Archive for Uncategorized
July 29, 2007 at 8:21 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Socializing is a huge part of this Airstream lifestyle. Being on the road full-time can be lonely if you don’t meet people, but fortunately there’s not much effort required to make new friends. Just owning the same brand of RV can be enough to start a friendly conversation, as we’ve proved dozens of times over.
Today, we had a double-header visit: Abe and Melissa, and Dick and Ann dropped in with their Airstreams for a visit down by the lake. Dick and Ann couldn’t stay, and headed off to Lake Placid, NY, but we convinced Abe and Melissa to hang out for the afternoon and through dinner.
Melissa and Abe and their shiny 1976 Airstream Sovereign
In campgrounds we meet people all the time. While we are in Vermont and relatively stationary, our form of socializing is to invite friends or acquaintances met online or through rallies to come by and visit. We’ve got room at a neighbor’s house by the lake for overnight visitors, and our present campground has a couple of spaces free most of the time too.
It might seem odd to non-RV’ers that we feel so free about inviting people over, but keep in mind that we all travel with our own homes. It’s not like inviting someone to stay at your house. No need to wash the sheets and towels, clean up the living room, or wonder if your future houseguest has odd habits. We meet, we visit, and we can each retreat to our own spaces whenever we want. This means we can meet lots of people without the worry of being stuck with a bad dynamic for an entire weekend.
It almost never goes poorly when we have Airstream visitors. They seem to be generally cut from a similarly adventuresome cloth, and there’s always lots to talk about.
Abe and Melissa pull out to go to Lake Placid
Right now we’ve got no one on the schedule for the rest of August, but I’m hoping that will change soon. We have reviewed the maps and decided we need to be on the road about August 26. That leaves precious little time to get in the last few wonderful days of summer, finish prepping for the movers, and finalize our remaining annual tasks. At the end of the month, we’ll be on our way again, with stops planned in NY, OH, WI, SD, MT, and WA through November.
July 28, 2007 at 11:19 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We hit a couple of the Farmer’s Markets again today. The primary reason was to capture photos for an article next year in Airstream Life, but of course there’s also the side benefit of munching one’s way through an incredible variety of food.
In Burlington, the Farmer’s Market is held in City Hall Park, just a few blocks uphill from Lake Champlain. This is a big one, with everything from maple syrup to Bosnian meat pies. I tried a really good local root beer, a buttermilk doughnut, two local blue cheeses, and a couple of bites of the meat pie. That was a tiny fraction of the things we saw, but I was more engaged in photography than I was in grazing.
The vegetables were beautiful, as were the flowers, bakery goods, and dozens of other goods. The Farmer’s Markets don’t just feature groceries, either. We found honey, wine, jewelry, handmade clothing, tortillas, turned wooden bowls, beeswax candles, and many other things. It’s easy to spend an hour or two browsing all the great stuff.
Some of the vendors were adding music to the mix. In addition to this fellow (a blacksmith), another couple was jamming on guitar and harmonica.
A Farmer’s Market is one of the great ways to explore a local community without driving around. All of the craftspeople, the small farms, and local producers of all types come out and bring the community to you. Even if you don’t plan to buy anything, a peek at the market gives you an insight into the values of the community and the sorts of things that are still developed locally.
It’s also a great place to meet people and, by talking to them, learn about things you’ll never hear about from the Chamber of Commerce. I grew up here and still picked up a few things from talking to the maple syrup guy. Sure, there are a lot of people who produce maple syrup in Vermont, and I can find some any day just by going to the grocery store. But will the impersonal bottle I buy in the store tell me a hidden place to go hiking?
July 27, 2007 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Parents everywhere know that once in a while you’ve got to have “date night”. Tonight Emma is having an overnight with her friend Kati and we are getting a nice evening to ourselves, including dinner at the local sushi joint.
We often get asked by people about the issues of intimacy and privacy in the Airstream, since we travel full-time with our daughter. Most people don’t want to approach the subject directly, but we try to read between the lines and give realistic and carefully worded answers.
The short answer is that we try to take advantage of opportunities like visiting friends and relatives with children who are willing to babysit for a few hours. This happens surprisingly often. We don’t let Emma away with people we don’t know well, but we have relatives in both east and west, and we have trusted friends in many parts of the country as a result of our travels.
Any amount of time to take a break from being parents is good. It doesn’t have to be overnight. Sometimes we just need to talk as adults for an hour to hash out issues or discuss future plans. It’s amazing how much we can clear up between us in a short period of time.
Being together in a small space doesn’t eliminate the need to converse and update each other — if anything, it increases it. You don’t want issues festering when there’s so little personal space. Even though we enjoy the excitement of travel, we still need the same human considerations that other people do.
So Date Night is always a success, regardless of what we do with it. Tonight, we had a lot of time to be together and a nice dinner too, both of which are like battery recharges to us. Tomorrow we don’t have to pick up Emma until dinnertime, so we’ll extend Date Night into Saturday and do some “boring” adult things for a change. I can see a whole program of little decadences, starting with a very leisurely breakfast …
July 25, 2007 at 2:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We had another Airstream couple drop in this week: Adam and Susan. They’ve got the prototype Airstream Class C (the only one made), and love to drive it everywhere. They spent one night at the same campground as us before heading on.
Walking through Vergennes, Adam encountered one of those priceless moments of Americana: a little kid with a lemonade stand. The pink lemonade Adam bought from this budding entrepreneur ($0.50 per cup) served not only him but a nearby flamingo. Now you know where they get the pink color!
July has at last arrived — three weeks late. We are getting the classic Vermont summer weather now, with sunny, warm, humid days that gradually build into thunderstorms and then re-start with fresh dry air. I’ve finally felt the need to put out the Airstream’s awning, which is the first time I’ve done that since Lake Mead in Nevada. Every evening we all gather at the rocky shore of Lake Champlain for swimming, boating, fishing, gabbing, whatever. The program is different every night but the general idea is the same: enjoy the warm nights of summer while we can.
And afterward, what better way to wrap up the evening than with a visit to the local “creemee” stand? Emma’s choice was Cookies-n-Cream ice cream dipped in Cherry sauce. It sounded horrible but I tried it and it wasn’t bad at all. But I’ll stick with one of my favorites: Vermont Maple with Walnuts.
A blog reader emailed me this week to say that I never appear in the blog myself. That’s because I’m the guy with the camera most of the time. But if you hunt through the archives you’ll find a few shots of me, and even one or two of all of us together.
Still, not to disappoint those who just can’t get enough of my face … here’s a bonus shot from last February when I was at the Florida State Rally. Every time I catch a cold my nose gets all red …
Rich with Obie the Clown
July 24, 2007 at 9:18 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Friends are starting to arrive for little drop-ins this week. Today our old buddies from Vergennes, Elisa and John, showed up with their daughter. They don’t live in Vermont any more and neither do we, but we are meeting up here anyway, since we all like to be here in the summer.
Elisa and John have a special honor. They were with us on our very first weekend out in our first Airstream, back in August 2003. They don’t have any sort of camping equipment, so we lent them a tent and of course it poured all night long. We felt a bit guilty in our comfortable 1968 Airstream Caravel, listening to the rain on the aluminum roof, while they were in our old tent.
Amazingly they are still our friends despite that experience. This time they’ll spend the night in the Airstream bunkhouse with us. There’s plenty of room for all six of us. I think they’ll be a lot more comfortable.
Emma has been catching all sorts of creatures lately. Japanese Beetles are a favorite for their iridescent gold color, but she’s also caught tiny leopard frogs, and a big fat toad. She has mastered a technique for rubbing their tummies to calm them. I don’t know where she learns these things…
July 23, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I keep walking across the lawn to the beach and back to the house, and thinking of the little cues that make the season into summer. It’s a only few hundred feet of open lawn, but it’s easy to fall into the moment and forget everything else as you walk across it. There’s the subtle smell of grass cut the day before, a few bumblebees browsing the flowers, a fresh breeze, sun setting over the Adirondack Mountains, the hum of a motorboat miles out on the broad lake …
… and thoughts of a ride on the boat to a distant sandbar, perhaps group whiffleball or Frisbee game on the lawn, dinner on the beach by the Tiki Bar … ice cream in the humid evening with fireflies blinking outside. These are a few of the sensations of a northern summer. I’m endlessly grateful that we have the Airstream to enable us to spend summers here.
Of course, for some of us the sensations of summer is completely different. Emma discovered the teeter-totter here at our new campsite and enjoyed the sensation of being popped up in the air with me halfway down the other end.
Saturday is the day for Farmer’s Markets all over the state. We’ve got three we go to: Vergennes, Shelburne, and Burlington. There will probably be an article on the subject in the Spring 2008 issue of Airstream Life, so I stopped by this weekend to snap a few photos for it. I want to drop in on Burlington’s on the next nice Saturday. There’s a local cheesemaker there who has fabulous blue cheese and I can’t get it anywhere else.
The one downside of summer is that our labors at the storage unit continue. Let this be a lesson to those who acquire too much “stuff”. Getting rid of it is much harder than you might think. Fortunately, we sold all the living room furniture this weekend and were able to get people to pick up several boxes of stuff, thanks to Freecycle. After two summers of effort, I think we are finally approaching the end of the project. We should be ready to bring in the movers in a couple of weeks.
I have partially resolved the Internet problem here at the campground. My repeater is bringing the signal into the trailer, but the distance between the source and the repeater is so great that the connection is fragile. If anyone in the area uses their microwave oven, we get knocked offline. A whole bunch of common wireless devices share or contribute interference to the same frequency band as wi-fi, including 2.4 GHz cordless phones, Bluetooth-capable devices, and microwave ovens.
The solution would be a second repeater to cut down the distance and thus strengthen the signal, but I don’t have one handy. I’m still playing with ways to enhance the signal and hope to have a more workable solution soon. In the meantime, the connection I have is adequate for most tasks. If I really need super-fast and reliable Internet, I can head over to my parent’s house on the lake to borrow their connection, and get another taste of summer while I’m at it.
July 20, 2007 at 3:48 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
It’s time to shift gears again. Having done three days of essay-writing, the blog will go back to the usual sort of entries, while I digest what I’ve learned from the many comments I’ve received (including lots of private emails). Thank you all for your help.
Another shift will be in our location. We have been parked in my parents’ driveway for several weeks, including the time I was down in Perry GA attending the International Rally. We’re going to move to a small campground near Vergennes VT for a while. The location is more convenient for Emma’s upcoming swimming lessons, but equally importantly, being in the campground will give us some space to host friends who are dropping in next week.
A huge flock of cormorants on Lake Champlain
I have avoided talking about the mundane tasks we’ve been doing since I got back from Georgia. Those of you who have read the blog for a while probably recall the drudgery of clearing out our storage units. We spent five weeks last summer working down from two 10×20 units to one, by giving away stuff to charities and via Freecycle, selling things on Craigslist, auctioning furniture, and donating things to friends. (You can read about this process in our August 2006 archive, starting with August 22.)
The job this summer is to get from one very tightly packed 10×20 storage unit down to half a unit. We conducted an evaluation and discovered that the cost of moving many of our possessions 2,500 miles west exceeded the replacement cost of those items. Moreover, after two years with minimal possessions, we’ve become even more religious about the need to pare down. We don’t want to fill up the next house with a bunch of stuff from the old house. Half a storage unit will mean we are down to the essentials: photo albums, a few basic pieces of furniture, my collection of Airstream Life magazines, tools, some extra clothing, kitchen stuff, and a few irreplaceable items.
So far Eleanor and I have had about four mutual sessions at the storage unit and she’s been there independently several other times. This Saturday will be the big push. We’re expecting to see buyers for our remaining living room furniture and a bunch of people from the local Freecycle group who want various household items. If we are lucky, after Saturday we’ll be ready for the movers to come in and quote the cost of getting the rest over to Tucson. I’m hoping to keep the moving budget under $2k.
There are some items in storage which cause me to stop and think. What to do with my old cross-country skis? What about my fabulously warm LL Bean winter parka (so warm I can only wear it when the temperature is below 20 degrees)? Winter boots? Ice skates? Autumn rain coat with zip-out lining? It’s easy to say I should just get rid of these things, but we do come back to New England regularly and I may want them. Most likely I’ll try to find a local friend or relative willing to store them for me up here.
Emma skates while her mother and grandparents watch from the gallery
Except for the ice skates … Emma has been taking skating lessons since she arrived in Vermont and seems to like them. It’s good for her to practice something that encourages grace and coordination. We’ll probably have find a skating rink in Tucson, and that means I’ll be asked to get on the ice too, so as unlikely as it seems, we will move pairs of ice skates to the desert.
For all the complaints out west about excessive heat and extended drought, it has been exactly the opposite here. It has been unbelievably gray and rainy for July, and we have not seen a day over 80 degrees since I arrived two weeks ago. No wonder my window air conditioner is not selling on Craigslist. Most days I wear a fleece while working at the computer until mid-day when it warms into the 70s. It’s nice that we have needed neither heat nor air conditioning, but this is not the sort of summer we usually get.
Since summer in northern Vermont really starts to decline by mid-August, this is slightly alarming. It won’t be long before the days start becoming noticeably shorter, and the county fair season kicks in, signifying the last hurrah before summer’s end. For northern Vermonters, it’s July or never, to get a few hot days to brag about later in the season. This year looks like a bust.
What we really need is a few hundred Airstreams parked nearby to create a local heat effect. When the International Rally was here in 2003, the temperature spiked at about 100 degrees, and that is a historic event indeed up here. It hasn’t been so hot since.
The heat spike seems to occur wherever the International Rally is held, causing many to speculate that it is caused by all the shiny aluminum. In Salem OR last year we had three days of 103 degrees, and the locals were flocking to the local rivers in their desperation to escape the heat. In Perry GA of course it was hot but who would expect otherwise in Georgia that time of year? I will be interested to see what happens in Bozeman MT next year — but probably from afar.
One last gear shift: Airstream informs me that the very last Safari 30 bunkhouse (like our trailer) has finally been sold from dealer inventory. These trailers are really special because they are the only Airstream trailers ever made with two permanent bedrooms. Only 80 were made in 2005 and 2006, and now they are all in the hands of happy owners. It is a shame that this trailer didn’t become more popular because it is uniquely suited to the needs of full-timers with children or a need for office space. If you want one, you’ll have to find one used now.
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