Archive for Uncategorized
August 13, 2006 at 10:37 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Another great day at the RMVR. Today was the Open House day. In the morning, we (and all the other rally participants) were open for each other to visit, and in the afternoon we were open for the general public. Thus, we basically spent most of the day socializing.
In between the two Open House periods, we headed over to Creede to take in the underground Mining Museum. In 1990 Creede hired some miners to tunnel out a Community Center, Fire Station, storage for the local constabulary, and a museum. All of these are located in the side of a mountain of rock just north of downtown. I’ve never seen a Fire Station built underground before, and it’s odd to imagine a chicken dinner fundraiser or a Seniors Bingo Night being held in the underground as well, but that’s what they do here in Creede.
The weather was changeable today, as it has been in Colorado for weeks now, so most of my photos ended up as interiors. Here are a few of the people at the rally and their trailers…
Harry and Kim Truitt have made over this 1966 Airstream Safari beautifully. Now they are ready to tackle the outside. Harry’s the guy who sold me the 1960s Thermos.
I didn’t get this gentleman’s name but I will later. He owns a pair of 1940s Airstreams, both in remarkably original condition.
Patty Raimondo demonstrates the Dickinson marine fireplace she recently added to her very customized 1954 Flying Cloud.
Diane Bailey and her dog seem very comfortable in this plush 1961 Bambi.
Rob and Sadie Super have been customizing this 1973 Safari for quite a while. It has a very cool aluminum and naugahyde interior. There’s some finishing work yet to be done here, but the design inside is excellent.
A friend of Rob & Sadie’s made this sign to commorate the long effort:
“Rome was not built in a day — and they did not build it out of ALUMINUM!” Sign of the week!
This evening at Happy Hour everyone gathered around and sang Happy Birthday to me. (I’m 43 today!) Then we got a group of about a dozen people together and brainstormed for about an hour on the 1952 Cruiser project we are doing for Matthew McConaughy (Project Vintage Lightning). Some excellent ideas came out of this, which you’ll be able to read about in the Fall issue of Airstream Life.
I want to publicly thank all the people who worked to put together this superb rally. It’s a lot of work to put on a good rally, and the talented people who volunteered their time have made this rally one of the best in the nation. Everything, from the signup process to the goodie bags, from the entertainment to the presenters, was first-rate.
This is our last day in Colorado. Tomorrow we must hit the road to Ohio if we are to keep our appointment at Airstream. We’re already packed and ready to hitch up. It’s going to be four days of long hauling … We’ll also be saying goodbye to Rich C for a few months. He’s heading to Florida for medical treatment, and we will probably not see him again until November. It is a bittersweet time for us, leaving the west and many friends behind, but we are headed home to other friends and family, and that will be a nice thing too.
August 12, 2006 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Terrific rally day today! This morning Herb Spies did his famous Airstream polishing demonstration, on a pretty Colorado morning in front of an audience of about thirty people.
Herb gave us the theory and technique of polishing, complete with demonstrations of polishing using a low-cost Harbor Freight grinder and an expensive Cyclo polisher. Herb prefers Nuvite polishes, by the way, but he acknowledged that you can polish with a wide variety of products.
Later in the morning we had the Swap Meet, which was fun. I sold most of my remaining Airstream Life shirts, and bought a very cool 1960s polished aluminum Thermos drink cooler for our 1968 Caravel back at home. The seller was kind enough to arrange shipping back to Vermont for me, so I won’t have to find room in the Airstream for it.
In the afternoon Emma and Eleanor headed off to collect rocks in the mining area north of downtown Creede. Mike Bertz, who we last saw in Tucson, is here at the rally and he lent Eleanor a rockhammer and chisel. They came back with plastic bag full of colorful stones. I think a few of them will polish up nicely. While they were gone, Molly Butterworth and I reviewed the layout for her article on “Streamlining”, which will appear in the Fall 2006 issue of Airstream Life.
This evening the dinner was western themed so we all showed up in whatever we had. Great catering, including a HUGE selection of homemade pies. I swiped a spare piece of cherry for later … there was plenty.
After dinner, Fred Coldwell put on another of his fine presentations on vintage Airstreams. This one was 1964-1968 Airstreams, a subject that interests me in particular because our vintage unit is a 1968 Caravel. At 9 pm he finished up and the campfire was lit outside, but we decided to call it an evening. Tomorrow will be a busy day — it’s Open House day. I’ve got to photograph about a dozen trailers and their owners, while we try to hold Open House at our trailer at the same time.
August 10, 2006 at 10:48 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We had conspired to take the Morrow Point Boat Tour this morning before heading south to Creede. The National Park Service has a tour down the Black Canyon of the Gunnison where it becomes the Morrow Point Reservoir, on a 42-passenger pontoon boat, and it seemed like a fine way to wrap up our stay in Gunnison.
But this morning, as I was making our pre-flight checks, I found that one of our tires had gone flat. Yes, another flat tire. Was our luck about to turn ugly again?
Fortunately, the tire had only a slow leak. We refilled it with Rich C’s portable air compressor (mine does not have a long enough cord to reach the driver’s side — something I’ll have to rectify) and the tire held air. But since we don’t currently have a wheel for our spare, we needed to get the tire fixed immediately. I figured that the trip downtown to get a tire patch would make us late for the boat trip, so we resigned ourselves to spending yet another day at a tire shop — and losing our non-refundable fares for the boat tour.
The Tour of America, or Tour of America’s Tire Shops?
And then we got lucky. The second tire shop we tried was willing to squeeze us in, and the problem was located and fixed in about 20 minutes. (It was a small nail this time, right through the center of the tread.) I stopped the mechanic and gave him a short synopsis of our previous tire/wheel problems, wrapping up with, “…. and so that’s why I want to torque the lug nuts myself, OK?”
He was amenable to that, and just spun the nuts on loosely. I carefully tightened them using the procedure I had learned back in Green River, WY, and checked them five, ten, and 25 miles later. This little episode only cost us $20 and about 45 minutes including hunting for tire shops so we decided to see if we could still make the boat tour.
We drove about 10 miles west on Rt 50 to the Elk Creek Visitor Center, unhitched the trailer in the parking lot (with permission), and raced another 15 miles west to the parking lot for the boat tour. From there, it is a hike down 232 stairs and along 1/2 mile of abandoned railroad bed to the boat launch on the Gunnison River in a deep canyon. We made it, with ten minutes to spare!
Our tour leader and Capt. Tom told me later that they were actually going to wait for us. Apparently the rangers at Elk Creek radioed ahead to tell the sad tale of a family who got a flat… in fact, by the time we arrived, all 39 other guests on the tour were aware of our story.
Click for larger
The tour takes about 1.5 hours and is spectacular. The canyon walls rise from 100-300 feet up to several hundred feet, as it widens into the Morrow Point Reservoir. There are a lot of interesting sightsalong the way including the waterfall pictured above, an old narrow gauge railway bed, hawks & vultures soaring above, caves in the rock walls, and beautiful calm waters.
After the tour we hiked back up the 232 stairs and over to Elk Creek again, where Emma picked up her 14th Jr Ranger badge and we hitched up for the trip over to Creede. Route 149 to Creede is predictably scenic, but that also means curvy, hilly, and remote. It took us nearly three hours to drive about 100 miles, mostly because of the 11,500 ft Slumgullion Pass just past Lake City. Speed limit on most of the southbound (uphill for us) portion of the pass is 15-25 MPH most of the time, and so we climbed the hill rather slowly in first gear. But it was a troublefree climb and descent.
We are in Creede at the rally campground now. When we arrived it was pouring rain and absolutely dismal so we stayed in and haven’t seen anyone yet. There are at least two dozen cool vintage Airstreams here already, and more than 30 more expected tomorrow. I’ll get pictures … and I’ll get the new rim from David Tidmore when he arrives, so we can get our spare tire mounted on it for the NEXT flat.
August 9, 2006 at 9:49 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We spent part of today exploring the downtown of Gunnison. It’s a small town, but everything is there, from the western outfitters to the old barber shop. Uptown you’ll find the newer places such as Wal-Mart and the quickie oil-change place. We stopped to get the oil changed and found ourselves in line behind Rich C’s Titan.
I think you can learn something about a town from the architecture you find. In Gunnison, you can find …
a beautifully maintained stone Victorian …
a colorful former hotel …
and an industrial-style artist’s cooperative, complete with welded steel fence — all within three blocks.
To me, this indicates a town with vivacity, a sense of community, and history. I’m sure we’d like to live here, if it weren’t unbelievably cold and snowy all winter. But we’ve been warned by locals: this is nothing like “banana belt” Salida, even though the altitude is similar. I can believe it. Each evening we’ve felt the wind rise and the temperatures plummet. It’s nice now, but I don’t want to be here in December!
August 6, 2006 at 6:05 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Reluctantly we left Roger and Brenda behind this morning after visiting the site where they are building their new home in the foothills near Salida. The views in Salida improved this morning, with a temporary lifting of the clouds, and showed us how spectacular and panoramic the views are in Salida this summer. But it wasn’t long before the thunderstorms began building again, as we began the long climb up to Monarch Pass on Rt 50.
The grade is only 6% up to Monarch Pass, but the road climbs and descends for about ten miles on each side. At the peak, we reached 11,312 feet and paused to ride the Monarch Pass Aerial Tram another 700 feet up a very steep peak.
The reason I felt obliged to stop is that we’ve got an article coming up in a future issue of Airstream Life about aerial trams … and this is one the author hasn’t yet covered. So I took pictures for the magazine and some notes. My major note is that very steep vertical climbs in aerial trams make me really nervous.
But Emma and Eleanor loved it. It was fun, but I was glad to get off it all the same.
Definitely don’t forget your camera on this trip. It’s short but very impressive. Several mountain ranges are visible from the top, and you can straddle the Continental Divide from the observation deck at the top — from an altitude of 12,000 feet.
Everything worked fine in the Nissan and Airstream too. No problem towing up to 11,300 feet, and nothing exploded in the trailer. Last year when we went over 11,000 feet a bag of sour cream and onion chips went poof. And hey, all the wheels are still on!
Everything in Gunnison CO was booked except the KOA next to the airport, so that’s where we ended up. It’s a good thing we don’t mind the sound of airplanes running up their engines, and taking off. (In fact, I kind of like it — reminds me of going to Oshkosh and Sun’n’Fun.) We’re parked on grass, our cell phones work, we have free wi-fi, and that’s all pretty incredible considering how small Gunnison is and how remote we are.
Rich C came to meet us, up from his base in Cortez CO. We’ll spend the next three days checking out stuff in the area. There’s a lot to do. Tomorrow will be mostly a work day but then we’ll get to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park and a few other things too.
August 5, 2006 at 9:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We moved the Airstream from the Wal-Mart lot over to a space next to Roger & Brenda’s house. Even though it’s only a hundred feet on the other side of the fence, it seems so much nicer here. We still haven’t plugged in, since I wanted to see how the solar system performs on cloudy days. (With mixed sunshine and clouds, we easily were re-charged in a few hours.)
We spent most of the day in the historic downtown of Salida. The commercial section is only about three blocks wide and five blocks deep, but it’s filled with interesting shops, parks, and restaurants. One of the interesting little features of Salida is the commercial art painted on the sides of the brick buildings. The more you look for it, the more you’ll notice. I shot pictures of at least a dozen good examples.
Wandering around, we found a 1966 Airstream Safari parked right in front of what used to be a Firestone tire shop. The owners are artists who use the building for workspace on the weekends. We told them about the upcoming Vintage Rally in Creede and they are thinking about dropping in for a day.
Kayaking along the river, downtown Salida (click for larger).
The foot of downtown is defined by the river. It’s ideal for practicing whitewater kayaking, with long gentle sections of quickwater punctuated by small drops and standing waves. I was able to get in close to the kayakers practicing flips and get some great action shots.
I’ve uploaded a bunch of photos from Salida to the Flickr photo album.
An intentional forward flip. Click for larger.
Salida is a neat place with a unique climate. Despite being at 7000 ft, it gets very little snow. The valley is surrounded on three sides by 14,000 ft mountains, which squeeze the moisture out of the air. As a result, most winters experience only a couple of good snowfalls which disappear quickly. They get less snow here than Denver or Colorado Springs, and 315 sunny days a year.
But not this week. It has been unusually wet this summer, and has been raining regularly each afternoon, like Colorado Springs was doing to us last week. We don’t mind the rain, having seen very little of it, but all the same it is hard to believe the locals’ claims that the place is normally parched, when everything here is so very green and lush now.
August 4, 2006 at 4:08 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We’re moving again, and as always it’s an interesting challenge. Our drive from Colorado Springs southwest to Canon City was sunny and uneventful. We took a four-mile detour off US-50 to go see the Royal Gorge Bridge, but I was disappointed to find that you can’t even walk on the bridge without buying an expensive admission ticket to the “Park” that goes with it.
We were only there for a quick look, so instead of going in, we parked up in Lot B (overflow area) with a few other RV’ers and had lunch with a gorgeous 360-degree view of the mountains. From our lofty spot I was able to receive Sprint and get online to do a few last-minutes pieces of business during lunch, which was a bonus.
If you go to the Royal Gorge Bridge area, you will find no end of places to spend money. There’s a Royal Gorge Route train that goes through the canyon below the bridge ($39 adults, more for 1st Class or meal service), a narrow-gauge railway that goes near the bridget ($9), a bunch of “western” towns with shoot-em-up shows, the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park itself, gift shops galore, and numerous other attractions. One could be forgiven for thinking that the bulk of Canon City’s economy is based on the bridge.
Another place that did not get our tourist dollars today
Our plan today was to drive up to Salida to meet with Roger and Brenda Roelfson. We met them last October in Denver and I interviewed them for the magazine. They used to live in Mississippi. You can read their story of fleeing Hurricane Katrina in the Spring 2006 issue of Airstream Life magazine (look for the article “Silver Survival Pod”).
About nine miles east of Salida we found the last public-lands campground before town, along US 50 bordering the Arkansas River. Rincon Campground is in the Arkansas Headwater Recreation Area, which intermittently follows the road. It’s a pleasant enough spot and a great starting point for fishing or rafting, but close to the highway.
We called Roger from Rincon, thinking we’d spend the night, but it turned out that the house is next to a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Salida. Hmmmm…. pay $14 for a campsite by the highway with no services and have to drive 9 miles back and forth to the Roelfson’s house, or pay $0 at Wal-Mart for a parking space by the highway with no services and walk next door to dinner?
So we drove into Salida and here we are parked only a hundred feet from our hosts, on asphalt provided by Wal-Mart. Eleanor went into the store and stocked up on groceries for the next two weeks, thus assuring that Wal-Mart is happy with our presence. And I am communicating with you courtesy of Roger’s wi-fi, which I can receive in the trailer using my little Linksys repeater. Not bad.
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