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November 27, 2007 at 11:15 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Our quest to understand Hawaii continues. This morning on our drive south the first revelation was that Hawaii’s “homeless problem” is much more vast and complex than we had first thought. The cities of tents extend for intermittently for about sixteen miles along the leeward Wai’anae shore.
Our initial impression was that these were beach bums, drop-outs, and surfers who were only taking advantage of a cheap lifestyle, but upon a closer look it has become clear that families are living there. There are children and old people, people who live in dirty clothes and a few who drive expensive cars.
They have taken over miles of beach and half a dozen state parks. There are hundreds of tents and perhaps a couple thousand people — and the number is growing. It is the largest encampment of homeless people we have ever seen in the United States. The western shore of Oahu is a little slice of the third world, right here in our country, just 30 miles from some of the wealthiest people in the world blithely enjoying Waikiki Beach.
Another angle on Hawaii is found at Pearl Harbor, where the USS Arizona lies on the bottom and WW II history is echoed in the monument, the neighboring Pacific Aviation Museum, the USS Missouri floating nearby, the submarine Bowfin, and a circle of plaques that commemorate the heroics of submariners.
The Arizona monument is right up there with the Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC for sheer chilling power combined with historical education. I highly recommend it to all, despite the 1-hour plus waits required to see the monument. (You have to be taken out to the site by Navy launch.) The museum, brochure, and movie all do an excellent job at explaining the events leading up to Pearl Harbor and our involvement in World War II.
So by the time you get to the monument, standing solemnly over the gravesite of 900 Navy servicemen, and see the “black tears” of oil floating to the surface from the encrusted wreck of the USS Arizona, it all comes together. As much as the long-ago volcano that built the island, the events of Pearl Harbor formed the Hawaii we know today.
Our final lesson on Hawaii comes from the food. Go to a lu’au and you’ll get some traditional Hawaiian foods like poi, and a lot of other modern favorites like pork ribs. In the fancier restaurants you’ll find “Asian fusion” and “Pacific Rim” cuisine. But today’s Hawaii has a people’s cuisine that the fancy resorts won’t acknowledge. Here on the cheap side of the island there are several “chop suey” restaurants, and in our quest we felt obligated to give them a try. Clearly they are popular with the locals.
It turned out to be a good gamble. We ordered a few simple dishes: wonton soup, noodles with shrimp, etc., and were rewarded with an enormous amount of delicious food for dinner in our hotel room. This may be the best deal on the leeward side.
Add to the chop suey another Hawaiian favorite: shave ice. On the North Shore in the town of Haleiwa is the best shave ice we’ve ever had. For a buck twenty-five you get a huge cone of ice drenched with three different flavors of sweet syrup. This is not a 7-11 Slurpee or one of those lame “snow cone” things sold on the mainland. This is a really incredible sensation of frozen nectar, and just the right thing for a humid Hawaiian afternoon. Perhaps if we keep ingesting these things we’ll come to understand Hawaii even better. It’s worth a try.
November 25, 2007 at 11:18 am · Filed under Uncategorized
For the next week or so the blog will cover our travels in Hawaii, making it less of an Airstream blog and more about travel in general. But for the aspiring full-time RV’er there’s still relevance. Almost every full-timer I know has broken out of the mold and left the Airstream behind for a period of time, just as you would leave your stationary house behind. There are, sadly, some places Airstreams can’t go.
But although our mode of travel has changed, our style of travel hasn’t. We still prefer to avoid the crowds and programmed adventures in favor of simple and real experiences. In Oahu, this means zipping away from the Waikiki crowds. We’ve taken up residence along the leeward side of the island, a place where people in online forums have reported “there’s not much to do.”
By that they mean that there are no helicopter companies, no parasailing, no museums, no submarines, musicals or dolphin adventures here. All of those things are available in Waikiki and the surrounding area. Here, we have only the basics: wide-open and uncrowded beaches, crystal clear water, snorkeling, hiking, bird songs, and the ruins of a historic site called a heiau. That’s the sort of stuff we came here for, so even though we are on the “tourist resistant” side of the island we should be plenty occupied.
Although we can certainly find a lu’au if we want one, about ten miles down the road. And our hotel is not lacking for niceties either. Breakfast on the patio with a view of the mountains and ocean was just as nice as breakfast will be under the awning in the desert parks we plan to visit later this month.
Several times a day we are visited on our lanai by the resident cats of the resort. There are several of them, basically feral but all spayed or neutered by locals who like to see them roaming around. Secret stashes of food around the resort area keep all the cats reasonably plumb. The “fixed” cats are identifiable by a notch on their left ear, and they aren’t too shy about coming into our room for a visit and quick scratch.
Today our plan was to find a quiet beach and go snorkeling if the surf wasn’t too high. If you follow the road along northward along the leeward side of the island, eventually you’ll come to the last beach, an Air Force Satellite Tracking station and the end of the road. You can see one of the “golf ball” domes of the satellite tracking station in the photo.
Even on a nice Sunday there were fewer than 30 people sharing about half a mile of beach with us. The surf was too high for Eleanor and Emma, but I got a little paddling around and saw some colorful reef fish about 150 feet offshore.
It’s beautiful here, but just south of where this photo was shot, along the leeward side of the island, you see a piece of Hawaii that doesn’t appear in the brochures. It is not a wealthy area. For miles along the roadside you can’t help but notice semi-permanent tent cities erected on the sand. These are the homes of itinerant surfers, drop-outs, and some of the poorer elements of Hawaiian society. Some are so poor they don’t even have tents, but live under blue tarps strung from trees. This is a beautiful stretch of shoreline, but most of it is occupied by people who could never afford to live here if they had to buy or rent a house.
Seeing the diversity of the population makes it apparent that Hawaii is really not just a paradise. In places it is wild, dangerous, even third-world. We’ve seen these bits of Hawaii before, when visiting the Big Island and Maui. There are even sections of those two islands that the Hawaiians have warned us away from because they are roadless and almost lawless.
This might seem frightening and directly opposed to the reason that people come to Hawaii. Most are looking for a resort hotel, some great dinners, a boat ride, a lu’au, a nice beach. Those are all great things but we’re also interested in the real place and the real people. To us, Hawaii is not the equivalent of a cruise ship, but a multi-faceted society with great historical and cultural stories to tell. We’ll be digging into those things a little more this week.
November 23, 2007 at 9:31 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We bid adieu to our courtesy parking hosts, Don and Gail, and hauled the Airstream 100 miles northwest to its storage spot in the hills. On the drive, I reflected on our uncommon success at finding courtesy parking this month in California. One night in Chico, two nights in Amador City, three nights in Visalia, two nights in Los Olivos, two nights in Ventura, and three nights in Riverside. That’s 13 nights in the past month.
Not only did we meet a bunch of really cool new friends (and solidified our relationship with others), but we saved about $300-500 on campgrounds. Courtesy parking is great! Some of the folks who hosted us will visit us in Arizona later, and we’ll cross paths with the others again somewhere on the road.
The Airstream is now tucked away in “an undisclosed location” as the Feds would say, with the furnace set at 45 F in the unlikely case of an extended cold snap and several precautions taken to make it very hard to steal. We left the refrigerator running because it is still full of food. The solar panels will keep the battery topped off so there’s no concern about coming back to a dead battery, but there is some small concern about coming back to a dead vegetable, so Eleanor stripped the fridge of virtually everything that could rot and brought it with us.
From there we drove another 70 miles down to an airport hotel in El Segundo, along the southern edge of Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Being a former advertising copywriter, I can’t help but notice the opportunities for billboards and slogans offered by the airport’s designator. Here we are, re-LAXing in the spacious comfort of the Embassy Suites (the room offers more than twice the space of our Airstream). It LAXs for nothing; we have a microwave, refrigerator, couch, easy chair, dining room table, two huge flat-panel TVs, and a fine view of two runways at the airport.
This transition from Airstream to hotel marks the official beginning of our vacation. We haven’t been in a hotel since …. hmmm… I think almost two years ago (January 2006), when we took a night in San Francisco at Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a neat thing to do once in a while, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it. It took Eleanor about six hours to pack for herself and Emma, and the entire Airstream was turned inside-out until late last night. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say again: What a pain it is, packing for a family vacation. I’m glad we don’t have to unpack and repack every time we go somewhere in the Airstream.
Tonight we are feasting on fridge leftovers: a massive salad made of lettuce, mushrooms, tomatoes, artichokes, sesame seeds, cucumber, croutons … Eleanor forgot the shredded cheese, and thankfully left the other items on the side: croissants, grapes, cookies, etc. This is what happened the last time they flew somewhere, except now I’ve got help eating the fridge leftovers. Good thing, because it’s a lot of roughage. Could have a LAXative effect. (Sorry, but I had to write that. It was just too tempting.)
November 21, 2007 at 11:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The overriding factor that seems to govern the lives of people in all of the Los Angeles area, including far-flung portions like Riverside and San Bernardino, is traffic. On the freeway, timing is everything. If you hit it right you zoom along at 65 MPH or better, and if you venture onto the freeway at the wrong time, heaven help you because you may be like Charlie on the MTA (Cue the Kingston Trio: “He never returned, no, he never returned, and his fate will never be learned …”)With this in mind we have traveled cautiously these past 24 hours. Friends of ours were staying at the downtown Marriott and we tip-toed through the traffic this morning to meet them for a really great brunch. So far, so good.
Then my task was to drive 15 miles down “the 91” (as they say around here) to Corona, to meet up with Andy Rogozinski, the proprietor of Inland RV. He’s the guy who virtually invented the Airstream vintage parts business. He’s been in the Airstream community for over 40 years, starting off as a dealer service tech, moving up to Caravanner Insurance in 1970, and now selling vintage Airstream parts out of his facility in Corona. Almost everyone who has ever done a vintage Airstream restoration has dealt with Andy at some point.
Traffic will be particularly of interest to us on Friday. We’ll have to tow the Airstream back 100 miles to storage, then drive about 30 miles to LAX. I’m crossing my fingers that Friday is a light traffic day all over Los Angeles.
The Santa Ana winds are forecast to being to blow soon. This will have two effects: It will clear the smoggy air and give us a decent view, and it will fan any flames if a new set of wildfires break out. After seeing what happened a few weeks ago, everyone here has gained respect for the power of fire and wind. And of course, it can’t possibly be good for traffic.
November 20, 2007 at 8:09 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
As always, things changed. Last night we were going to try for an oceanside county park, but then we got to thinking differently (always a dangerous thing) and suddenly we were going to Riverside, 120 miles distant.
It happened like this: I called a friend in Riverside who we were going to look up, to tell him that we couldn’t make it over for a visit before Thanksgiving. The friend promptly invited us to Thanksgiving dinner. That was unexpected, since we thought he was going out of town.
Riverside is not an easy place to camp. There is a county park called Rancho Jalupa, and a few commercial campgrounds 30 to 60 minutes drive away. That’s about it. Rancho Jalupa was (predictably) completely booked, and the commercial campgrounds were $45 per night and up, if they had space. After considering it for a while, I remembered Don & Gail, Airstream Life subscribers who have emailed me in the past. They have a house in Riverside, so I emailed them at about 10 p.m. to see if they had suggestions.
They did. Right in front of their house in a very nice neighborhood in Riverside. It’s nice to have so many friends in the Airstream community who are willing to help out.
Then I called my old college buddy Alex, who live in Silicon Valley. I’d been feeling badly about skipping the entire Bay Area and a bunch of good friends. I remembered that Alex’s mother-in-law lived in Riverside, and theorized he and his family might be coming down for Thanksgiving. They were — another lucky break.
All the signs were now clear. We were destined to go to the great Inland Empire of California. So in the morning we packed up and bailed out of the noisy campground (while a news helicopter was slowly circling overhead and a freight train was passing by). Five minutes after we hit the road, our last courtesy parking host David called to say that he’d driven past all the county campgrounds we were considering earlier, and every one was completely full. That was yet another confirmation we’d made the right decision to head east.
Driving across the Los Angeles metroplex can be a harrowing experience, but even more so with a big trailer strapped to your butt. The 120-mile trip from Ventura to Riverside can take two hours, fifteen minutes, or it can take four hours with traffic. We went mid-day in the hopes of avoiding the worst of the traffic, and were amazingly successful.
About 3/4 of the way through we made a wrong turn and ended up in a quasi-industrial / Hispanic neighborhood for a few minutes, so we took it as an opportunity to grab some lunch at an authentic taco shop. We’re in southern California so it’s safe to eat Mexican again (no risk of eastern “Mex” food made with spaghetti sauce, or de-spiced for wimpy palates).
When you eat at this sort of place the tacos are always soft, not crunchy, and the fillings don’t resemble anything you get at Taco Bell. They had four types on the menu: asada, langua, cabeza, and pastor, and since we didn’t know what those meant and the girl at the counter couldn’t explain it in English, we just ordered them all. $1.25 each plus an awesome burrito for $3.99. Add in some horchata, a pineapple soda for Emma, and jamaica for Eleanor, and we’ve got lunch.
It turns out that the difference between the four types was considerable, although they all looked similar. The pastor was spicy, the asada was a tasty steak, the langua tasted of fresh green spices, and the cabeza was a bit dull.
If you want to know where to get the best tacos in the Los Angeles area, check out this guy’s taco blog.
We are now parked on the street in front of Don & Gail’s house in Riverside. It is a huge relief from the Ventura campground and the price is right too. We are parked in a “knuckle”, a wide spot on the corner where we will be out of the way for the next couple of nights. Don and Gail will toss us an electric cord later tonight, but otherwise we are going to try to stay out of their way. They just got back last week from a multi-month Airstream trip, and so they are still settling back into their house. I think that’s the hardest part of any trip.
November 18, 2007 at 11:32 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Some time ago I was “tagged” by my friend Rich C, who writes a blog of his own about his life in Prescott AZ. I think that being tagged means I am supposed to write seven things about myself that are not commonly known (and then tag a few other bloggers to do the same).
My first feeling about the “7 things” tagging game was that it was silly, a sort of blog chain letter, far outside of the purpose of this blog. Then it occurred to me that since I have been blogging our daily life on the Internet for over two years, there remains very little left to tell other than things I have deliberately avoided discussing. Thus, perversely, the challenge of coming up with seven more things to say might be interesting, or at least a mild break from the musings of daily events that usually comprise the blog.
So here they are, seven things you didn’t know about me and probably don’t care to:
- I never wear a watch but I own two watches, an ultra-thin black Swatch and a vintage Hamilton Electric Ventura.
- My Airstream’s essential equipment includes a torque wrench, a laptop, and a collection of James Bond movies on DVD.
- All of my three pairs of glasses have scratched upper left corners from using my camera. This makes me consider Lasik or contact lenses.
- My favorite animal is a Maine Coon tabby cat, the bigger, the better.
- If I had my life to live over again, I would have cycled across the USA the first time somebody suggested it to me.
- I once lost my sense of smell for two months. (Steak tastes like cardboard if you can’t smell it.)
- The most common comment on my school report cards was that I’d do much better if I just applied myself. I always wished I could turn the tables by issuing a report card on my teachers.
Well, I feel better having gotten all that off my chest. And now, back to our regularly scheduled program …
The Airstream is parked on a sloping road in front of David and Ariadna’s house. It is so sloped in fact that even unhitching the trailer and dropping the front down to the ground, we still have a noticeable elevation gain when walking from back to front. I put both Rotochoks into the wheels and hoped they would hold. So far the Airstream hasn’t traveled as a result of gravitational attraction.
Either the city of Ventura or the county of Ventura would like our courtesy parking hosts to report that we are parked here on the street, if we are to stay more than two nights. Rather than force them to do that, we are moving on to a campground tomorrow, where we will stay through Thanksgiving if possible. We wanted to go to Point Mugu State Park’s beachfront camping area, but it has been foggy and cold lately along the coast. Not only would this make the beach much less fun, but we wouldn’t be able to make power with our solar panels, and the campground offers no electrical hookups.
So we are leaving, but Emma and her new friend 7-year-old William have been so happy together (yet another score on the kid front) that we may stay fairly local and come back for a few more play dates. They certainly managed to keep each other entertained today while we roamed around town. David took us to the secret location where he stores his highly polished 1964 Airstream Globe Trotter, and his slick vintage truck, and then we all went down the Pacific Coast Highway past Point Mugu to Neptune’s Net for seafood.
Neptune’s Net is a great spot for seafood, but in my opinion the best aspect is the people-watching. You can sit at big picnic tables with your fried seafood basket and see the most classic California personalities, from sun-bleached surfers to hawg riders to Sunday-best-suited churchgoers. There’s a dress code, though. A sign says clearly that if you are dripping wet (the beach is just across the highway), “No soup for you!”
Now, let me offer a version of the “7 things” challenge to you. If you can, write up 7 great places that we should visit in southern California or the American southwest that we might otherwise overlook, and post them to the blog as a comment. If you can’t come up with seven, just write as many as you can. Other blog readers will appreciate them, and I’ll see how many we can add to our itinerary.
November 17, 2007 at 11:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Note that this post is entitled “Airstream life” with a small “l”. It’s not about my magazine, Airstream Life, but rather the fun and occasionally odd coincidences, opportunities, and friendships that pop up simply as a result of being part of this lifestyle.
For the past two days we have been feted by our hosts Cynthia and Dennis as if we were celebrities, which has been simultaneously flattering and humbling. Flattering, because of the attention we received and the thrill our hosts affected from our visit. Humbling, because at the end of our visit, Cynthia noted that in the final analysis we were “just regular people” who happen to be living a different sort of life. After two nights in their driveway our celebrity status was stripped away and we were revealed as Rich & Eleanor & Emma, three people who breathe the same air as everyone else, and who still have to swipe the credit card at the pump twice when the total exceeds $75.
Perhaps in the future we should bail out before our courtesy parking hosts realize they’ve been had by a family of nomadic carpetbaggers who sleep in driveways for free. (Although I did give Dennis an Airstream Life hat and some free advice to “pay” for our visit.)
I’m just joking of course … We became fast friends with Dennis and Cindy, and Emma has a good friend in Madison, and we hope to see them all again soon. That’s how it goes, and we love it. We’ve made a lot of good friends in the past few weeks and there is little doubt they will pop up in our lives again, possible in an completely unexpected place and time, as happened today with Rickie and Yank Sefton.
We were standing in the driveway admiring the two lovely Airstreams when an unknown truck pulled in to the driveway. A man in the driver’s seat called out, “Is this Mark’s place?” I said “No!” and then noticed that the driver was our friend Yank, and sitting next to him was his wife Rickie. We hadn’t seen Yank and Rickie since last June in Oregon. It turned out they were in Los Olivos looking for the park where they had first kissed, and they were attending a rally of the El Camino Real Unit of the WBCCI just a few miles away.
So we went to the rally, of course, and found many other Airstream friends there, including Tommy & Kathy Green, Herb Richter, and Marilyn & Roger Taylor. Tommy pulled out his collection of ukeleles and dobros and inspired me to get back on practicing. I’m hoping he will join us at Anza-Borrego in December so he can tutor me a little — his playing is really great and he’s only been at it a couple of years.
Meanwhile, Cindy & Dennis got so pumped by the friendly people at the rally that they went home and got their trailer. They’re going to camp at the rally site for a few nights and commute to work from there instead of from home for a while.
Before all this happened, Emma joined Madison for her Saturday morning karate class. I’ve been wanting Emma to try karate since I’ve hypothesized for a while that she’d like it, and I was right. When we get back to Tucson and are working on the house I’ll try to get her in for some lessons. Karate is great for kids, helping them develop physical skills and mental discipline. The instructor in Los Olivos was really excellent. I can only hope we can find someone as good as him later.
Driving around town after karate, we spotted this little gem sitting in a driveway. It’s a 1947 Silver Streak, very much like the late 1940s Airstreams. I talked to the owner, who was only too happy to give me a tour of the project. It’s still gutted inside but in a year he plans to be touring the country in it. It’s very hard to find 1940’s-era aluminum trailers in any condition these days, so he’s got something quite special on his hands.
With all the action today, I was beginning to feel the need for some down time, and we were due to head to Ventura to courtesy park at Dave & Ariadna’s house. The 70 mile drive down Rt 101 was just the answer, since the traffic was light and the scenery along the Pacific Coast always inspires me. We made a quick stop at Carpinteria State Beach to use the dump station ($8) and found ourselves parked on the street in front of Dave & Ariadna’s by 5 p.m., just in time for sunset.
Once again we are blessed with a 7-year-old to engage with Emma. She and William immediately began doing kid things to the living room (stacking pillows to make a fort, playing raucously with the dog, yelling, and pointing Nerf guns at each other), and left us free to get to know our current courtesy parking hosts.
Ariadna is from Mexico, and for this occasion she went all out and made us an authentic homestyle Mexican dinner. I ate far too many tortillas, but I couldn’t resist her cooking. She has completely charmed Eleanor, and it wasn’t long before David and I began kicking around ideas for a Sonoran Airstream tour, perhaps in late February or early March — assuming we can get the house under control by then. Not only would Ariadna be a huge asset by speaking Spanish, but it looks like we would all enjoy doing the same sorts of things once we get to Mexico, and the kids would have a blast together.
But that’s far off. Right now we need to figure out this week. Thanksgiving is looming and we have no place to stay. Tomorrow we are going to check out some interesting potential spots in Malibu, Santa Paula, and other close areas. On Saturday, one week from today, we will fly out of LAX for a vacation, and between now and then we have a ton of things to do.
Now, I know what you’re thinking … “Vacation? How can they tell the difference?” Well, a vacation by my definition is a period in which I do no work. Normally I work every day of the week, weekends included. Once in a while I declare a holiday and leave work behind. This time, it happens that the place we all want to be while I am on vacation is a place we can’t reach conveniently with the Airstream, thus we are flying from LAX. I’ll talk more about that later.
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