Archive for Home base
March 20, 2008 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Home base, Maintenance, Mobile technology
We’re back in Tucson at home base. The little three-night trip to the Sierra Vista area was very helpful as a test of our ability to go back to road travel after three months of parking. It was as easy as anything could be, so my fear of getting terribly rusty has been abated. I can still back up the trailer, hitch it, and find my way to the bathroom at night — the three essential skills.
Tucson has warmed up to what I regard as decent weather: low 80s during the day with lots of sunshine. “Winter,” as it is defined here, is over, and that means the house is starting to show how well-designed it is for desert life. I opened the door this afternoon and found the interior at about 68 degrees, downright chilly for my blood, despite the warm temperatures outside. The masonry construction and reflective roof are doing their job. I almost wish we could spend the summer just to see how well it performs in the real heat yet to come.
The warm weather has inspired Eleanor too, I think. Knowing that we have only a little more than a week left here, she is starting to tackle the maintenance and housekeeping items on our list.
First item today was the routine defrosting of the refrigerator. Since our refrigerator is normally in continuous use, it accumulates ice and frost and needs this process every six months or so.
It’s much easier now that we have a second refrigerator in the house to put all the food in, but even on the road it’s not hard to do. We just put the food into a big cooler, shut off the refrigerator, prop open the door, and mop up the melting ice for a few hours. The melt from the refrigerator compartment will mostly drain out the drip line (located in the exterior refrigerator access hatch), but the freezer doesn’t have a drip line so it has to be mopped up with a sponge.
The other major task to prepare for the road ahead is to clear out stuff from the Airstream. When we started full timing our procedure was to re-evaluate what we were carrying every six months. Anything that wasn’t used in the preceding six months, and wasn’t likely to be used, got pitched overboard, donated, or shipped back to storage. We haven’t done that in a while and since we are here at our “storage facility,” this is our chance.
Some of our stuff has become embedded in the deepest, darkest recesses of the Airstream’s storage compartments. The only good way to deal with it is to completely empty those compartments, and then re-pack them slowly, evaluating the utility, necessity, and weight of each item. I already did this with the front storage compartment and found that about 20% of the stuff could stay behind. Now we can actually get to things we need in there without fighting past layers of “we might use this” stuff.
The mental challenge of this stems from the fact that even an Airstream can seem dauntingly packed with stuff. Where to start? It’s a gumption block. So we’ve broken the task down by room. First on the list will be the bathroom. Everything comes out, gets evaluated, and only the essentials go back. If we tackle one room a day (counting the exterior storage compartments as a single room), we’ll easily be done before next weekend.
When we get back on the road, I’ll stop and get the trailer weighed. This is another task we haven’t done lately, and I think it’s good practice for every RV’er at least annually. We haven’t done it since July 2006, so we are overdue. Our GVWR (maximum weight) is 8,400 lbs., and at that time the trailer weighed 7,320 lbs. The empty weight of the Airstream is 6,400 lbs., so at the time of our last weigh we were carrying less than 1,000 lbs of stuff (including a full tank of water @ 312 lbs by itself).
People are often surprised that the trailer weighs so little, and that we able to full-time with so little weight. But what would we carry that weighs a lot? Clothes are light, as are bedding, toiletries, DVDs, laptops, and stuffed animals. The only heavy things we carry are magazines, books, dishes, cookware, Emma’s rocks, and water, and we keep our collections of things like books and rocks to a bare minimum (which reminds me, I’ve got to check that Emma has offloaded her rocks).
I do see some RV’ers who carry ridiculous items just because they have the space. More than once I’ve observed a fifth-wheel or Class A motorhome owner open up a basement storage compartment and reveal half a dozen concrete blocks (“to put under the stabilizers”), a chainsaw, 300 feet of garden hose, and a mechanic’s toolkit that could be used to rebuild a Boeing 777. I think we run light because I enjoy the challenge of finding lighter and smaller solutions to problems. I was just eyeballing the charger for my Nikon batteries and thinking, “I bet I can find a travel-size version of that.”
I’ll also need to make some off-site backups of my data. I’m amazed at the number of people who travel around taking irreplaceable photos of their trips and don’t even have a primary backup. One microscopic failure in their computer’s hard drive, and poof, all those photos are gone! That happened to my photos from Glacier National Park, and it was painful enough. It would be a nightmare to lose two years worth of photos.
So in addition to my primary backup drive, I have an emergency backup of my most critical files on a 60gb iPod. It’s encrypted so if the iPod is stolen, no valuable information can be compromised.
I have also periodically maintained a off-site super-duper emergency backup on DVDs, but this is getting too cumbersome (my photo collection alone is over 30 gb, which is about seven DVDs). I considered getting a subscription to “.mac” (dot-mac), which will do incremental backups over the Internet, but the sheer volume of data I have makes that impractical (and dot mac costs $99 per year). Ultimately, the cheapest thing to do is buy another external hard drive for $100, back everything up to it, and leave it in the house.
Think I’m paranoid? Well, remember we don’t go to home base very often. If the Airstream is stolen, or catches on fire, there goes my computer, my backups, and a big chunk of my livelihood. For the average traveler, I’d just recommend having at least one good backup on an external hard drive — and remember to update it once in a while.
Soon we will be lean, clean, and tuned up for another six months on the road. This will be the critical week before getting back out there. Our trial run worked out well enough, but after a week more of preparation we should be in prime form for some fun camping.
March 17, 2008 at 11:56 pm · Filed under Home base, Maintenance
Back on the road!
Getting hitched up and ready to go always takes longer when you’ve been parked for a while. When we are moving every few days, our departure routine is quick and efficient. After a week of parking, it can take a couple of hours to get everything packed up, and after several weeks, it seems to take most of a day to get ready.
It would have been much easier to leave if I hadn’t had a pile of frustrating tasks to complete first. I am relocating the company’s official mailing address from Vermont to Florida (for complicated reasons having to do with mail forwarding), and this means literally dozens of phone calls to vendors. Those people have managed to make “customer service” an epithet. Of 13 vendors on my list for today, nine had dysfunctional websites that could not or would not accept my new billing information.
So I had to call again and again, wading through voice-response menus and answering security questions about “the last four digits of your social,” and “your mother’s maiden name.” It took about six hours to effect 11 vendors. The other two proved so well-defended against customers who might try to make changes to their accounts that they defeated me today. I’ll have to attack them again another day.
Vonage won the award for most irritating “customer service”. Their rep was beyond obtuse, and I finally had to threaten to close my account completely before he would make the billing plan change I requested. Sprint won the award for best defenses against hackers and customers, by instituting a new web system that required me to set up a new username (8-30 characters with a mix of letters and numbers), a new password, a new PIN, a new security question … and then provided no way to give them a new credit card for billing.
FedEx deserves an honorable mention for their incomprehensible website, which was so baffling that even their own representative could not at first tell me how to navigate it to make a simple billing change. (He figured it out after I did.) Verizon’s website became convinced that my VISA card was a Mastercard, and thus would not accept it. And so it went all day.
After six hours of this, you can see why I was eager to pack up and hit the road, and maybe chuck a few Molotov cocktails toward the call centers of certain companies. It was not the most inspiring day, and the rather uncharacteristic weather we had today (occasional rain and temperatures in the 40s) didn’t help. But I went out and hitched up anyway.
I’m always suspicious when we’ve been parked for a long time. Everything gets a more careful check, especially hitch, tires, and brakes. Scanning the tires, I noticed one had a definite thin patch in the tread. This is a sign that a belt inside the tire has broken. The broken belt allows the tire to bulge, and that causes uneven wear.
This not the sort of thing you want to ride on for long, so even though we were eager to get going, I called a local tire shop and verified they had a replacement tire (the Airstream takes ST225/75R15 tires), and that they could handle a 30-foot trailer coming into their parking lot. Assured on both counts, we headed over to the nearby “Big O” tire shop.
After a 40-minute wait, the tech came over and said, “The tire is still on the trailer? I’m not allowed to take a wheel off a trailer.”
Huh. And here I thought I was at a tire shop. So we got the manager over and he explained first that “We don’t have a jack big enough for a trailer like that.” I pointed to the hydraulic jack sitting nearby and said, “That one will do just fine.”
“No,” the manager said, “that one is only rated for 10,000 pounds.” Well, the Airstream’s max weight is 8,400 lbs. Once I clarified that, the manager told me that it was a “liability issue” and that he had to protect the technician. The trailer might fall off the jack and smush him, you see.
I refrained from pointing out that the trailer was unlikely to topple over, that it was hitched to the Armada with the parking brake set, that we can chock the wheels, and that it has a spare axle which makes it impossible to “fall”. But I did point out that I had called in advance to verify they could do this job and was told they could. That got me nowhere.
So I volunteered to do it myself. Nope, still not good enough. Liability again. I finally clarified, “I’ll use my own equipment.” And finally the manager said, “I have no problem with that.”
Well, that’s a relief. I was allowed to remove my own wheel with my own tools, and roll it over to the service bay, whereupon they removed and remounted a new tire, balanced it, and returned it to me for $150 in total. (That’s no bargain.) I mounted it back on, using my torque wrench, and fled. So I can’t recommend Big O Tire to anyone with a trailer.
Once on the road, the whole rig felt perfect. It was like putting on a worn old baseball glove. The trailer towed as beautifully as ever, the road was smooth and the short 60-mile drive (now at sunset) was scenic. I haven’t driven the Armada or towed the Airstream since early January, but it was still as easy as ever.
Our trailer is now a tire test lab. As the original tires (Goodyear Marathons) have been replaced, either due to wear or failure, I seem to always end up with a different brand. In Idaho when we lost a wheel in the summer of 2006, I bought a Trailer King because that’s all that was available. I was wondering about it at first, but it’s still on the trailer and seems to be wearing very well. In December 2006 we replaced two of the worn-out Marathons with two new Marathons. In Oregon last October we bought a TowMax from Les Schwab. Now in Arizona we have replaced one of the Marathons with a Green Ball tire. This means that we have four different brands on the trailer, counting the one Goodyear Marathon still on the trailer.
Of the seven Goodyear Marathons we’ve owned, two have had belt failure, two have worn out, one suffered an irreparable flat, one was destroyed when the wheel came off, and one is still on the trailer. I’m not happy with the loss of two tires from belt failure, but until I wear out a few of the other brands without similar failure, I’m not ready to cast aspersions on Goodyear alone. Another year on the road will be a good test.
Having taken a wheel off means I’ve got to check the lug nuts periodically, but again I’m so used to that routine that it’s really no big deal at all. Whenever a wheel is removed we check the lug nuts at 10, 25, 50, and 100 miles. When in doubt, check ’em again — it only takes a minute.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to a very good article about trailer tires and why they fail.
Tonight we are in Huachuca City, AZ, near Sierra Vista. We are parked directly beside an identical 30-foot Safari bunkhouse owned by our friend Brent. Tonight Brent made corned beef and cabbage for all of us (in honor of St Patrick’s Day) and we unwound at his place for the evening. I’ve still got work to do this week, but I’ll keep it to a minimum in order to enjoy the little break. I definitely won’t be calling any more “customer service” departments.
March 16, 2008 at 7:06 pm · Filed under Home base, Travel / lifestyle musings
This morning we dropped off our houseguest, Christine, at a friend’s to go horse riding. All around Tucson there are pockets of “horse country,” where you can show up with your horse trailer and RV, park for a few months, and ride all winter long.
These places are basically spacious campgrounds in the country with horse boarding. The place we visited this morning is called Spirit Dog Ranch. It sits in a shallow valley near the base of the Santa Catalinas in Oro Valley, bordering Catalina State Park. We watched the horses playing for a few minutes, then headed out to do a little shopping.
Based on suggestions from blog readers, I bought a sacrificial anode rod for the water heater. As full-timers, it probably would have been a good idea to get one two years ago, but better late than never. The version I bought incorporates a quick-drain, useful for easy winterizing.
Our travels will resume tomorrow, at least for a short time. We are heading to Sierra Vista for a few days, just to blow the cobwebs off the trailer. Officially, our purpose is to do some birdwatching and hiking, but in reality we’re just getting out of town to avoid sitting around another week waiting for the countertops to show up.
Having been stopped since January, when I got back from Quartzsite, it’s interesting to experience the pre-trip excitement. I’ve been talking to Brent, who we are joining in Sierra Vista, every few days to “prepare” for the trip. There really isn’t that much preparation needed, but when you are looking forward to a trip, the preparation can be half the fun.
We have always anticipated each new phase of our trip, and every major stop, but of course there’s more contrast when you are parked and waiting to go. This trip is a mere 60 miles, less than we drove today to go shopping, but it has become a major event in our otherwise-sedentary lives. It’s not the distance that matters, it’s the change of scene.
Our other anticipated travel to Sonora, MX has attracted even more attention. Our friends the Neels have been emailed every few days with reports of their preparations. They are coming from California to meet us here, and then head across the border with us, around the 29th. Today’s email from David reported the status of his tires, wheel bearings, propane, insurance, family health, and iPod.
I also heard from Adam today. He and Susan are up in Maine, feverishly working to escape the damp, snowy, northeast and join us here for the Mexico trip as well. His reports are like David’s, and every few days I get an update on the progress.
I like getting the progress reports from my friends. It shows that they, too, are excited to travel. People who get excited about travel are the sort of people we like to travel with. There is no doubt we will have a superb time because of our friends, and that’s the best type of trip to be anticipating.
March 11, 2008 at 10:01 pm · Filed under Home base
With me posting only every other day instead of daily, you might expect each post to be twice as good. But that’s like crossing the International Date Line and expecting to have the same day you had yesterday…
I realized why I am so stymied right now. We are caught between two worlds. At one time this was a travel blog (and it will be again!), and then I promised it would become a house renovation blog. At this point it is neither, because we can’t go anywhere and yet there’s nothing happening to the house either.
This is what most people would refer to as a stable, normal lifestyle. A lot of people prefer an uneventful life: get up, go to work, come home, watch some TV, repeat ad infinitum. They like to avoid surprises, at least those of the unsettling variety. We have an opportunity for that right now. We could easily settle in here. Just enroll Emma in the local school, start attending the PTA meetings, join the local uke club, and enjoy a completely safe and reliable lifestyle in a lovely spot in suburbia.
But if this break from full-time travel has taught me anything, it is that I am not cut out for that. I may lost a few of the more prickly edges in recent years, but I am far from ready to sit still. I love where we are right now, but then, I’d love where we are going, too. I have become a travel junkie.
And it’s not just me. I suppose some people might have thought that a year or two on the road would have caused us all to “get it out of our system,” or “appreciate being home more,” but the opposite seems to have happened. Having lived in the Airstream for two years, we can’t seem to get out of it. In the house, we have a ready made bedroom, with curtains, bed, new mattress & pillows, and a pair dressers. It has a lovely view of the Santa Catalina mountains, and beautiful morning light. So why are we still sleeping in the Airstream in the carport, where there is hardly any light and much less space?
Because it is home. Eleanor logically points out that if we slept in the house, with the sinks and showers still not fully operational, we’d have to go back to the Airstream to brush our teeth at bedtime, a small nuisance. But I think a lot of people would be eager, even desperate, to get into their new house — the one they’ve owned for nearly a year, and have only slept in once. Let’s face it, what she’s really saying is the Airstream is more comfortable. That is a direct result of living in it, and loving it, for two years.
At some point, we will sleep in the house, and if we can get somebody to show up and actually install the countertops, the rest of the details will fall into place, making the house fully functional. At that point, however, it will probably be too close to our departure date. So we’ll just spent a perfunctory night or two in the house and then take off in the Airstream. Score: Airstream 362, House 3.
Absolutely nothing has happened on the house since last week. But we did receive a package of glass tile from the UPS truck on Monday. (Mail deliveries are a big part of our daily excitement these days. Emma loves to run out and catch the mail truck, hoping for letters or magazines addressed to her.)
The box of tile means that when Contractor Chris has a chance, he will be able to finish the hall shower. Since we are expecting a house guest on Thursday, who will be sleeping in the house, a working shower would be appreciated as soon as possible.
Come to think of it, when we leave Tucson, our guest Christine, and our previous guest Brett, will both have slept in our house many more times than we will have. Perhaps that is why we bought it: guest quarters!
This fall our friend Doug Keister will be releasing his new book, “Teardrops and Tiny Trailers.” He’s the guy who wrote “Mobile Mansions,” “Silver Palaces,” and “Ready to Roll,” all books about vintage trailers and RVs. I think we have them all. Doug offers signed copies of his books if you know the right people.
Fortunately by reading this blog, you do. If you care to buy any of his books and want a signed copy and want to support this blog, use this link to buy books from Doug Keister. Right now only Mobile Mansions and Silver Palaces are available as signed copies, but I’ll post a reminder on the blog when “Teardrops and Tiny Trailers” comes out. Using the special link above means I get a small kickback on the book sales.
Uke song of the day: “The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea” as performed by George Harrison. This is a fun one, but it requires the somewhat tricky E chord, which I haven’t mastered yet. Chord tabs here.
March 9, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Home base
I’ve decided to put you all on half-rations for a while. I’m going to give the blog a rest, and post only every other day this week.
There are two primary reasons for this.
- After over 900 nearly consecutive blog entries, I think I’ve earned a vacation for a bit.
- Let’s face it, our life is just not very interesting right now, even to me.
The past few weeks I’ve been struggling to tell you something, anything, interesting that relates to Airstream travel. But I’m getting tired of hearing myself re-hash old themes: planning the next trip, maintenance on the Airstream, travel philosophy, budgeting, etc. I have to face reality: right now we are just sitting here and waiting for a chance to run away.
And while we are sitting here, our lives look a lot like everyone else’s. We brush our teeth in the morning. We work and go to school. We buy groceries and take out the trash. We pay the bills and work on the house. Except for the fact that we still live in the driveway in an Airstream, our lives are hardly distinguishable from the other people living on this street.
This will change in a week, when we have a trip to southern Arizona planned with our friend Brent and his daughter Kendal. And in three weeks we’ll head out again, this time to Sonora with our friends David, Ariadna, and their son William. A couple of days after that, we’ll start trekking east through NM, TX, LA, MS, and FL. But right now, we’re parked and there just isn’t a whole lot to be said about it.
This is a good thing, really. It’s time for a little vacation. Since I began working from home in 1993 as a self-employed person, I have tried to take full advantage of the opportunities for vacation that self-employment can offer. Most of the time working for yourself is rough. As my friend Steve Bertocci used to say, “Working for yourself is hard because the boss is a bastard.” It’s true. Like most successful self-employed people, I work much longer and harder than I ever did when I was working for other people.
But I’ve learned that if you are willing to work hard when the job calls for it, you should be ready to vacation whenever you get the chance. In other words, when things quiet down unexpectedly and you’ve got a dull afternoon, just leave the office. Don’t sit around filling the hours browsing the web or playing Solitaire. Get out and have fun, because there will come another day when you are locked in the office for 15 hours straight.
It all balances out in the end. So the signs are telling me to take a vacation this week (from the blog, but not from the day job, sadly), and enjoy it, because soon we’ll be back on the road and I’ll hopefully have more blog material than I can handle. In the meantime, hang in there. I’ll blog every other day this week and resume the daily blog as soon as events warrant, probably next Monday.
March 6, 2008 at 10:43 pm · Filed under Home base
Dare I say that we have tackled the last few leaks in this house — The House Of 1,000 Leaks?
Since we bought the place last year we have been randomly discovering leaks in the plumbing, and repairing them as they turn up. It started with a dripping garden hose faucet outside, and the hot water line for the washing machine. Then we started to see leaks everywhere: the shutoff for the toilet didn’t quite shut off; the toilet ran until you jiggled the handle; another outside faucet began to drip, then another.
We eventually replaced every bit of plumbing in the house except for the lines themselves. This included all four outside faucets, three sink faucets and associated shutoffs, laundry connections, two toilet shutoffs, both toilets, ice maker shutoff, and even the shutoff to the house itself (which didn’t shut off). For a while we were complacent in our water-thriftiness, until a couple of weeks ago.
Then I noticed the thin wet line below the tub faucet in Emma’s bathroom. The thin wet line never stopped, even when the shower taps were closed for days …
And then I noticed the little puddle on the floor, that seemed to arise from the tile grout itself, like a natural spring, after a shower in the hall bathroom …
We had forgotten about the shower taps. Like every other water fixture in the house, they were 37 years old. The washers were long since worn out, and they were leaking water, possibly inside the walls. This gave me visions of black mold and rotted wood. Who knew what evils lurked in the dark, behind the tile?
This was a tough call. A peek inside the wall would be expensive, and we’d undoubtedly break the tiles. Since they are impossible to match with modern tiles, we’d have to come up with a complementary tile to replace them.
We decided that if were going to sleep well at night, and leave this house alone for months at a time, we needed to do some exploratory surgery. After some planning, we arranged to have the showers gently dissected, saving as many of the original tiles as possible. Eleanor found a nice glass tile that will go well with the originals and placed an order for them.
Today was surgery day. Contractor Chris came over and took things apart. He confirmed that the taps were leaking — badly — but that no damage had been done behind the walls. The water was dripping onto a hidden edge of the tub and thus never reached the wood studs in the wall. In the hall bath he replaced the ancient three-knob system with a modern self-balancing shower control and put everything back together. Next week, when the tile order comes in, he’ll finish the job.
In Emma’s bath, things are much worse. That shower has been heavily used over the past decades, and it really could use a complete rebuilding. We had Chris remove the old leaking taps, seal up the plumbing, and just leave the wall open. We’re going to ignore this bath until we get back in the fall, figuring that we can take all summer to decide what we want to do about it.
For now, ours will be a 1.5 bath house. Being just the three of us, we don’t really need two full baths anyway, and since we’ve lived in an Airstream for over two years with only one very small bathroom, even having an extra half-bath represents complete luxury bordering on decadence. Our expectations of a house have been re-defined by our travel experience: if it doesn’t leak and we have one good bathroom, we’re happy.
March 4, 2008 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Home base
You may have noticed me mentioning Bookmans in prior Tucson posts. It’s a small chain of used bookstores here and around Arizona. The chain is small, but the stores are large — about the size of an average Border’s or Barnes & Noble. And all the space is gloriously filled with used books of every imaginable description.
If you’re not a reader, this description may not give you palpitations, but for those who are, take your heart medicine. Bookmans is a true “find,” and two of their locations are practically in our back yard. In addition to the books they have fast and free wi-fi, cushy chairs, high ceilings, a spirited staff and an absolutely unpredictable selection of music playing constantly. It’s a public library on steroids. Open till 10 p.m. for those late-owl browsers. It’s a book nut’s idea of heaven.
No, it’s better than that. The people-watching alone is worth paying an admission fee. People who love books come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and they are all parading past me as I sit here in my overstuffed floral-print chair taking notes. The staff is a hoot too. Their use of the public address system is creative, bordering on anarchic: “Jim … I’m up front … I’ve got that book you were looking for … but you’re not here … (fake sob) How could you do this to me?”
and later: “We’re going to change the music. Annie suggested something better. If you like it, thank her … and by the way, you can buy the CD for eight bucks.”
I came here for the high speed Internet because I had a lot of major files to move around today, but I stayed because Bookmans makes the whole family happy. I get my work done faster, Emma gets to sit and read, and Eleanor shops for more books, games, and all kinds of other stuff they have, for cheap. From my chair — which I am not going to give up until my battery dies — I can see used CDs, game cartridges, DVDs, magazines, faux jewelry, and today a selection of funky vintage purses hanging on the rack.
Lately our flow of books has been in the reverse direction. We’ve now opened the ten or so cartons of books that survived the cut in Vermont (out of 30 or so cartons) and found that there were still more we didn’t care to keep any longer. So I brought over a box of books the other day and they bought about ten of them, giving me a $34 store credit. I’m sure that will be used up today for kids books, but that’s OK. Thirty-four bucks worth of used books should keep Emma occupied for at least a week … I hope.
Besides, once in while they surprise us here with a little bonus. A few weeks ago we were at the Oro Valley store and Emma picked out a book. The guy at checkout asked, “How old are you?” and Emma replied, “Seven!” He said, “Well today all 7-year-olds get their books for free,” and he refused any payment. When was the last time that happened to you at any store?
So here’s a vote for a very cool store that is one of the many reasons why we like Tucson.
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