We are back home now and I’m amazing that in the three weeks we were on the road I had so few opportunities to update the blog.  While it would be easy to blame it on a lack of good Internet opportunities (which was the case for four days in Death Valley and six days camped up by the San Francisco Bay area if you can believe that), the real reason has been that I often made the choice to spend time with people rather than with the computer. I guess that’s a good sign that my priorities were straight during the trip.

We went to Death Valley to be with Airstream friends as much as for the national park itself. Then we migrated to Thornhill Broome beach (Point Mugu State Park, on the California coast) for three days and met other Airstream friends there, and picked up my mother at LAX.  The four of us then towed up to Anthony Chabot Regional Park near Castro Valley CA (east of Oakland) and spent six days with yet another group of Airstream friends (from Europe), attending their wedding and touring San Francisco.

Then it was back down the coast, drop off Mom at the airport, and back east toward home. Three weeks fly by when you are traveling and doing lots of things. By the time we got back to Quartzsite for a final night, about to go home to Tucson, it seemed like we just got started.

Camping in winter, even in the southwest, presents special challenges. First, you’ve got to pick the right places to go. Snowbirds aren’t interested in encountering blizzards and we definitely don’t want to think about winterizing.  So the possibility of snow and freezing temperatures keeps us to the lowlands. Northern Arizona, northern New Mexico, and the Sierra Nevada range are strictly off limits because they are high elevation areas. Most RV’ers seems to cluster around a few reliably warm places strung along I-8 or I-10: Los Angeles, San Diego, Yuma, Quartzsite, Phoenix, Tucson.

The Pacific Coast is also OK but it’s hard to camp along the California coast sometimes. There aren’t enough places for everyone who wants to camp on the weekend, and prices are high especially since the state hiked prices at all the state parks. We spent $70 for one night at a decent RV park, which wasn’t an unusual price.

The short days of winter and cloudiness from this year’s El Niño storms in California made it hard to rely solely on solar for our electricity when we were boondocking.  Even in a less-stormy winter, desert temperatures drop fast at sunset and there’s usually a lot of furnace use.  We relied heavily on our catalytic heater because it doesn’t use electricity.

In the winter certain problems crop up that you wouldn’t notice in the summer camping season.  For example, the propane regulator has been “singing” various songs for a couple of years now, whenever a propane appliance is drawing gas—but only when it’s cold outside.  Since the regulator is right outside the bedroom, we were hearing it a lot on cold nights. Eleanor has been asking me to solve the problem for a while but until recently I wasn’t sure whether the tank, regulator, or propane hoses (“pigtails”) was the cause. Turns out it can be either the regulator or the hoses–or in our case both.

The noise (which varies from a low humming to an oscillating note) has gotten louder and finally one night it was too much.  I found an RV repair place in Ventura CA that stocked our regulator and swapped it out while we were camped at the beach later that day. It’s not a difficult job, taking about 20 minutes if you have the right wrenches on hand. That reduced the noise considerably but I still had to replace the pigtails later to get back to complete silence.  I’m adding “replace propane regulator” to our routine maintenance list, once every 10 years.

Another challenge of winter is condensation.  On this trip the El Niño rains and cool temperatures kept the Bay Area near Oakland right around the dewpoint during the day, and combined with four people in the Airstream it added up to lots of humidity inside. Two or three days we woke up to water dripping from the window glass, and that’s not good.

Why?  Because that amount of water condensing on the glass means that it’s also condensing in other places you can’t see.  Between the two aluminum sheets that comprise the exterior of the Airstream is a layer of fiberglass insulation.  Sometimes there are bare patches where the fiberglass has been pushed aside for something else, like an exterior water connection or a speaker in the ceiling.  When the humidity in the trailer is too high, the moisture will start to condense on the interior side of the aluminum skin, and soak the insulation.

You might not notice this until it gets severe enough to drip out from a seam, but it’s always a problem.  Repeated bouts of heavy condensation mean corroded wiring, rotted floors, mold, stains, and smells–all in places that are difficult to access and repair.

The solution is ventilation.  We didn’t open the windows enough to compensate for four people breathing, washing, cooking, and using a catalytic heater.  (The cat heater produces quite a lot of water vapor during operation.)  It is counter-intuitive to open the windows and roof vents when you’re trying to stay warm, but you have to do it.

Yesterday, five days after the last rain, I removed a ceiling speaker in the Airstream and found water droplets still collected on the aluminum above.  Once the moisture gets in there, it takes quite a while to dry out, even in the arid desert of Tucson. Imagine how long it stays—and how much damage it does—if you live in a damper climate.

Last year we were towing from Arizona to Florida in February and ran into cold temperatures and rain in Texas.  We didn’t winterize the trailer because we were towing along I-10, deep in the south.  That episode taught me another lesson about winter travel because along the highway the city water fill froze, cracked, and sprang a leak inside the trailer. Sometimes you just get unlucky.

It’s a tricky time of year to do much with a travel trailer, but still the opportunities and cost savings are worth it.  Our trip to Los Death Valley, Los Angeles, and San Francisco wouldn’t have been possible without our Airstream.  I’ll just remember that winter makes things a little more complicated … and go anyway.

Technology kept collapsing around us last week, despite my hopes for a turnaround in luck. The refrigerator dropped back to its prior level of weak performance, managing to keep the interior only about 46 degrees on electric and about 50 degrees on propane. In addition to everything else that went wonky, the rear-view cam on the Airstream went dark as we left Destin FL, and so it made sense to drop in on our friends at Airstream of Mississippi (Gulfport, MS, right off I-10) for a little help.

AS of MS (also known as Foley RV) has a small but capable service department.  Jesse (pictured here) swapped out the bent stabilizer in a few minutes, which I appreciated particularly because it meant I didn’t have to lie on my back and wrestle it off with my own wrenches.  The service guys were kind enough to take a good stabilizer off a used Airstream, since they didn’t currently have a new stabilizer in inventory. That’s good service!

They also took a look at the mysterious failure of the rear-view cam and figured out in a few minutes that the problem was in the flexible cable that carries the signal from the Airstream to the car. A little tweaking and that problem was solved too.  I was starting to have hope.

I should pause here to say that Rick Foley and his team are really great—making Airstream of Mississippi one of my favorite dealerships to visit. Rick is a “real Airstreamer.” He actually became an Airstream dealer after being a vintage Airstream owner and falling in love with the lifestyle.  That’s good motivation by my standards.  Rick has a nice Argosy motorhome these days, which is looking sweet thanks to a recent repaint in the neighboring bodyshop.

At that point we still thought the refrigerator was working, so I didn’t ask about that, but later that day when we pulled into Bayou Segnette State Park in Westwego LA (across the river from New Orleans), it was obvious that we still had a cooling problem.

Since we’d already reduced our perishables to a bare minimum, the weakness of the refrigerator wasn’t as much of a crisis as before.  We left it running in hopes it might recover, and spent a day in New Orleans with our good friends Lexie and Charon, visiting a few old favorite places.  I had to get a really good muffaletta, for one thing, and so we had lunch at a place I’ve been visiting for muffalettas since 1983.

In my college years I visited Cafe Du Monde many times, but never before midnight. It was something of a ritual back then, topping off an evening of wandering and listening to jazz leaking out of the cafes and restaurants, with an order of 3 beignets and coffee.

Being a tad older these days, we hit it in the mid-afternoon this time. It was exactly as it always is: simple, crowded, and fun. Wearing powdered sugar from the beignets is de rigeur.  I had left a few white smudges on my green Airstream Life baseball cap as a souvenir until the heavy rains over the weekend washed them off.

We had only one good weather day out of three this visit, so we made the most of it, walking all around the French Quarter and riding the St Charles streetcar its full length at sunset.  Everyone was out in their Halloween costumes a day early because of the strong forecast of rain on Halloween, and this made the people-watching just fantastic.  New Orleans is a city of drama and costume already, so when you mix in Halloween and massive  parties along St Charles and Carrollton, it’s a virtual show.

The next day I tackled what technical problems I could, with Lexie’s help.  I’d had several packages sent to the park, so at this point I was able to replace the dead Wilson cellular booster, replace the failing showerhead and flexible hose with an Oxygenics model, and replace the TPMS with the latest version with user-replaceable batteries (this is the same one I sell in the Airstream Life Store).  I also lubed the awning arms with silicone spray since they were sticking.  I felt like I was making progress against entropy.

The big project was the fridge. First, I wanted to make sure that the propane gas pressure was set correctly at the regulator.  Low pressure can cause the refrigerator to fail when running on gas.

Lexie had an old-fashioned blood pressure manometer that read millimeters (mm) of mercury (HG).  In the photo at right you can see our almost steampunk-appearing test rig. We bought a few pieces of brass at the local hardware store to screw into the test port on the refrigerator (1/8″ FIP by the way) and connected the rubber hose from the blood pressure gauge to that.

Since the optimal gas pressure is 11 inches of water column, I just had to find an online converter to figure out what that was in mm/HG.  The answer is 20.5, and sure enough, the gas regulator was set too low.  We quickly adjusted that, but I knew it wasn’t the whole story since the refrigerator wasn’t working properly on gas or electric.  (Also, the regulator seems to be at its adjustment limit, so it may need replacement soon too if I can’t find the correct spring.)

I decided to do the test that Arcticold requested.  This involved disconnecting the 120 volt wires to the refrigerator’s circuit board, and cutting/splicing them to connect the electric heating element directly.  Essentially this “hotwires” the heater so it runs full bore even if the refrigerator is turned off.  This test eliminates any possibility of failure caused by a faulty circuit board, thermistor, or gas burner.

After 24 hours of running like this it was clear the cooling unit wasn’t performing.  The fridge stayed in the upper 40s.  We let it run like this for another 12 hours, taking temperatures of the exterior tubing periodically with an infrared thermometer so I could report to Arcticold.  On Sunday I re-wired it back to original–with one exception.  Now it has a set of “quick disconnect” plugs so that I can easily repeat this test without cutting anything.

I gave Arcticold a call this morning and got voicemail again, which I expected.  They didn’t call back today, so it looks like this could be a long slog.  Meanwhile, we’re back to putting dry ice in the freezer to protect the few things remaining in there.

Despite not having reliable refrigeration, Eleanor is still managing to cook well.  In the photo above she’s making a spectacular meal of South Carolina’s famous “Shrimp & Grits” with a few crabcakes on the side.  She has adopted a philosophy of buying fresh stuff daily as we need it, and using the refrigerator mostly as a moderately cool place to store less perishable things like canned drinks and butter.

We’re also making a few substitutions like buying UHT milk. It turns out that refrigeration is overrated, and by the end of this trip we may have figured out that we don’t need it at all.  After all, Wally Byam toured Europe in 1948 without a refrigerator. I think we can get across Texas and the desert southwest.