotel just before the sky went dark and a line of thunderstorms swept through. It’s nice to have concierge service, and nice to have someone to talk to once or twice in a ten hour day of highway solitude.

Ever since we went through the Thanksgiving leftover cycle I’ve been craving some Chinese food, so as soon as I had checked in I asked the front desk clerk for the closest Chinese take-out restaurant. It turned out to have changed names (twice!) since the front desk menu was printed, and three times since the GPS database was updated. I finally gave up on looking for it and pulled into the parking lot of another nearby Chinese restaurant, which turned out to be the one I was looking for, two generations of owners later.

I can see why it keeps going out of business. Even for a Sunday night in downtown Little Rock, this place was dead. When I see a staff of three in a big empty restaurant, I always wonder how places like that manage to pay just the electric bill. Certainly the $9 they charged me for “Ginger Chicken” wasn’t going to keep the doors open for long. The Ginger Chicken turned out to be more like nuggets of theoretically chicken-related parts, in meatball form, slathered in a generic brownish sauce with sliced onions. It could have been the mushed-up brains of other people who just drove I-20, for all I knew. The rice was good, and I was hungry enough to eat anything, so it didn’t matter much until I got to the end and started to wonder what the heck it was I just ate. Road food is rarely good for you.

I MUST get some sleep tonight. On Eleanor’s advice, I checked the air conditioner as soon as I checked in, to verify that it won’t make the horrific monster-trapped-in-the-dungeon noises of the other one, so I’m clear on that issue. I don’t need to leave before dawn to make it to Louisville on schedule tomorrow, so I may take a couple of hours to lounge around the room or go for a walk. (Other than walking to the bathroom at rest stops, I don’t think I’ve used my legs since Friday.) I should probably arrive in Louisville looking and feeling somewhat human, since the two days there at RVIA will be a health-sapping whirlwind of bad food and hyperactivity.

Speaking of human appearance, the pecan stain from last week has faded completely except for three of my fingernails. I will have to trim them very short because the black stain simply will not come out. I’ll do that at the last possible moment on Tuesday, and hope that I can remove all the grim reminders of my pecan-shucking folly. Or, I can just wear blue gloves and get Brett to do it too. (The geeks in the crowd know what I’m talking about.)

One more day …

Nov 28 2009

I-10 from Tucson AZ to Midland TX

I woke up at 4 a.m. Without looking at a clock I knew it was far too early to be getting up for the big drive today. The Great Horned Owl was still shrieking in the back yard, warning off his potential rivals in between soft hoots. His warning call is like the screech of a frightened small child, and it always wakes us up. But he never does it in the morning, so I knew I had to get back to sleep if I was to be ready for ten hours of driving. I rolled over and tried not to think about what lay ahead.

The strange thing is that we go on roadtrips all the time, and I don’t have this sort of nervous anticipation normally. Something felt different about this one, but why should I be surprised? Traveling without E&E, hotels instead of Airstream, and a rigid 600-mile per day schedule. Everything was different.

Well, I did get a few hours more sleep, and was finally rolling away at 7:50 a.m. The trip started off with a bad omen: the GPS would not power on. It worked fine just two days ago. Why should it suddenly die? I took it along anyway, thinking that by wiggling some cords or perhaps applying some other form of persuasion I would get it working again along the way. The day’s route was as simple as could be. Get on I-10, and stay there for 600 miles. I didn’t think I’d need it for a while.

I did stop at The Thing in Arizona, but the sky was gloomy and my photographer alter ego said to try again on the way back, when I have the Airstream in tow. I took a few half-hearted snapshots of the exterior and continued on.

Along the road I counted five Airstreams, all headed west. One of them was a Caravel, just like the one I’m going to pick up, which gave me a pang of wistfulness. I wished I had it in tow already, and I was heading for Big Bend National Park instead of Louisville.

But for today there was the compensation of just driving the heck out of the car without anything in tow. Mercedes enthusiasts says it is “autobahn ready,” which means theoretically I should be able to go 150 MPH with no trouble. In reality the car is electronically limited to 130 MPH, and even in Texas that’s a big ticket. The speed limit was 75 through Arizona and New Mexico, and once I was about 30 miles past El Paso things opened up to a neat 80 MPH, which meant I could at least flirt with what the car could do in those big empty spaces between El Paso and Van Horn.

By the numbers: 622 miles total driving, average speed 73, fuel economy a startling 26.7 miles per gallon! I hadn’t expected such good fuel economy at 80 MPH, but speed doesn’t seem to affect the fuel economy on this car very much. After 622 miles the computer said I could go another 59 miles, but when the orange “low fuel” indicator went on I decided to call it quits. I was in Midland, where I had planned to stop anyway. It was just a matter of finding the hotel I had reserved. And then I remembered: no GPS.

The dead Garmin is still a week inside it’s one-year warranty period, so tomorrow I’ll call for a return authorization, and when it comes back we’ll have a GPS for each car. In the meantime, I need a functioning one to navigate my way around half a dozen cities on this trip. Fortunately, all along America’s highways one can find handy superstores, so I stopped at the first one I saw and bought a replacement GPS.

And with that, I found my hotel, grabbed some takeout dinner, unloaded my valuables into the room, and settled in to update you with the millionth re-run of “Caddyshack” playing on the TV in the background. I think the presence of a cheap room, cheap takeout, and a brainless old movie at the end of the day completes the requirements for this to be an official roadtrip. It has been a long day, and tomorrow another long day lies ahead.

Nov 27 2009

The ghost of Thanksgiving future

For us, Thanksgiving was last weekend. We’re splitting off into different directions tomorrow, and Eleanor wisely did not want to make a her normal “ginormous” meal and then have nobody around to eat the leftovers, so we did the big feast last Sunday. Three of us and two guests cut into the delicious goodies Eleanor made, and we barely made a dent.

We’ve been eating leftovers since. Twice a day, every day, it’s turkey, gravy, roasted vegetables, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry relish, pumpkin soup — probably the same sort of thing that you are salivating over today. Well, let me tell you, enjoy it while it’s still a novel experience. Because I’m your future, and I can tell you that in three days, you’ll be begging to be released from leftover jail.

(Image credit: Brad Cornelius)

Emma mutinied this morning. I was prepared to surrender on Tuesday but after seeing how much was remaining of that 23-lb bird I felt it was my husband-ly duty to persevere, even though my mouth was craving something — anything — different. We managed to wipe out the soup, 90% of the vegetables, the cranberries, 80% of the stuffing, and the gravy, but that darned fowl is still sitting in the refrigerator, taunting us from under a tent of aluminum foil. When Emma cracked, I lost my willpower as well and we declared the season of Thanksgiving leftovers officially over.

Tonight I want Chinese food with lots of unidentifiable MSG-laden sauce. Or maybe spaghetti with spicy meatballs and lots of chopped garlic. Anything that has pungent odors for the palate and alternate textures for the tongue will do. Just please, no more “white meat or dark meat?” this week.

So without traditional Thanksgiving things to do, we are spending the day packing. E&E are flying up to Vermont for a visit to the seasonal gloom and wet (just kidding, they’re really going to see family), and that is an adventure that requires much packing, analysis, unpacking and repacking (repeat ad infinitum). I am leaving for a major roadtrip to Louisville KY and Grand Rapids MI, among other spots.

The roadtrip will be a screamer compared to the way we usually travel. Being solo, I can roll out of bed, jump in the car, and knock off 800 miles before dinner. Bathroom stops will be brief & infrequent, lunches can be eaten with one hand at 75 MPH (or during a very short rest area stop), and the route will be 100% high-speed Interstate highway. My route is easy to remember — I-10, I-20, I-30, and I-40 — but being Interstates, the drive itself should be pretty forgettable. Thanks to the wide-open spaces of the west, in my entire first day I will pass through only one major metro that could slow me down (El Paso). The rest of the time the speed limit is 75-80 MPH and there’s not a whole lot to bother stopping for.

Actually, I might detour very slightly in Arizona to drop in on “The Thing.” I know what The Thing is (but I’m not telling!) My reason for stopping is to get a few photos for an upcoming article in Airstream Life (Spring 2010) about “America’s Favorite Tourist Traps.” But other than that, I don’t plan to stop for much until at least Odessa, TX. That’s 600+ miles from Tucson. I don’t even expect to stop for fuel, ’cause like the other Mercedes Bluetec diesels, the GL320 can get up to 700 miles out of a tank when there’s no Airstream dragging it down. That’s a feature I haven’t had a chance to test out yet. So with a few distractions like these I’ll try to make the trip more interesting for myself.

In case you are wondering, the thing pictured above isn’t The Thing. But it’s a Thing anyway. I don’t know what the heck it is, really. It seems to be the result of Brad working out a nightmare he had. He’s a brilliant illustrator and that means sometimes odd things come out of his head. He’s the guy responsible for the Alumapalooza poster design, as well as all the Tin Hut illustrations that have appeared in Airstream Life, and if you come to Alumapalooza next summer you can meet him.

One last thing to do tonight: cut up the remaining turkey and freeze it. Eleanor says there’s enough left that we can have it for Christmas, and the carcass will become soup. It seems the ghost of this turkey will be haunting us for some time to come.