Archive for May, 2008
May 8, 2008 at 9:33 pm · Filed under Roadtrips, Travel / lifestyle musings
We have left Florida in search of something. Trouble is, we don’t know what. I was hoping that we’d figure it out as we drove, and so far that theory is working. There’s nothing like the threat of having to park by the side of the road overnight to inspire those gray cells that make the plans.
The first brainstorm was to swing by Green Cove Springs, where our “virtual address” is located. We are now, and permanently at 411 Walnut Street in Green Cove Springs. So we towed the Airstream downtown and parked it on this brick paved street to see where we live now.
Except that it doesn’t exist. Somewhere behind the orange car in the photo was 411, but now only 409 and 415 can be found. The left pane of glass of the storefront is where 411 should be. In white vinyl letters on this window appears a message, telling all who come by and gape (as we were doing) that St Brendan’s Isle, our mail forwarding service, is now located 2.7 miles up the highway.
So as it turns out, our virtual address is more virtual than we thought. We pulled the Airstream the requisite 2.7 miles and parked it at the Winn-Dixie next door to a featureless steel office building, where St Brendan’s Isle now processes all the mail of their customers.
So we met three of the staff, and they met us, and they showed us our virtual home. It’s a box with the number 4468, amid the hundreds of other little boxes in the room, but it contained something particularly special for me: advance copies of the Summer 2008 issue of Airstream Life. (Copies went in the mail this week to all subscribers as well.)
This may seem to be a minor event, but it felt sort of important to me. We’ve put faces with the names, which is always nice when you work across cyberspace with people. We’ve made an appearance. We may never get to Green Cove Springs again, but at least now we know what it looks like, and somehow that feels good. It was always a tiny bit uncomfortable having an address in a place we’ve never been.
Having accomplished that first step of our east coast tour, we started thinking about where to head next. (These brainstorming sessions were held over walkie-talkie, since Eleanor was driving behind me with Emma in the Honda.) All of the beachfront sites are booked solid this weekend, and we didn’t want to fight crowds. We also realized that boondocking or overnight parking outside of campgrounds would be much more comfortable once we got further north. Florida is running 90 degrees every day now, and the southeast in general is experiencing the usual humidity. So we decided to put some miles behind us in order to get into some cooler weather sooner, and open up our options.
Tonight we are parked at a Cracker Barrel in Georgia, just for convenience. Keeping the speed down to 60 MPH all the way boosted our fuel economy by more than 10%, but with that and all the stops, we ended up driving until 7 pm. Hopefully this will be our only such stop on this leg of the trip. We are planning to spend the bulk of the trip in state and national park sites. I’ll lay out that plan over the next few days as it unfolds.
May 7, 2008 at 10:05 pm · Filed under Emma's posts, Maintenance, Tips & Ideas
Our Airstream parked next to Wendy & Bill’s, in their driveway.
Tonight I’m going to stay brief because a better blog is coming to you from Emma. She dictated a blog to Wendimere and it appears on her “Health Chic” blog site.
Eleanor has been making interesting meals today. She created a really fabulous salad with very complex tastes in it with one of her homemade dressings, for lunch. She told me, “I like cooking around Wendy because she doesn’t think what I’m making is weird.” That really means she’s mixing flavors non-traditionally and that usually means something great is coming.
Emma’s blog entry describes her contribution to lunch as well (also inspired by Wendy), a drink she called “Spear-Refresh.” It’s really delicious. That’s a glass of it in the photo at right. I’ve been drinking it with every meal since yesterday.
Wendy has also had Emma helping with the plants in the garden, painting rain barrels, and playing Scrabble. Having Emma in the Health Chic world has been a great example of “stealth schooling,” which is when Emma learns all kinds of things but doesn’t realize she’s in school.
This evening we got a surprise call from Brett, who was unexpectedly in Orlando for business. So we invited him over for dinner and an evening Scrabble championship: boys versus girls. The guys won, mostly because we managed to use all 7 tiles to spell “DETOURED” and got 50 bonus points.
One maintenance note: the 30-amp power cord supplied with all late-model Airstreams tends to pull loose of its “strain relief” at the male end of the cord. This exposes the insulated wires and will eventually lead to the failure of the electrical connection. The manufacturer of that cord — whoever it is — needs to beef up the way the plug end is attached to the main cable. I’ve seen many of them falling apart, mine included.
So on his way over here, I asked Brett to stop at Camping World and buy a Power Grip replacement plug. He installed it for me in about five minutes, using just a wire stripper and screwdriver. It’s an easy fix and the replacement plug connection is much sturdier than the one it replaces.
May 6, 2008 at 9:18 pm · Filed under FAQs
Last night while talking with Alice and Tim, a commonly-asked pair of questions came up, which are: How do you set your schedule? and How do you choose where to go?
If, like most people, you work in a fixed location and only travel in the RV during vacations and holidays, you’re accustomed to having limited time to travel. This puts boundaries on your trip, which helps you determine how far you can go and how long you can stay.
It’s really the same for us, only with larger boundaries. For example, having left Fort Wilderness this morning, we are finding ourselves in a situation that is very familiar to us. We have a certain amount of time ahead before we need to be somewhere, and only the vaguest of ideas about what to do on the way there. For some, this would appear to be a problem, but really it’s an opportunity.
In this case, we have decided we want to be in Vermont by the first week of June, and we are currently in Florida. These are our primary boundaries (time and space). Our secondary boundaries are things like budget and my work schedule. (When I’m busy I usually need high-speed Internet and good mobile voice service, which means we can’t go to off-the-grid spots.)
As we explained to Tim and Alice last night, in these situations I collect bits and pieces of information, and then slowly build a trip out of it. The information will include things like:
- interesting state or national parks approximately along the route
- scenic roads
- courtesy parking opportunities
- tips we’ve received from people about interesting places or attractions
- weather or weather-related phenomenae that might induce us to change our route (hurricanes, blossoms, foliage, freezing, humidity)
- rallies or business obligations (meetings with contributors or advertisers, photographic assignments for the magazine, etc).
When I don’t have information, we wing it. We figure that if we don’t have a plan, we have little to lose by just trying a spot at random. Often this is the way we find the best little-known spots.
That’s what seems to be happening right now. Today marks the end of the plan that I developed in Tucson over a month ago. I planned to get to Disneyworld and then figure the rest out. Well, here we are, one day out of Disneyworld and I still have no followup. We’ve talked about it a little, and considered the options, but have no solid conclusions. I think we’ll just have to take it one day at a time.
We’ve still got another day to consider things. We’ve moved the trailer over to Haines City, where our friends Bill & Wendimere live. They are giving us courtesy parking (with power to run the air conditioning, a key factor in Florida this time of year) for a couple of nights. We used to spend winters here in Haines City, so we are in a familiar spot both situationally and geographically.
Car update: The new-old 1983 Honda is toodling along just fine. It’s extremely handy to have an efficient car to run around in, especially as we make side trips going up the east coast. I’m factoring that into our trip plan as well, since it enables us to make long detours using the Airstream as home base.
Longer term, we do have a rough plan. It looks like this: June-July in New England; August heading west through Ohio and onward to Colorado; late August and September in Colorado and Utah exploring national parks; early October in northern Arizona; back to home base by Halloween. But keep in mind that life is what happens when you are making other plans. What actually happens to us this year may be completely different.
May 5, 2008 at 8:28 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows that it is traditional for Brett and I to go boating together, and then for something horrible to happen. We don’t have good luck with boats together. On our first trip, renting jetskis on Lake Mead, we encountered high winds and brutal conditions. On our second trip, we used two of Brett’s own jetskis on Lake Tarpon and one of them died five miles from the dock.
Our third trip was worse. We rented a boat on Lake Mead and halfway across the lake it began to sink.
So it was with great expectations that I joined Brett again for another boating adventure today at Ft De Soto Park. I knew something would happen. It was just a matter of what. I was primed for the thrill of disaster.
The mechanical problem, when it arrived, was rather unexciting. Something clogged the fuel line of Brett’s ski. He managed to get it to work its way out, but by then a spark plug was fouled. Fortunately Brett carries a full kit for contingencies (wouldn’t you?) and had that spark plug replaced in just a minute.
I was thinking we had gotten off rather easy at that point. Should have known better. We wandered around the inlets and bays trying to figure out where we were permitted to go, because the place was littered with signs advising, “No wake,” “Shallow water,” and “Combustion Engine Exclusion.”
It wasn’t long before the Coast Guard patrol showed up, blue lights-a-flashing. I’ve never been pulled over on a boat before. At the dock, the officer had a good time telling us, in a very polite way, what complete and utter incompetent boobs we were for disregarding the signs. For the most part it seemed the best course to simply agree with him.
Recognizing us for the (mostly) harmless idiots we were, he declined to give me a citation (because I was following Brett and holding an out-of-state license, e.g., just another dumb tourist) and cited Brett for the minimum he could, $65. We got a map from the officer and figured out where to go for the rest of the afternoon without causing ecological damage or incurring more fines.
As boating trips go, that was one of our best ones together. We got back to the dock with the engines still running, the bilges dry, and a few nice pictures in the camera. See the value in having a few bad experiences? It makes everything else seem fantastic.
Back at Ft Wilderness this evening we were treated to a (scheduled) visit by Alice and Tim Wymer, who live locally. Alice has been a subscriber to Airstream Life since the beginning and has been following our blog, but they just got their first Airstream last summer. I know I say this all the time, but it really is cool to meet people who have been inspired by the magazine or the blog. I never get tired of it.
May 4, 2008 at 5:49 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Yes, we had such a marvelous time at the Magic Kingdom that we got back at nearly midnight … and I was far too tired to write about it. It was the kind of day we hoped to have: reasonably short lines, lots of fun things to do, plenty of time, nice weather, good parades, and a minimal amount of exhaustion-induced crankiness. We got soaking wet on Splash Mountain, had our necks re-aligned on Space Mountain, and “woo-hoo’d” our way through Big Thunder Mountain Railway, so we hit all the major peaks too.
It is a fine tradition that Disney often ends the evening with a fireworks display. In EPCOT and Magic Kingdom the fireworks I have seen are second to none, and last night the show was no exception. We really should have gone home at 9 pm instead of staying for the 10 pm show. With the ferry boat ride, bus ride, and the post-show crowd, we ended up getting to bed at nearly midnight.
But by staying we got a bonus. We happened upon fellow Airstream enthusiast Paul Waddell, his wife MaryKim, and daughter Virginia, who were also hanging around for the fireworks. We’ve seen them for years at various Airstream events, most recently last summer in Perry GA, and about three years ago we courtesy parked at their home. It turns out to be a small world, after all.
So after a long day in the sun and lots of excitement, you can imagine how soundly we all slept, but perhaps you can also imagine how I felt about waking up at 8 a.m. to pack a bag and join Brett & Lori for a ride back to Tampa. We have decided to leave the Airstream, Emma, and Eleanor in Ft Wilderness for two more nights while I go back to Tampa to fetch the “new” 1983 Honda we bought. With gas prices as they are, it was actually about the same total cost to buy two more nights in Ft Wilderness at $71 per night, as to tow the Airstream to a Tampa campground, spend two nights, and then tow back to the Orlando area. And besides, I hate backtracking. We’re ultimately headed north.
It was also a sad morning for us, because our friends Adam and Susan had to depart for their home up north. They need to be up in the northeast in a few days, whereas we have scheduled another three weeks or so on the road. There were a lot of hugs all around and we all promised to get together again this summer. We already have some interesting plans for July and August in the works.
While we were away from Tampa, an auto detailer cleaned up the Honda and now it no longer smells of old car, ancient spills, mildew, pollen, and dirt. It just smells faintly of “old car,” a major improvement. To complete the transformation, I invested $38 in a pair of “Hawaiian hibiscus” front seat covers. They are loud and distracting, which is ideal for drawing attention away from the dull gray interior, the multi-shade faded carpeting, and the eroding roof paint.
I love the covers, but Brett described the process of fitting them to the seats as “dressing a pig.” It’s true, but it’s my pig now. I’ll drive it back to Ft Wilderness on Monday night and re-join the family, assuming the car doesn’t break down on the way.
May 2, 2008 at 8:34 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
It is always hard for me to write about a day at a theme park (not that we visit them all that often), because the inherent design of theme parks is to give a uniform experience. One day is very much like another in a theme park: same sights, same sounds, same surprises, same friendly staff as the previous visit.
It’s not a bad thing at all, but it is very different from what we encounter in the “real world.” Out there, somewhere beyond the boundaries of Disney property, are people who don’t smile when they see you. Some of them have visible tattoos, beards, and opinions. They are the diverse group who make our daily experiences so interesting, and they make good blog fodder for a guy looking for something to write at 11 o’clock at night.
Hence my writing challenge. I could write about the personal impressions I have of this particular theme park, but I was having too much fun splashing around to make many notes, and besides, where would I keep my pen? It was hard enough keeping my sunglasses and sandals on (in fact, I lost the sunglasses twice despite Croakies and was lucky to retrieve them both times).
I could tell you about the very interesting display of bikinis and other assorted swimwear that we spotted, on a widely varied set of bodies, but you wouldn’t be interested in that, I’m sure. Suffice to say that you can’t appreciate the diversity of human beings until you see a few thousand of them parading by virtually naked. The people-watching at a water park rivals The Strip in Las Vegas.
A day in Typhoon Lagoon, like we spent today, is designed to be within a very narrow set of specifications. The water is always warm in the slides of Humunga Kowabunga, and the waves in the Lagoon are always six feet high. So our day today was just like the last time we visited that park (three years ago?) except last time we didn’t have an 8-year-old with us.
Which, as it turns out, makes a small difference. The child shrieks with joy after every ride: “That was AWESOME!” And she begs to go on a ride again, thus saving us from admitting ourselves that we’d like to as well. “Oh, you want to go again? Well … OK.”
Fortunately the park was lightly attended today and there were no lines. We rode every water slide two or three times, even the dreaded Humunga Kowabunga, the feared Crushin’ Gusher, the terrifying Keelhaul Creek, and … well, you get the picture. All of the rides were fearsome to Emma before we rode them the first time, then they were old favorites.
In the photo above you’ll note my calm, cool expression, while the two females of the party are engaged in full-blown panic. Emma has frozen with terror, clenching her teeth almost as tightly as the grip on her mother’s legs. Eleanor is screaming (“WHOOOOOOOOA!!!”) either because of Emma’s death grip on her or because we are entering the final chute, preparatory to splash-down in a 84 degree pool. It’s a good thing they have me to Captain the ship and steer it safely to the pool.
Our friends Brett, Lori, Adam and Susan were all elsewhere today. We last saw them at the bus transfer station at Ft Wilderness, and since then I think they’ve been park-hopping. At 5:30 they called and said they were about to watch Arlo Guthrie performing somewhere. I’m sure they will drag themselves in later tonight, completely wiped out and looking forward to tomorrow. I know we are.
Back at the Airstream this evening, we were treated to a visit by new friends Krista and Frank Stanley, who arrived in Ft Wilderness today. Like us, they are traveling in a 30-foot Airstream Safari “bunkhouse” with their daughter Maya. They are two weeks out on their first big trip, and already they’ve figured out that this is the way to go.
Frank is obliged to work at various locations as they travel, so their route is somewhat confusing, but they are making the best of the opportunity and enjoying themselves hugely. We gave them some tips on Airstreams and traveling, and then they went off to the Princess and Pirate Party at the Magic Kingdom. We may see them again before we leave. I hope so. The theme parks are great fun but still the lasting reward — and the part we remember the longest — is the friends we meet along the way.
An “Elfstream” at the Winter Summerland Miniature Golf at Blizzard Beach. Photo by Alice Wymer.
May 1, 2008 at 6:39 pm · Filed under Places to go, Uncategorized
It’s a short drive from Tampa to Disneyworld, but once you get here you’re a thousand miles from the real world. Which is as it should be, I think. The goal of being here is to escape the real world and live somewhere perfect for a little while. We’re here snuggled into a spot in Disney’s campground, called Fort Wilderness.
“Snuggled,” I say because the campground was designed in the 1960s and the spaces and roadways are a bit tighter than they would design today for the larger RV’s that are common, like ours. It took a couple of passes for us to make it into our spot, which is saying something considering that we have backed up our Airstream on the order of 600 times, into some pretty tight spaces. It’s a rare campground that makes us take more than one pass, but this spot took three tries.
“Wilderness” is a bit of a Disney-esque turn of phrase. Yes, it is a heavily wooded campground with lots of shade, little creeks criss-crossing the park, and pine cones everywhere. But there are no mosquitoes to be found, something that is pretty peculiar considering we are surrounded by tens of thousands of acres of forest and swamp. It is like a state park but without warnings about ravenous raccoons, dangerous snakes, or ravens that like to pick at the sewer hose.
And of course there are full hookups at every site, nightly sing-alongs and movies, swimming pools, golf cart rentals, fast and free bus transportation everywhere, clever little gift shops, a ferry boat, and the Hoop-de-doo Revue.
We’ve been here before so it wasn’t a mad rush for us to run around and see everything as soon as we arrived. We settled in, had lunch in the Airstream, and considered our options. Most people run off right away and go hit a theme park, but one of the nice things about Disneyworld is that you can have a fairly impressive time doing “nothing”. So we went off and rode the ferry across the lake to the Contemporary Hotel, browsed a bit, then took the monorail to the Grand Floridian, people-watched for a while, then rode the monorail and the boat back across the lake. All the transportation is free to guests at any Disney resort (which includes Ft Wilderness), and the weather was absolutely perfect. It’s “low concept” entertainment but it worked for us this afternoon.
The Disney people gave us sites all together, so we’ve rejoined Adam and Susan for dinner this evening. They have been having a wonderful time on their own so far. When we talked via phone this morning they were at Magic Kingdom, and this afternoon they were at Animal Kingdom (Susan got soaked on raft ride), and apparently they’ve been taking in evening concerts as well.
Tonight we’re all hanging back at the campsite for a group dinner by the grill and then, at 9:40 pm, we’ll take in the Electric Water Parade, or whatever they call it, by the boat dock. It’s a good first day away from reality.
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