Archive for Tips & Ideas
April 23, 2006 at 7:09 pm · Filed under Tips & Ideas
One of our alert blog readers, Rob Baker, noticed that our route from Charleston to Myrtle Beach would take us up Rt 17 in Mt Pleasant. So he put a comment on yesterday’s post to tip us off to the Jack’s Cosmic Hot Dogs and we made a point of stopping there for lunch. There’s plenty of parking in the back for an Airstream.
Rob was right, the Cosmic Hot Dog (blue cheese cole slaw and sweet potato brown mustard) was awesome. Emma opted for the Earth Dog (plain, with mustard). Jack’s fries are pretty darned good too, thin and extra salty, and just right with a frosted mug of root beer.
Suitably refreshed, we charged up Rt 17 a couple of hours to Myrtle Beach and pulled into the second-largest campground we have ever encountered. (The largest was Fort Wilderness, at Disney World.) It’s a giant complex, with hundreds of sites for RVs, permanent residences, rental cabanas, etc.
Site I-46, oceanside
Our site is right smack-dab on the front row closest to the ocean. The boardwalk between the sand dunes is about 30 feet from our front door and the sound of the crashing surf emanates from perhaps 200 feet away. You couldn’t be any closer to the beach than this. It’s terrific.
The view from our front door
Yesterday Fred gave us a microfiber towel to use when washing the Airstream. The weather was spectacular when we got here (breezy, sunny, 80 degrees) and we were in settling-in mode, so I decided to try out the towel instead of hunting up a truck wash at $40 a pop.
It worked great. We used a small bowl of water with a big sponge and two drops of soap, to get the dirt loose. Then we followed up quickly with the microfiber towel. We changed the water eight or nine times and rinsed the towel two or three times.
The result was a pretty clean trailer with very little mess using just a few bowls of water. This means we can “stealth wash” the trailer at campgrounds that normally frown on it. Good tip, Fred!
Even though the rally doesn’t start until Wednesday, there are already 30-40 Airstreams here. People who have met us at other rallies are stopping by to say Hi, and those who don’t know us are cruising slowly by in their rented golf carts and wondering about all the stickers on our trailer. Eleanor and Emma have gone out for a few groceries (which is why Brett now calls our trip the “Tour of America’s Grocery Stores”) and we’ll have pizza tonight while planning some fun for the rest of the week.
April 9, 2006 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Tips & Ideas
We’re at it again — modifying the Airstream for more convenience. Brett and I started off the day with a ride on the Upper Tampa Bay Trail, which is another converted rail trail not far from here. Tampa has some excellent bicycling! Even though this one is short, we got in a good ride, about 11 miles round trip.
This put us in the mood to drill holes in the Airstream. (Don’t ask me why.) We met up with Eleanor and Emma at the local Steak’n’Shake and then proceeded to buy some hardware for the jobs we had in mind.
The first job was to install a level on the front of the trailer. For the past six months I’ve been levelling the trailer by eyeballing it, and it has worked well. But it seemed time to have the real thing. This is an easy item to install, so I didn’t bother taking photos of the process. Basically, just level the trailer, drill holes, and screw the level on.
The second job was to put in a secret hiding place. Brett and I spotted the perfect place in the trailer last week, and today I rigged it up. I wish I could show it to you, but then it wouldn’t be a secret would it? I’ll just say that it is very hard to find, opens in a non-intuitive way, and big enough to hold our Passports and some cash. I feel good about having this available, just in case we ever have a break-in.
The third job was to install a bed lift. I got the idea from David Tidmore at Roger Williams Airstream, who has installed them for his customers. The Airstream bed sits on a plywood platform, which is screwed to a storage base. To access storage below the bed, you normally reach in through openings in the side of the storage base. But it would be much nicer to be able to just lift the bed up and access everything from the top.
To install the bed lift, we removed the screws attaching the plywood, added a long piano hinge, and then attached two automotive-type gas struts beneath. Now the bed can be lifted up off its base by anyone, with just one hand, and it stays up as long as you are accessing the storage area. Even Emma can do it!
April 7, 2006 at 8:08 pm · Filed under Tips & Ideas
For six months we have been taking photos of our travels, and posting many of them online in our photo album. (You can see them using the link in the left column that says “Pictures”.) But until this week, we’ve never printed a single picture.
This week we selected 29 favorite photos and burned them to a CD. We dropped by Walgreens and printed six of them as a test, then framed them in some fun frames Eleanor picked up at various local stores. All of the prints are either 4×6 or 5×7, which are good sizes for mounting on the walls of an Airstream travel trailer.
The outside walls of our Airstream are lined with a white fuzzy material that velcro sticks to. Hanging pictures on those walls is easy: just use adhesive velcro strips on the pack of the frame. The interior walls are a woodgrain laminate. We use double-sided tape to stick frames to those walls.
The photos make a huge difference to the interior of the trailer. Now it’s much more personalized. It feels homier. Emma walked in the door today — back from Vermont — and noticed all the photos immediately. These are the best souvenirs that we can have. Every day we’ll be reminded of the great travels we’ve enjoyed. I expect we’ll be printing more of the 29 photos I selected, in the next few weeks. There’s plenty of wall space left!
April 3, 2006 at 11:06 pm · Filed under Tips & Ideas
Now, before I launch into this diatribe about what tools I carry, I will tell you what I know you all want to hear: Eleanor arrived this afternoon, feeling fine. So 2/3 of our Tour family is back together. Emma will follow on Friday.
What I really want to talk about is tools. People often ask us what we carry with us to deal with those little household repairs and roadside situations that can crop up. I composed a list of what I carry in the trailer for your general info. While I can’t promise that this tool kit will deal with every emergency that could happen, it does suffice for 90% of what we encounter — and the rest I leave to professionals.
In a small blue fabric bag from Sears, I have the following items:
— small hammer
— screwdriver set
— drill bits and screwdriver bits for cordless drill
— tape: electrical, duct, & masking
— Gorilla glue
— (2) medium sized adjustable wrenches
— Reese hitch lube
— 3M silicone lube and graphite lube
— set of allen wrenches
— retractable safety knife (“carpet knife”)
— pliers
— small wire cutter/stripper tool
— plenty of misc screws, washers, and grommets
— one small bungee cord
— rivet tool
— small tube of Parbond, aluminum color
— small tube of GE Silicone II sealant, white, for kitchen and bath area
— assortment of “bullet hole” stickers
AND
— a small plastic “tackle box” or similar with internal compartments, with:
spare 1156 bulbs, glass fuses of varying amperage, several large cotter pins, single-sided razor blades, misc screws, several hose washers, 3/16″ POP rivets, Olympic rivets, mini 10w Halogen bulbs for the reading lamps, extra 303 Protectant samples for the Fantastic Vents (keeps ’em from sticking), automotive blade-style fuses (various sizes, open your Magnatek to see which ones you need).
I have used almost everything on the above list in the past year. No kidding! Things loosen, jiggle free, crack, and pop in thousands of miles of travel. With this kit you can fix almost any small problem without assistance. Without a kit like this, you could spend a lot of time visiting repair shops for little things, when you’d rather be having fun. And even if nothing goes wrong, the kit is useful for those little upgrades and personalizations you’ll want to do.
Also strongly recommended:
— cheap 12v air compressor with a looooong cord
— lug wrench (and be sure you have a spare tire and know how to change it, or you’ll end up waiting hours for roadside assistance someday!)
— cordless drill — very handy for setting stabilizers with appropriate socket and adapter
There are many other pieces of equipment you’ll want to have, but I’m only including the tools and parts here. Obviously you need extension cords, chocks, etc., but I’m assuming if you own an RV already you’ve figured that stuff out.
March 30, 2006 at 6:37 pm · Filed under Tips & Ideas
Tonight we are concentrating on lighting. Some of it’s just fun stuff, some of it is practical.
Last year we installed some cool blue neon tell-tales in our 1977 Argosy project. They lit up when the outside step light or patio light was on, so we wouldn’t forget to shut them off at night. I loved those blue lights. So Brett found some nice little amber LEDs and wired those into the switches of this 2005 Airstream. Cool!
We also changed one of the lights over the bed. Airstream installs a omni-directional light in the ceilings of the new Safaris. When I come to bed late at night and Eleanor is already sleeping, I often use a flashlight to read so I don’t disturb her. But for some reason, Airstream installed a very fine directional halogen lamp in Emma’s bedroom area. In fact, because Emma’s bedroom area has two bunks, she has three. So we swapped one of her unused halogen lamps for my omnidirectional incandescent. Now I can read at night and the light will only hit my book.
In fact it worked so well that Eleanor want us to do the same thing with her bedside lamp. We’ll hit that job a bit later. Brett has been so enthused by the success of these little upgrades that he is bubbling over with ideas. We’ll have to pick through them to decide what we can do over the next few days.
I’ve been too busy working the past few days to get out and explore Tampa. But a list is developing, and once Eleanor is back on Monday I hope we have some fun. Not far from here are Ybor City (a historic Cuban district), Big Cat Rescue, all the Clearwater beaches, and lots more. I am hankering for some Cuban food, too.
Sign of the week: Are these the guys you use to sue discount stores?
March 14, 2006 at 8:51 pm · Filed under Tips & Ideas
We’ve arrived at Mystic Springs Airstream park, about 30 miles north of Pensacola FL. Finally! The long driving spree is over for a while. We’ll hang here amongst the moss-draped pine trees through Sunday or so. We need the break.
Our camping budget has been greatly helped by all the courtesy parking we’ve been doing lately. Our stay at NTAC was free (because we were the guest of one of the lot owners), as were our four nights in Weathersford. Then we hit Wal-Marts along the way up to Indiana, spent a few days at Airstream of Indiana, and stopped at a Cracker Barrel on the way down to Florida.
The upshot is that in the past 15 nights we have only had to pay for parking twice (at Kickapoo State Park in IL and Mammoth Cave NP). So for two weeks our total camping expenditure has been $32.
Now it’s sort of a quest: how long can we go without paying? Eleanor says I’ve gotten cheap, but I prefer to consider it Yankee frugality, or perhaps just an expansion of the way we travel. Anyway, we just put hundreds of dollars into batteries so we can get along longer without power connections — let’s make use of them! Didn’t we buy an Airstream for “real travel independence” as they say in the brochures? But she still says I’m cheap.
We need to make a few more tweaks to be comfortable living “off the grid”. I’d like to be able to power our laptops and cell phones off the trailer’s 12v system without using an inverter, so I am considering a IGo everywhere universal power adapter. This thing has little power tips to fit all sorts of equipment, so one IGo will power both the laptops and the phones (assuming I buy the right tips to go with it).
On Saturday night I went out to Radio Shack and bought their universal 12v adapter for $5.99. This allows us to run the factory-installed Sharp flat panel TV on the 12v system, bypassing the inverter that came with it. (Formerly it went from 12v to 110v AC power, then plugged into the wall.) So that’s one less appliance that needs AC power. Now we can watch DVD movies even while boondocking.
Once we have the 12v adapter for the laptops and phones, everything in the trailer except the laser printer and vacuum cleaner will run off the house batteries. I can recharge the cordless drill, camera batteries, and other misc battery-powered devices using a basic Radio Shack cigarette-lighter inverter, if I really need to.
So, I’ve dumped the Honda eu1000 generator that we were hauling around. With an SUV, toting a generator means gas fumes in the car, less storage space, and more weight. We’re going to see how it goes with just batteries and — eventually — a pair of solar panels.
Mystic Springs is a nice spot, but it’s in the boonies. Sprint doesn’t cover the area, and there’s no Internet access to be had anywhere nearby, so I have to drive 30 miles into Pensacola to snarf wifi from Panera Bread or one of the hotels. I already got booted from the Luxury Suites motel by a grumpy matron earlier this evening, so I think from now I’ll stick with Panera. At least there you can get a nice cuppa and muffin while you work. While I’m doing that, Eleanor and Emma are going to run errands and find something fun to barbecue — the park is planning a barbecue night on Thursday. I’m voting for salmon… would a cheapskate do that?
March 5, 2006 at 8:55 am · Filed under Tips & Ideas
Saturday was a work day for us. We got towed by the forklift into the service bay on Saturday morning. General Manager David Tidmore and Service Tech “Denver” (I don’t know his last name yet), got busy working on things in and out of the trailer, while Eleanor and I took care of few minor things as well.
At first, Eleanor and I took turns keeping Emma occupied, but as the day warmed up Emma adopted a few people who happened by. First it was Gunny and his black labrador puppy, later it was the Service Manager and his wife from the car dealership next door, and later still it was anyone who walked into the dealership to look at the Airstreams.
I removed and replaced the caulk around the kitchen countertop and stove, which had loosened up. We also removed the opening portion of the bathroom window, applied frosted window film to it, and raised the bathroom blinds. This allows us to more easily operate the window knob without having to reach through the blinds, while still retaining privacy. If you have a later-model Safari you’ll know what I mean.
I finally got a chance to repair the damage we picked up in California to the rear skid plates (under the rear storage compartment). That was a matter of grinding off the old paint and rust that had formed since the plates were bent, and re-painting them.
We are also replacing and extending our battery bank, from two Interstate group 24 “wet” batteries to four Optima blue-top AGM (absorbed glass matt) batteries. Two will go in the existing battery box, and two will go into the front storage compartment. Since they don’t vent hydrogen and can’t spill, they are safe to have inside the trailer. This is preparatory to installing a full solar system, which we will do later. In the meantime, we’ll have double the battery capacity we had before — very useful when boondocking.
David also has a theory about our water heater that doesn’t stay on reliably. We’ve had that serviced in Jackson Center, and again at an Airstream dealer in Iowa. But both times the problem has recurred. David, being an electrical engineer by training, has zeroed in on the problem and I think he might have it nailed. Amazingly, the problem may come down to a dirty contact!
And there’s more … we added a Fantastic Vent to the rear bedroom (Emma’s area). This trailer has three roof vents, but only one had a powered fan. Now two of the three vents are powered, which will be a huge improvement in air circulation when the hot weather comes in.
Finally, we are making a big upgrade to a Hensley Arrow hitch. While we have been happy with the Reese hitch to date, David and the Hensley people have convinced us to try the Arrow. Having a relatively short wheelbase SUV towing a long trailer, they believe the new hitch will improve our handling and overall safety. I am really looking forward to trying it out next week. We’ll have some long days driving to Indiana.
On Monday, we still have a few more things to do. We want to replace the two-handle faucet in the bath with a single-handle one. We’ve already found one at the local Lowe’s. The toilet seal is leaking, so that will get replaced. We’ll finish adjusting the new hitch and Eleanor & I will get a “Hensley 101” course from David.
We are also going to modify our flat-panel LCD screen to run on 12v so we can watch movies when boondocking. That’s an easy job since the TV already runs natively on 12v. Right now it goes to a power converter which plugs into the 110v power. By removing the converter box and connecting it to 12v, we can run the TV off the new Optima battery bank.
Our long term goal is to get everything except the laser printer, vacuum cleaner, and coffee pot running on the 12v system. This will save us a pile of money because we won’t need to buy an inverter. I’m going to search for 12v adapters for the laptops and cell phones.
One problem we still haven’t solved in the bicycle rack. We’re going to struggle on with our wobbly roof system and keep researching options. It has lasted 13,000 miles so far — I guess it can go a bit further.
Today we are off to Ft Worth to see some interesting water gardens and the downtown district. We’ve been told it’s worth the trip. I’ll take pictures for you.
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