Tonight I am letting Wally Byam take over the blog.   My friend Dale Schwamborn, who I introduced in this blog a few days back, has shared with me a letter written by Wally to one of his fraternity brothers (Wally was a Sigma Chi).   See if you can see the similarities in travel perspectives (to mine, and your own) in Wally’s letter from half a century ago:

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April 20, 1959

Dear Sam:

Nice to get your note … I’m asking the secretary of the Wally Byam Caravan Club to send you a copy of ‘Parade’ magazine.   They wrote a rather interesting article about me, and also, did you know that National Geographic Magazine devoted 35 pages to the Wally Byam Caravan to Europe in their June 1957 issue? More recently, I’ve appeared on coast to coast television programs with my caravan to Central America.

Right now we are preparing a caravan of some 40 trailers and trucks, which will sail for Africa in May and June of this year and leave Capetown in South Africa on July 14th, on a 12,000 mile trip north through Africa, eventually coming out in Cairo on December 5th.   In the process, we expect to park the   caravan under the nose of the sphinx in the Nile valley and if luck goes with us to be in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve.   All these things make startling and interesting publicity.   The real interesting thing is that although this trip to Africa has never been done before by a group of caravanners such as ours and   has a lot of elements of real adventure and not small element of danger   in it, the average age of   the people going   is 67 years and the oldest man is 87.   They all drive their own trucks and act in a general way like kids.   The trick is that with trailers like ours they can rest whenever they get tired and they have all the comforts of home,   including hot and cold running water, showers, bathtub, flushing toilet, wonderful beds, refrigerators, good stoves, air conditioners, just about everything you could call for.   Thus, the old guy really takes life easy on a very hazardous journey.   I wonder if any of these things would make a good story for some of the Sig magazines sometime.   You can’t blame a guy for tooting his own horn occasionally.

Apparently the only people still living from my class at Stanford are Eddie Randall, who I often meet in Washington D.C. and Tex Talbert of Beverly Hills.   Tex says he doesn’t go to meetings anymore because he is always the oldest guy there and he does not like that designation.

I sure hope I can drop in some noon, but it seems that I am always traveling.

Very sincerely,

Wally Byam

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If you know anything about Airstream’s history, you know that the Cape Town to Cairo caravan became the most famous caravan in Airstream’s history, and probably the most publicized caravan in all of RV’ing history. Wally knew he was on to something — and as you can see, he was a relentless publicist — but I bet even he didn’t know how important this trip would be.   We still talk about it today, and publish the photos in Airstream Life magazine.

I find his closing line to be the most poignant of this letter.   He was indeed always traveling, and apparently enjoyed that more than anything else in life.   Three years after this letter was written he died of cancer, at a relatively young age by today’s standards, but with an incredible and fulfilling life behind him.