Pay No Attention
Pay no attention to “the man behind the curtain” or in this case the man under the quilt. I think Rich has taken too much cold medicine and he needs a nap. We are still going to Borrego Springs, not Hollywood, on Friday.
“Tour of America” — the movie
My friend Rob forwarded me the address for a new movie, called “RV”, which is coming out in March. The plot is basic: Dad (played by Robin Williams) decides the family is falling apart, and decides to take them all on a giant RV adventure to bond. This go disastrously, of course. From the promotional trailer, it looks long on visual comedy and short on reality, but Robin Williams should manage to make it funny.
This movie has to be inspired by the resurgence in RV travel over the past four years. People started shying away from air travel in 2001, and RV sales boomed. Families started discovering that spending time together wasn’t so bad. And now Hollywood is acknowledging that trend with a major motion picture.
This gives me an idea: Perhaps we can turn back to Hollywood (only 75 miles north of here) and pitch a movie based on our lives in the Airstream. Matthew McConnaughy can play me (we’re practically twins), and I think Elle McPherson can play Eleanor. I don’t know who can play Emma but I’m sure the casting agent can come up with some precocious kid. There was a little girl in “Cheaper By The Dozen” who was pretty close to an Emma.
The plot would be about a family that decided to chuck it all and travel together in an Airstream. Along the way they encounter a strange mystery. While studying condors in the Los Padres National Forest, they discover opals in a place they shouldn’t be. With the help of their Internet friends, they research the true origin of the opals and unwittingly crack an enormous smuggling operation hidden in a small California town. At first, the townspeople reject the family as a bunch of suspicious out-of-staters, but eventually Emma wins them over with her charming handmade greeting cards.
A scene from the movie, just before the bulldozer arrives!
The story ends happily, but not before a few alarming scenes, including a part where the villains try to push the Airstream over a cliff into the sea with a bulldozer. (Fortunately, I — meaning Matthew McConnaughy — tackle the villains and the bulldozer ends up in the sea instead. The Airstream is undented.)
It’s a mashup of Hitchcock, Scooby Doo, and Indiana Jones. Classic stuff! Eleanor, forget Sea World — we’re going to Hollywood!
Stuck at home
I wish I could offer you some exotic story about the glamour of Airstreaming today, but it’s not much fun when you’re sick. It seems like part of the package of taking a once-in-a-lifetime trip should be guaranteed immunity from illness, but the truth is that anything can happen, and does. Including the common cold.
So I’m sitting at home in my pajamas breathing through my mouth (the nose has closed shop for a few days) and working on Operation “Kill Paper”, while Eleanor and Emma are taking the opportunity to do the laundry, pick up our forwarded mail, and buy cold-related supplies for me (extra tissues, various medications for the symptoms). If they could find a full-body condom to wrap me in so they don’t get the virus I think they’d buy that too.
But we’re all making lemonade out of it as best we can. Eleanor met a women with five kids at the laundromat, and discovered through that connection that some museums at Balboa Park are free on Tuesdays. The specific museums offered for free change every week. So she dropped off a few things here and then whisked off to have fun at all the places I’d like to go: the Automotive Museum, the Aerospace Museum, etc.
Meanwhile, back at camp I was pleased to receive a blog reader by the name of Byron, who turned out to be a charming fellow who is currently doing a motorhome restoration. He didn’t mind that I am a dripping, coughing mess today — and he invited us over to his canyon home in San Diego. If I am more pleasant to be around by Thursday we will definitely drop in for a visit. That’s the best way to get to know an area, in my opinion. Thanks for cheering me up, Byron!
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Operation “Kill Paper”
I went to bed last night knowing I was getting a cold — again — and today when I woke up, there it was, in my head, telling me I wasn’t going to the museums or the Old Town or the state Historic Park today.
But that’s OK. We all needed a quiet day. E & E parked themselves at the dinette and worked on their various projects (drawing for Emma, and writing a Christmas letter for Eleanor), while I cleaned up old email correspondence using my laptop in bed.
At 1:30 pm we had to move the Airstream to another site. When we arrived at Sweetwater Summit, our site couldn’t be booked for the whole week. We knew that on Monday we’d have to hitch up and go 100 feet to a different one. Not a problem either, since it was time to dump the tanks. By 2:30 we were done and set up in the new site, and the sun was shining, my head was feeling better, and it was time to launch Operation Kill Paper.
We headed out to Circuit City and bought a Canoscan LiDE 60, which is a $80 scanner. It’s slim and lightweight, perfect for RV life. With it, I plan to eliminate all the folders of paper which currently occupy two large file boxes in the back of the truck.
If you only use your Airstream for recreation, you don’t have this problem. But I have to travel with an entire office all the time. It’s amazing that I can operate a magazine with only two boxes of paper (everything else is digital), but I’m not satisfied yet. Those last two boxes have been a persistent thorn in our sides. They don’t fit in the trailer well. They take up too much space in the truck. And 99% of the time, we don’t need them. It’s just stuff we are carting around “just in case”, like receipts, paid invoices, tax records, documentation, etc.
Well, my photos are digital. My writing is digital. My music is digital. And it all fits on a backup hard drive only about 6 inches long by 3.5 inches wide. So why am I carting around two big boxes just for a some paper documents I hardly ever need?
Let Operation “Kill Paper” begin! I just put the paper into the scanner, press one button, and it turns into electrons in about 10 seconds. Then the paper goes in the shredder. Ahh, the joy of eliminating unneeded stuff!
This week, while I am sick with a cold and have not a lot of other work to do, I am going to scan as much old paper into PDF format as I can. Not only will it save a ton of valuable space (and full-timing with a family, every cubic inch counts), but the resulting files are searchable, so I can find documents much more quickly than I could before. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Tonight Eleanor is making the pork roast. I can smell it even with a stuffy nose and it smells wonderful. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be feeling better and we’ll go out. But if not, I’m going to send E & E out and I’ll stay here and scan to my heart’s content.
Christmas Day at the San Diego Zoo
We’ve had a very nice Christmas (for the second time this year!)
Last night Eleanor made the Christmas eve dinner I talked about the other day. I grilled the steak outside since the weather was fairly warm (about 58-60 last night), and Emma and I played a little “flashlight tag” in the dark, while Eleanor prepped the rest of the meal. The steak came out perfectly. We met up inside around 7 pm and had a fabulous meal. The plantains were included mostly because Emma saw them in the grocery store and was wondering what they were. They were delicious, pressed, fried, and seasoned.
After dinner we watched “Dr Doolittle 2”, put all the Christmas presents under the “tree” (our rosemary bush), left out cookies and carrot sticks for Santa and the reindeer, and cajoled Emma into bed. Santa arrived later with a few additional presents.
It is perhaps the oddest Christmas we have ever spent. 3000 miles from home, in a warm climate, in an Airstream trailer, sitting atop a hill in the arid hills above San Diego, but it was also an excellent Christmas. The little things that make holidays great were all there: each other, good times and good food, calls from friends and family, and a feeling of well-being. So it didn’t feel odd, it felt fine.
Emma would like you to know that she got everything she asked for: a unicorn, a tin whistle, and a seahorse. She also got a few other goodies. Mommy & Daddy got some books, edible treats, and DVDs.
But mostly what we got was a nice day. It turned out that the San Diego Zoo is open on Christmas, so after pancakes we spent a very nice day among the birds and animals. If you have never been to the San Diego Zoo, let me recommend it. I am not a big fan of zoos, but this one is a day well spent. I will have some pictures on the Flickr photo album later tonight.
We’re back now, and worn out, so we have decided to eat leftovers from last night and save the pork roast for tomorrow. No need to push it — we’ll just let the holiday go an extra day!
Quick Answers and our Christmas Menu
It’s Christmas Eve and the birds are singing in the trees outside our windows.
A few people have asked questions recently, and I wanted to share the answers with all of you:
Q: How was it driving the curvy roads of Route 1?
A: Not a problem at all. The Airstream handled beautifully. Just remember to slow down in the tight curves and obey the speed limit at all times. By the way, we use the Reese Strait-Line hitch with Dual Cam. I think it is a superb hitch and it has worked very well on this large heavy trailer as well as on our previous Argosy 24.
Q: Are we re-greasing our bikes after washing them?
A: So far we have not needed to, but I expect to do that soon.
Q: How is Emma doing?
A: Very well. She has been traveling by Airstream since she was three years old, and to her this is just a normal part of life. She meets kids and adults everywhere she goes and just a few minutes after meeting a new folks she is starting games with them. She talks to her grandmother and grandfather via phone every few days, too.
Q: Can you use Google Earth for the Tour map?
A: Well, we can’t, for two reasons, but you might be able to. Google Earth requires both broadband Internet and a PC. We use Macs and we don’t have anywhere near broadband capability. Frappr works best for us. But if you want to see where we are, you can get the zip code from our Frappr map or www.usps.com, and then use Google Earth to explore the area.
Q: Will we make a book out of this trip?
A: You never know. I’d want to re-write a lot of it if I were to publish in book form. The original plan was to come out of this trip with a book on full-timing as a family. We might still do that.
Q: Where’s my free CD??
A: Would you believe it got lost in the Christmas rush? No? OK, the truth is that I haven’t mailed them yet. But I will get on that this week, I promise!
By the way, we have set up RSS syndication on this blog, which is a really cool feature. I’ve only tested it on the Firefox browser, but it may also work on Internet Explorer. On Firefox, you look for a little symbol in the bottom right corner of your browser window that looks like orange radio waves. Click this symbol and select “RSS 2.0”. This will put a bookmark on your browser.
I recommend you put the bookmark on your bookmarks toolbar so you can easily click on it. When you click on the bookmark, you’ll see a drop-down list of our latest blog entries. It will automatically update itself so you can see at a glance if we’ve posted anything new.
If anyone is running Netscape or IE on a Windows PC and figures out how it works on those platforms, let me know and I’ll post the instructions here. If you haven’t tried Firefox, I strongly recommend it. It disables pop-ups, is highly resistant to viruses, is fast, has many useful features, and it is free. It works on Mac and Windows.
Today we will probably head into town for a museum or something. Tomorrow, being Christmas, everything will be closed and so my plan is to go cycling on the many dirt trails around this park.
Last night we braved the crowds and did a little shopping, mostly for groceries. The result will be two days of fine dining courtesy of Eleanor’s culinary skills. We’ve added a few items to the menu to reflect that we are only 10 miles from Mexico now.
Today’s menu: Grilled steak with mushrooms and onions; salad of mixed baby greens with ginger dressing; corn and fried plantains; sugar cookies made by Emma, and Mexican hot chocolate.
Christmas menu: Roast pork with roasted potatoes, carrots, and pearl onions; haricot verts (French green beans) with onions and almonds; grapefruit and avocado salad with honey-lime dressing; hot apple turnovers. Who says Airstreamers never use their kitchens? 😉
We hope you are enjoying the weekend also. Happy holidays!
Sweetwater Summit County Park
We had to flee the Los Angeles area. The original plan was to head down to San Clemente for another day or even through Christmas, but we got so frustrated with driving in the incessant traffic that it felt like a better decision to head to our base in San Diego and just sit still for a while.
So, although a few people recommended Newport Dunes (pricey but substantial), Doheny State Park, San Clemente State Park, and other spots, we bailed out. Los Angeles was tough on us and the trailer. We came in with a perfect trailer and left with a new stone ding and a bent stabilizer pad (impacted an obstacle despite being fully retracted), plus the aforementioned greasy coating.
The truck wash turned out not to exist, but we did find a car wash that seemed big enough at first glance. It wasn’t. I pulled in straight but couldn’t get out going forward, so I did a quick spray of the truck and trailer, and then Eleanor stood in the middle of a side street and directed me backwards while watching for oncoming cars. We survived. The trailer isn’t sparkly clean, but at least it doesn’t leave a residue on bystanders anymore. We’ll do a proper wash later.
We’ll be here for a week.
Christmas is in two days and Emma is very excited. She and Eleanor spent much of Thursday making decorations for the trailer and the little rosemary bush. So we’re all decorated and ready for the holiday. I’ll post a few shots of the decorations they made in a new Flickr photo album soon. In the meantime, stay warm, wherever you are!
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