You’ll never guess what today is. But if you do, for bonus credit you can guess how old I am. There are subtle clues contained in this blog entry.

Eleanor made a very fine cake in the trailer, which we enjoyed last night ( a day early). Making a cake in the Airstream’s tiny oven is a significant feat in itself. First of all, it’s a small space, and RV ovens are not known for their BTU power or temperature accuracy. Also, you have to be sure the oven is perfectly level, in order to have an even cake. That may not coincide exactly with leveling the rest of the trailer. Eleanor is a master at this now and so her cake came out fine. We shared slices with some of the managers at Airstream today, which made us fairly popular.

Things in the trailer have been busy each day as we work around each other in the small space. Outside the trailer things have been even busier, with meetings and such things going on all over the factory campus. We’re going to have to extend our visit into mid-day Thursday.

One of the projects took up half the day today. Brett and I were allowed into the archive room, where an absolute treasure trove of Airstream photography, films, and documents are stored. Some of this stuff hasn’t seen the light of day since it was originally produced decades ago. I was specifically looking for archive photos of the NASA astronaut transporter (the “Astro Van”) and the Mobile Quarantine Facility (MQF) used to isolate astronauts returning from Gemini and Apollo missions. We found plenty of those, and then dug into a lot of other great history.

One find was a whole file folder containing prints of Cornelius Vanderbilt posing in front of his Airstream at the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago. This photo shows Cornelius with Dorsey Conners, a Chicago TV personality and daughter of a famous organized crime boss. I like the photo for the character, but also for the style of the times. It was probably a big deal for Cornelius Vanderbilt to come to the Ambassador in his Airstream, and even a bigger deal for the local celebrities and business heavies to get to pose with him. Cornelius had definite ideas about what “Airstreaming” meant in the 1950s, and he did a lot of it, from devastated post-war Europe to the parking lot of a Chicago hotel.

While we are here, we embarked on a project to lighten the trailer and clear up some clutter that we picked up in Vermont. We boxed a lot of books, magazines, fabric, and miscellany (like my old laser printer) to ship to Tucson via UPS. All told, we shipped 98 lbs of stuff in three boxes. It’s nice to see the unneeded weight depart, but even nicer to have the space back. Some of those items had nowhere to be in the trailer, and were starting to take over floor space.

Emma has been relocated from her bedroom at the back of the trailer to the dinette, which she finds novel. Brett has her bed while he’s visiting. That means every night we have three bedrooms set up. Walking down the hallway I feel like I am in a Pullman coach, with every berth filled with somebody reading a book before bedtime. Rather than feeling crowded, it feels exciting. It will probably be even more exciting when we get moving along I-70 tomorrow afternoon, heading to our next stops in Missouri and Kansas.