Archive for Uncategorized
October 24, 2005 at 8:47 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
It is a learned skill to instantly be at home wherever you go. Even for experienced travelers, it can take a day or two to get comfortable with a new place. We’re pretty well set now, and Denver is starting to feel like home. Emma says, “We’re having fun here!” which is about the highest praise you can get out of a five-year-old. (She went to tour a candy factory today, so little wonder …)
Rather than go on about the nice day I had, I’m going to try to get Emma to do a little blogging tonight or tomorrow. Suffice to say I had a lovely walk after work, watching the sun set over the Rockies, and I took a lot of photos which may appear on our photo album tomorrow.
By the way, you may notice down on the left side of this page we’ve added a “Subscribe” link. If you subscribe I believe you will receive notifications when I post. It won’t add you to any spam lists. Give it a try!
October 23, 2005 at 11:24 am · Filed under Uncategorized
It’s not all fun and games. Today the morning has started cold (40s) and the sky is cloudy, which puts a damper on my plans to go for an extended bike ride. Plus, there’s work to be done. We are burning a 30-lb propane bottle every five or six days due to the overnight lows in the 30s, so I’ve got an empty bottle to fill, and I might as well do that errand on a day when the weather is not great.
But what I want to talk about is the computers. We travel with a pair of Mac laptops, which are the nerve center of our work and communication. Most of the time they require no maintenance, but the reality of computing life today is that a 30 or 40-megabyte system update or “security update” arrives every few weeks. Try downloading that over a cell phone. Even my Internet in Motion system would take hours to download something like that.
Also, occasionally friends or magazine contributors email me files which are just enormous. To protect myself against hour-long downloads, I have set my email program to tell me when an email is greater than 500 kb (half a megabyte). It gives me the option whether to download it, delete it, or save it for later. Most email software will do this for you.
At this point I’ve got two huge emails sitting in the box, awaiting downloading, and a few system updates, so …
Off to the local cybercafe! Most of the time we use Panera Bread for their free wifi, but today there is a place called The Daily Grind just three miles down the road. I brought both laptops, bought a Spiced Chai Latte ($2.60), and settled in with the newspaper while the laptops downloaded their updates and mega-emails.
This is one of the reasons I recommend that anyone who wants to travel with a computer, buy a laptop. I see many Airstreamers with full desktop systems set up in front, and I know why: they are cheaper, have bigger screens and keyboards, and are more expandable. But I couldn’t live without a laptop. You can’t haul that big tower into the cybercafe to download a system update! And I like to work outside under the awning when the weather is nice.
And finally, I should acknowledge that some people should never have a computer in their RV. If you work on a computer all day, and want to get away for just a few days to relax, my advice is to leave the computer at home. Sometimes you just have to unplug, and leaving the temptation behind might be the best strategy.
Since we full-time and I have no choice about bringing my computer, I make a point of putting it away in a closet when I’m taking time off. Out of sight, out of mind. Another small advantage of the laptop, if you care to look at it that way.
October 22, 2005 at 7:09 am · Filed under Uncategorized
A lot of people have been visiting this weblog in the past couple of days, so let me give you some tips on how to get the most out of it.
First off, we’re still developing the site, so a few features are not fully operational. Our Gather essays are just getting started, for example. The Store is not running yet, but will be soon.
We plan to add a webcam in the next month or two, which will show current pictures of where we are, and sometimes what’s going on at the trailer.
We also are trying to figure out how to add a map so you can see where we’ve been.
Of course, I’ll be adding a lot more pictures and blog entries as we travel. Bookmark this page: http://tour.airstreamlife.com/weblog and check it every day or two. That’s how often we will be updating it. Eleanor plans to start contributing blog entries soon, so you’ll hear from her as well.
If you have a question for either of us, just click the “Comments” link at the bottom of any daily blog entry. Fill out the form and I’ll get an email with your comments. After I read your comments, they will show up on the weblog for other people to see. If you want to comment privately, just tell me in your note and I’ll make sure it doesn’t get posted on the web.
Enjoy! Feel free to ask questions anytime, and let us know if we might cross paths. We love to hear from you!
October 21, 2005 at 10:10 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I like this place. Cherry Creek State Park is an oasis right next to Denver, in Aurora. It’s a few thousand acres of land and reservoir with bike trails, camping, wildlife, and yet very convenient to everything that the Denver area offers. Beautiful landscape. This is sort of Denver’s version of Central Park in Manhattan.
It’s odd to be able to hear the I-225 highway just outside the park, but in here see mule deer and great horned owls. We spotted both last night on our half-hour walk before sunset. I’ve never seen a great horned owl before, and its gentle hooting reminded me that I heard one in the pre-dawn hours the night before when we were camped in Nebraska. For me, that’s the best possible sound to hear outside my window in the night. I love owls.
Mule deer, on the other hand, strike me as sort of ugly. But they were thrillling to Eleanor and Emma anyway. And in this park, they are nearly tame. You can see them everywhere, and they don’t run away at the sight of humans.
It’s also peculiar to me to encounter a state park with full-hookup campsites. In Vermont, none of the state parks even have electricity. Here, the campsites are paved with pink concrete pull-throughs, and as a result it attracts the biggest of the big 5th wheels and Class A motorhomes. With our 30-foot Airstream we look positively tiny.
Today I must be realistic and work a full day, and probably also Saturday. Fortunately, we have excellent Internet and cell phone service here, and the post office is just 5 miles away. It’s a good spot to catch up on work.
If the weather holds (meaning, no snowstorms) we will stay through Halloween. We have friends all over this area and relatives in Colorado Springs. The time will pass quickly.
Where should we make our next stop? We need to be in Eugene OR by Nov 10, but between Nov 1 and Nov 10 our time is our own. We need a nice place to stop, with electricity, and relatively safe from snowstorms, between here and Eugene. Any suggestions?
October 20, 2005 at 5:41 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
This morning, Emma wanted to take her camera out as well (she has my old digicam, a Kodak DC280), so we both dressed up warmly and went out at sunrise. It felt like low 30s outside. Everything was steaming: the lake, the exhalations of the cattle, even the cowpatties “¦ To the west, a nearly full moon was still high in the sky above our Airstream. To the east, the sun was rising over a huge open prairie scattered with cattle.
They are more skittish than the friendly eastern dairy cows I’m familiar with. One spotted me with my camera and gave the alarm, and they gathered up their calves and trotted away, mooing to each other all the while.
I’m not sure what was better ““ the wonderful scenery, or the fact that Emma (and later Eleanor) was out there at dawn, in the cold, enthusiastically snapping pictures with me. This morning makes the trip worth it, and we’re just getting started.
This post reaches you from our home for the next nine days, Cherry Creek State Park in Denver CO. I’ll post about it tomorrow. By the way, since we crossing time zones occasionally, my posts will always reflect local time.
October 18, 2005 at 8:35 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
A friend of mine wrote me to say how lucky we were to be in Council Bluffs. Apparently the Union Pacific Railroad Museum is a mecca of sorts for railfans. We didn’t have time today to drop in, because of errands, but we did have time to drop in on the local Airstream dealer (Outdoor Recreation Center).
Don Bowerman was a great host for us, while we waited for some systems checks on the new trailer. A long-time Airstreamer and lifetime WBCCI member, Don has retired from a long career in police work and now sells Airstreams. Needless to say, he’s got a few stories to share.
Being an Airstreamer, Don naturally invited us to his house for pizza. And being Airstreamers, we of course accepted. (We can’t turn down hospitality.)
We’ll be sorry to leave Council Bluffs tomorrow, but we need to get out to Denver soon, so we’ll be hitting the road tomorrow morning. There’s still a chance to see the UP Railroad Museum, but I don’t know yet. We’ll wing it.
October 16, 2005 at 10:06 am · Filed under Uncategorized
I think yesterday should count as our first official day of the Tour of America. We headed out from South Bend in the morning and (after a harrowing ride through Chicago on I-90), stopped in Rolling Meadows IL to visit with a few folks. Tom King and Joyce Cutsforth of Internet-in-Motion dropped in to see our trailer and catch up a bit. Tom has some great ideas for a mobile webcam that we may integrate into the upcoming Tour website.
Brad Cornelius also dropped in. He designed the great graphics you see on the exterior of the trailer. (Brad also painted the Fall 2005 cover of Airstream Life, which should be in the mail to you in about a week.)
While we were giving these tours, we happened to be parked at a Wal-Mart. People kept coming by and taking photos of the trailer, so we invited a few in. We met some nice guys from Holland who have a “mobile bakery” that they run out of an Airstream there. They were excited to see the Tour trailer and promised to email photos of theirs as soon as they get back home.
After that visit we hit a local IKEA to shop for some trailer accessories. Eleanor found a fine aluminum wine rack that we plan to mount on the wall. It looks like it belongs there. This is an accessory every Airstream should have, if only because it looks so right.
Our next stop was 90 minutes west, somewhere along I-80 in the plains of Illinois. We hit a Cracker Barrel for dinner (our friend Gary was right, you CAN eat every meal at Cracker Barrel if you stick to the highways), and then parked overnight. Our neighbors happen to be in an Airstream Classic with the WBCCI # 5883. We haven’t seen them yet but perhaps we will before we go.
There’s an axiom I was taught by the fellow who sold us our first Airstream: The propane always runs out in the middle of the night. For some reason I was up at 4:30 this morning when I heard the furnace cycle on and off a bit too quickly. Sure enough, we’d just run out of gas. That’s why we have two bottles and an auto-switching regulator, but of course I forgot to open the second bottle, and so I had to get out there in my bare feet in the dark to flip the switch. At least it wasn’t too cold…
Speaking of which, poor Emma is really down with a cold. She’s a trouper about it but there’s no question it has taken her down a peg. I expect she’ll sleep late and so it will be hard to reach our next goal today. But that’s the nice thing about traveling this way. She can stay in bed while we catch up on work and phone calls, have breakfast, etc. When she wakes up, we’ll be all set to go.
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