Archive for Uncategorized
May 17, 2008 at 9:21 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Ever have one of those days where you did everything except the one thing you planned to do? That was today. We had been looking forward to visiting the Pea Island Wildlife Refuge but it once again got shoved back in the schedule for a thousand little things. Even though the day dawned bright and beautiful, we stayed in the trailer most of the morning.
Not that it has been bad. Through a series of emails and phone calls and map reviews, we have finally developed a plan for our last two weeks of travel (before we settle into Vermont for the month of June). We’ll be visiting Assateague National Wildlife Refuge, doing some courtesy parking, and hopefully getting some service on the trailer too. We’ve got a bunch of interesting stops worked into this plan, so it should be a good time.
Emma and Eleanor made “Strawberry shrub,” which is apparently mashed fresh strawberries steeped in lemon juice, sugar, and water. It made a nice drink and a good project to learn about cooking measures (cups, pints, quarts, etc).
We set out for lunch with a decadent plan to find the Orange Blossom Bakery and eat “Apple Uglies” for lunch. But it wasn’t open — for reasons we could not discern, since the shop doesn’t post its hours of operation. Thus we were not able to get Karen the cookbook she wanted (see comments from previous entries). We may try again tomorrow on our way out.
Seeking consolation, we stopped at Uncle Eddy’s Frozen Custard and Mini-Golf … and had custard for lunch instead. I don’t think you can find a more nutritionally unbalanced meal. Something was apparently telling us to go nuts today.
As you can see from the photo above, we did find the OBX “Spaceship” parked next to a junkyard. It appears to be a Futuro house. The owners have decorated it with alien pictures and mannequin heads, and the interior seems to be in tough shape. It would be an interesting restoration project.
In the afternoon we were happy to find our friends Zach and Deb arrived at Frisco in their Airstream Westfalia. We’ve been expecting them for days. Zach is an old friend from the days when I lived the bachelor life in the Boston area. We’ve stayed in touch for years, and lately he and Deb have produced an heir: 3-month old Zane. The three of them are off on their first long trip together, with three dogs … all in a B-van. They seem to do fine.
We were happily engaged in catching up when a late-model Airstream Safari Special Edition rolled up, with two adults and three children in the truck. Carl and Laurie Hallinger were scouting for a site for the weekend and happened upon us.
It turns out that Carl has followed this blog from time to time, and also has all the back issues of Airstream Life. They got parked and came back half an hour later to meet up. That launched a whole ‘nother discussion, and suddenly it was 7 p.m. … and the day was wrapping up. I hope to meet up with them again sometime.
We’re going to start moving again, but not far. Tomorrow’s tow takes us first to the dump station at Cape Point campground (near the Hatteras Lighthouse), since Frisco doesn’t have one, and then 50 miles north to Oregon Inlet campground. We’ll spend another couple of nights there before we leave the Outer Banks for good.
May 5, 2008 at 8:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that it is traditional for Brett and I to go boating together, and then for something horrible to happen. We don’t have good luck with boats together. On our first trip, renting jetskis on Lake Mead, we encountered high winds and brutal conditions. On our second trip, we used two of Brett’s own jetskis on Lake Tarpon and one of them died five miles from the dock.
Our third trip was worse. We rented a boat on Lake Mead and halfway across the lake it began to sink.
So it was with great expectations that I joined Brett again for another boating adventure today at Ft De Soto Park. I knew something would happen. It was just a matter of what. I was primed for the thrill of disaster.
The mechanical problem, when it arrived, was rather unexciting. Something clogged the fuel line of Brett’s ski. He managed to get it to work its way out, but by then a spark plug was fouled. Fortunately Brett carries a full kit for contingencies (wouldn’t you?) and had that spark plug replaced in just a minute.
I was thinking we had gotten off rather easy at that point. Should have known better. We wandered around the inlets and bays trying to figure out where we were permitted to go, because the place was littered with signs advising, “No wake,” “Shallow water,” and “Combustion Engine Exclusion.”
It wasn’t long before the Coast Guard patrol showed up, blue lights-a-flashing. I’ve never been pulled over on a boat before. At the dock, the officer had a good time telling us, in a very polite way, what complete and utter incompetent boobs we were for disregarding the signs. For the most part it seemed the best course to simply agree with him.
Recognizing us for the (mostly) harmless idiots we were, he declined to give me a citation (because I was following Brett and holding an out-of-state license, e.g., just another dumb tourist) and cited Brett for the minimum he could, $65. We got a map from the officer and figured out where to go for the rest of the afternoon without causing ecological damage or incurring more fines.
As boating trips go, that was one of our best ones together. We got back to the dock with the engines still running, the bilges dry, and a few nice pictures in the camera. See the value in having a few bad experiences? It makes everything else seem fantastic.
Back at Ft Wilderness this evening we were treated to a (scheduled) visit by Alice and Tim Wymer, who live locally. Alice has been a subscriber to Airstream Life since the beginning and has been following our blog, but they just got their first Airstream last summer. I know I say this all the time, but it really is cool to meet people who have been inspired by the magazine or the blog. I never get tired of it.
May 4, 2008 at 5:49 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Yes, we had such a marvelous time at the Magic Kingdom that we got back at nearly midnight … and I was far too tired to write about it. It was the kind of day we hoped to have: reasonably short lines, lots of fun things to do, plenty of time, nice weather, good parades, and a minimal amount of exhaustion-induced crankiness. We got soaking wet on Splash Mountain, had our necks re-aligned on Space Mountain, and “woo-hoo’d” our way through Big Thunder Mountain Railway, so we hit all the major peaks too.
It is a fine tradition that Disney often ends the evening with a fireworks display. In EPCOT and Magic Kingdom the fireworks I have seen are second to none, and last night the show was no exception. We really should have gone home at 9 pm instead of staying for the 10 pm show. With the ferry boat ride, bus ride, and the post-show crowd, we ended up getting to bed at nearly midnight.
But by staying we got a bonus. We happened upon fellow Airstream enthusiast Paul Waddell, his wife MaryKim, and daughter Virginia, who were also hanging around for the fireworks. We’ve seen them for years at various Airstream events, most recently last summer in Perry GA, and about three years ago we courtesy parked at their home. It turns out to be a small world, after all.
So after a long day in the sun and lots of excitement, you can imagine how soundly we all slept, but perhaps you can also imagine how I felt about waking up at 8 a.m. to pack a bag and join Brett & Lori for a ride back to Tampa. We have decided to leave the Airstream, Emma, and Eleanor in Ft Wilderness for two more nights while I go back to Tampa to fetch the “new” 1983 Honda we bought. With gas prices as they are, it was actually about the same total cost to buy two more nights in Ft Wilderness at $71 per night, as to tow the Airstream to a Tampa campground, spend two nights, and then tow back to the Orlando area. And besides, I hate backtracking. We’re ultimately headed north.
It was also a sad morning for us, because our friends Adam and Susan had to depart for their home up north. They need to be up in the northeast in a few days, whereas we have scheduled another three weeks or so on the road. There were a lot of hugs all around and we all promised to get together again this summer. We already have some interesting plans for July and August in the works.
While we were away from Tampa, an auto detailer cleaned up the Honda and now it no longer smells of old car, ancient spills, mildew, pollen, and dirt. It just smells faintly of “old car,” a major improvement. To complete the transformation, I invested $38 in a pair of “Hawaiian hibiscus” front seat covers. They are loud and distracting, which is ideal for drawing attention away from the dull gray interior, the multi-shade faded carpeting, and the eroding roof paint.
I love the covers, but Brett described the process of fitting them to the seats as “dressing a pig.” It’s true, but it’s my pig now. I’ll drive it back to Ft Wilderness on Monday night and re-join the family, assuming the car doesn’t break down on the way.
May 1, 2008 at 6:39 pm · Filed under Places to go, Uncategorized
It’s a short drive from Tampa to Disneyworld, but once you get here you’re a thousand miles from the real world. Which is as it should be, I think. The goal of being here is to escape the real world and live somewhere perfect for a little while. We’re here snuggled into a spot in Disney’s campground, called Fort Wilderness.
“Snuggled,” I say because the campground was designed in the 1960s and the spaces and roadways are a bit tighter than they would design today for the larger RV’s that are common, like ours. It took a couple of passes for us to make it into our spot, which is saying something considering that we have backed up our Airstream on the order of 600 times, into some pretty tight spaces. It’s a rare campground that makes us take more than one pass, but this spot took three tries.
“Wilderness” is a bit of a Disney-esque turn of phrase. Yes, it is a heavily wooded campground with lots of shade, little creeks criss-crossing the park, and pine cones everywhere. But there are no mosquitoes to be found, something that is pretty peculiar considering we are surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of forest and swamp. It is like a state park but without warnings about ravenous raccoons, dangerous snakes, or ravens that like to pick at the sewer hose.
And of course there are full hookups at every site, nightly sing-alongs and movies, swimming pools, golf cart rentals, fast and free bus transportation everywhere, clever little gift shops, a ferry boat, and the Hoop-de-doo Revue.
We’ve been here before so it wasn’t a mad rush for us to run around and see everything as soon as we arrived. We settled in, had lunch in the Airstream, and considered our options. Most people run off right away and go hit a theme park, but one of the nice things about Disneyworld is that you can have a fairly impressive time doing “nothing”. So we went off and rode the ferry across the lake to the Contemporary Hotel, browsed a bit, then took the monorail to the Grand Floridian, people-watched for a while, then rode the monorail and the boat back across the lake. All the transportation is free to guests at any Disney resort (which includes Ft Wilderness), and the weather was absolutely perfect. It’s “low concept” entertainment but it worked for us this afternoon.
The Disney people gave us sites all together, so we’ve rejoined Adam and Susan for dinner this evening. They have been having a wonderful time on their own so far. When we talked via phone this morning they were at Magic Kingdom, and this afternoon they were at Animal Kingdom (Susan got soaked on raft ride), and apparently they’ve been taking in evening concerts as well.
Tonight we’re all hanging back at the campsite for a group dinner by the grill and then, at 9:40 pm, we’ll take in the Electric Water Parade, or whatever they call it, by the boat dock. It’s a good first day away from reality.
April 20, 2008 at 8:39 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Where did the day go? Rick Olivier, a professional photographer and Airstream owner, whose images will appear in the Summer 2008 Airstream Life magazine, invited us over for lunch. We meandered over to his house in a quiet mid-city neighborhood and the next thing we knew it was past 5 p.m. and we were still there.
We shouldn’t have been too surprised. In addition to Rick and his family, we had Jim and Donna Clark (Airstreamers), Rick and Mary Dotson (Airstreamers), and their neighbors. So the talk was heavily Airstream oriented all afternoon, including a couple of lengthy show-and-tell sessions at Rick’s 1969 Airstream Safari. He’s renovating it at the moment.
Being an accomplished photographer who has shot a lot of album covers and a book about Zydeco musicians, Rick also had a lot of images to show us. The day turned out to be a mix of music, Airstreams, photography, and talk about New Orleans — plus a lot of good food. No wonder we didn’t think to leave for five hours.
I didn’t mention this last night, but we are camped at Bayou Segnette State Park, in Westwego, across the Mississippi from New Orleans. This campground is one of the most popular in Louisiana, for good reasons. Not only does it have large open campsites and nice scenery, but swimming pools, a wave pool (not yet open for the season), and a boat launch.
The state park is full of living things, so densely packed that their presence is always noticeable. On a bike ride this morning we spotted an interesting gray snake which we have not identified yet. Coming back through the campground we saw brown rabbits everywhere, then in the early evening we spotted an armadillo industriously pawing through the grass for dinner, while Susan and I were playing ukulele music at the picnic table. At night a chorus of chirping and clicking comes out of the swamps that surround us, and continues all night until dawn when the birds start in.
Things are so different from the west. I still can’t believe the change. Despite a few dry days, we are starting to notice the humidity building up here. Upper 80s here today felt like 100 back in Arizona. The mountains have been replaced by extensive swamps, the javalina have been replaced by alligators, and the cactus are now mulberries. We are in the East now … or at least, we will officially be there tomorrow when we cross the Mississippi River and head to the Florida panhandle.
Our coordinates: 29 °53’19.43″N 90 ° 9’51.81″W
March 22, 2008 at 11:59 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We paused in our travels two days before Christmas, and here it is Easter already. I can tell it’s Easter by a number of signs: Eleanor and Emma are dyeing hard boiled eggs, people are passing around the annual email about giant bunny rabbits, and people are starting to come out of their winter hiding places to go traveling. (I’ll get to that in a moment.)
Dyeing Easter Eggs is a big tradition here. It’s a chance for E&E to express their creative sides (but they do that every day anyway), and it’s usually an excuse for Eleanor to do some above-average cooking. This morning we gathered at the dining room table in the house instead of the Airstream, and feasted on some sort of variation on French Toast (a single delightfully fluffy thing baked in a glass pan and covered with maple syrup, with strawberries on the side). I don’t know exactly what it was but that didn’t matter.
As an aside, I should mention another one of my culinary fetishes. You already know about the yogurt thing so I may as well admit to this one. Maple syrup is an essential part of anyone’s diet, unless you can’t have sugar. It’s a fact that if you don’t consume maple syrup at least once a quarter you will eventually find that your skin wrinkles. For first-timers I recommend starting with Grade A Fancy, which has a very light maple flavor. Once you are hooked, you’ll want to get something stronger, and my personal favorite is Grade A Dark Amber.
Don’t ever eat that fake stuff, it’s poison. This message is brought to you by a guy who grew up in Vermont, where elementary school kids are brought out into the snow to pour heated maple syrup over snow and eat it. In Vermont, that’s considered a legitimate educational field trip.
That early childhood experience had an impact on me. Eleanor and I have been known to carry our own REAL maple syrup into restaurants, because good pancakes can be ruined by plastic “breakfast syrup”. We always have at least a quart in the Airstream. When we started our trip, we carried several quarts and gave them away as gifts to people who gave us courtesy-parking.
By the way, Cracker Barrel, every RV’ers favorite stop (because it combines food and free overnight parking) serves 6% of the world’s supply of maple syrup. Now that’s a culinary ideal I can get behind. No wonder we like to drop in there on travel days. I can’t respect restaurants that serve fake syrup, especially this time of year when the sap is running from maple trees all over New England and eastern Canada.
I also have a weakness for maple milk (served at county fairs in Vermont), maple frosted doughnuts (which make Eleanor cringe), and maple cookies. When in Banff last fall we bought three different kinds of maple cookies and had a family taste test. Oh man, we are wierd, aren’t we?
All of this has absolutely nothing to do with Easter eggs except that when the maple trees are producing sap, it’s usually around Easter time. Today, Eleanor invited over the girls from across the street, and our neighbor Carol to help decorate eggs. This seemed to make everyone happy. Decorating eggs is more fun when it is a social experience.
Meanwhile I tackled a few items from our “hurry up let’s get going” list. I finally demolished the old toilet with a hammer (and wow, is that therapeutic if you’ve got some stress to work out — I should have saved it for a stressful day), broke down and cut up about two dozen empty cardboard boxes, cleaned up some house projects, and generally got a bunch of things ready for Departure Day.
… which is now set for Sunday, March 30. Seven days to go. We pushed it back one day just to allow our friends the Neels time to come from California and visit relatives before we head south.
In our last week, it turns out we will have the travel world coming to us. Gunny called today to say he would arrive tomorrow for a brief visit. He’ll stay not far away, at an RV park. The last time we saw Gunny was up in Tillamook, OR. Bert Gildart also called, to say he and Janie would be in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument for a few days and then drop in on us too. They might park in the driveway overnight, although they won’t be able to open their Safari 28’s slide-out if they do.
I also heard from Adam and Susan, who are currently somewhere in South Carolina on their way here. They may arrive around Thursday or Friday, and will join us on the trip to Mexico. They have the prototype Airstream Class C motorhome — one of a kind — which was featured in Airstream Life back in our second issue (Fall 2004).
So we are about to be inundated with friends, which, in the grand list of all the things with which we could be inundated, is certainly right up there with greenbacks and maple syrup.
The timing is absolutely impossible, since this week we have to also somehow get the car serviced, have a followup appointment for the contact lenses, attend three karate classes, have our countertops installed, have our appliances installed, have the interior paint touched up, seal the dining room and living room floors, return books to the library, get the Airstream’s heat pump fixed, pack for a six-month trip, arrange house-sitting, take trash to the dump, and clean the Airstream — in addition to finalizing half a dozen layouts for the Summer 2008 magazine. Oh, and I’m also going to fly a helicopter on Tuesday. Somehow, it will all happen. It should be a marvelous week.
PS: The bonus picture above is of Brent and I on the roof of his Safari 30, looking for a leak, a few days ago in Huachuca City, AZ. We found the cause of the leak easily: cracked caulk around his middle Fantastic Vent. Brent’s Airstream is parked in the Phoenix sun all summer and the factory caulk just can’t hold up under that stress. He’ll need to check it annually and expect to remove and replace the caulk at least every other year. The recommended caulk for Airstreams is called Vulkem or TremPro 636.
March 3, 2008 at 6:46 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I’m going to wander off topic here today, because I need to get some things off my chest about the sad state of magazine publishing in this country.
As you probably know, I publish Airstream Life magazine and have done so since 2004. Airstream Life is a magazine that, by conventional wisdom, shouldn’t exist. It serves far too small an audience, and attempts to do it with a level of quality that is far above a magazine with circulation of 12,000. Most full-color magazines, even quarterly ones, have circulation in the tens of thousands at the very least.
Honestly, Airstream Life would not exist if not for the Internet revolution. Virtual offices, easy electronic collaboration & document sharing, digital photography, digital layout & proofing, online marketing, and e-commerce are the essential technological elements of a business such as this. If I had to open a physical office and give everyone a desk and telephone, the magazine would never have launched. If we couldn’t market the magazine inexpensively via the Internet, we wouldn’t have many subscribers. In a dozen different ways, Airstream Life and other niche magazines — such as Atomic Ranch and Route 66 Magazine — are symbols of the efficiencies made possible by the Internet.
This is great not only because new technologies have enabled magazines to pop up that couldn’t exist before, but because these small magazines have to be of very high quality in order to survive in today’s competitive environment. The world is awash in magazines, and it is an extremely competitive business. Hundreds of new titles launch every year, and most of them die quickly. Magazines have to fight for advertisers and spots on newsstands, in a time when paper prices are rising as much as 20% per year, and as advertisers move their budgets from print magazines to other forms of marketing.
Remember the Avis rental car commercials of the 1960’s? “We’re number two. We try harder.” That’s the situation of niche magazines, except that we’re not number 2, we’re number 71,532. The media buyer at a national advertiser can go to a major RV magazine like Trailer Life and get 200,000 pairs of eyeballs with one ad, so how do we get them to advertise in tiny little Airstream Life?
We do it by being more focused and better than other RV magazines. In other words, we try to publish better articles, better photos, on better paper and with better customer service. We’re not perfect by any means, but we hustle and do our best. We do our homework. We take quality seriously. All of those things are appreciated by our subscribers. I know because they tell us. The other niche magazines do the same, or they earn a quick death.
And that brings me to the inspiration for this little editorial. I read most of the competitive magazines in the RV segments, and let me tell you, there’s a lot of crap out there. Really. I’ve never called out my competition before but I just can’t stay silent any longer. Too many of the titles are publishing junk articles that are:
- poorly researched, just plain wrong, or misleading
- badly written, hopelessly vague or useless
- entirely and obviously pandering to an advertiser
- dumbed down to the point of being insulting
This problem exists to some extent across the magazine industry, but nowhere is it worse than in the RV segment. There seems to be a general malaise across the sector, and a feeling that low standards are good enough for the RV owner. Look at the selection available to an RV owner on the newsstand sometime. The editors seem stuck in the 1990s, and they seem to think their readers are exclusively people of low-brow interests and completely undiscerning of the pap they are receiving.
This is utterly wrong, and a huge disservice to the RV-owning audience of today. RV owners encompass all ages, all interests, and they aren’t just dumb yokels looking for cheap gas & flea markets. But read most of the magazines and you could be forgiven for making that assumption.
I finally hit my personal limit when I read an article on a visit to Yellowstone in an RV rag. Here are two excerpts:
“After arriving at Yellowstone, we stopped by the visitors center where we grabbed a sandwich, some ice cream, and oh yeah, some souvenirs. We were greeted by the picnic tables by a rather chubby chipmunk with whom our daughter delighted in sharing her Lay’s Potato Chips. A young cafeteria worker emerged happily from the visitor’s center and brought with him two whole-wheat crackers; he claimed they were the chipmunk’s favorite. I told him, ‘This one is eating some potato chips,’ to which he jokingly replied, ‘He might have a heart attack.’ “
… later in the same article …
“Before we left, I had tromped through brush, taken a photograph from our truck window of a grizzly bear less than five feet away, and had been ordered back to my vehicle by a park ranger with a bullhorn for getting too close to a mama black bear and her cub. My adrenaline had already warned me of the fact, but the park ranger wasn’t in the waving mood after that. As for me, I am now ready for a safari hat and the Serengeti.”
If this strikes you as intelligent, quality travel writing, then you probably won’t appreciate Airstream Life. (Hint: What’s the first thing they tell you about animals in a national park?)
But here’s the irony. You’d think with the generally low standards of RV publications, there’d be a strong demand for an intelligent, well-written and beautifully presented magazine that explores a more diverse range of topics than just tow vehicle comparisons and tips on how to feed Cheez Whiz to squirrels.
Sadly, the opposite is true. I’ve spoken to several well-placed consultants in the industry, and they all say the same things: you can’t make it on editorial quality alone. Circulation is king. Put out a sorry rag of a magazine, make it cheap so lots of people subscribe, and the advertisers will come. Don’t waste money on better articles because the advertisers don’t care. The media buyers don’t actually read the magazines, they just evaluate on the basis of CPM (ad cost per thousand readers).
This really hurts me because I won’t go that route, but it is a fact that no magazine can survive for long without ad revenue (or some other form of financial support beyond subscriptions). Subscriptions alone pay only a tiny fraction of the true cost of producing a magazine. If we had to charge what it really costs to produce Airstream Life, an annual subscription would be about $50 per year instead of $16.
I would like to think that there are advertisers who value quality. In fact, I know there are a few because they buy ads in our magazine. Those advertisers know that many Airstream Life readers save their issues, collect the back issues, and even buy them on eBay when they can. (Last month a copy of the inaugural issue — Summer 2004 — sold for $48 on eBay!) But those sorts of advertisers are far too scarce.
For three years we’ve been trying to convince media buyers that paying for quality really does result in a higher quality of customer. A few of them have figured that out, and they do really well. But we’ve never had an advertisement from any of the vehicle manufacturers, and we’ve been ignored by hundreds of other national advertisers with products and services aimed directly at the RV traveler.
Thus, the structure of the magazine industry reinforces and even encourages mediocrity. Bad magazines thrive on the strength of their circulation numbers, because that’s what media buyers think of first. They get that circulation by promoting subscriptions at ridiculously discounted rates (as low as $8 for 12 issues of a magazine like the one I quoted above — which barely covers the cost of the printing!), and the RV owner buys them because they are “a bargain,” thus perpetuating the cycle.
I can’t say that any of this is a surprise, but it does make survival a constant challenge. Despite the odds, we’ve been making a go of it by serving those folks who actually care about what they read, and hoping that eventually the advertisers — including the 70+ Airstream dealers who don’t currently advertise in Airstream Life — catch on.
In the meantime, the wonderful people who subscribe and tell me how much they love the magazine, continue to motivate me and all the other people who work on Airstream Life. Thank you. You’re the reason we’re doing this.
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