March 18, 2008 at 11:54 pm · Filed under Places to go
This area of southern Arizona is a hot birding spot. Although it’s a low time of year for birds, since the winter birds have gone and the summer birds aren’t here in great numbers yet, along the San Pedro River area and in the canyons of the Huachuca Mountains there are still plenty of birds to see.
Traveling around the country we’ve become more interested in birds. I never really cared much about them in the past, but now it’s fun to see the variety of species the live in North America, and to try to photograph them. To really do a good job I’d need a much longer lens than I have, but I catch a few halfway interesting shots from time to time with the 200mm zoom. Today I wasn’t trying too hard because we were just having a nice time walking along the river with the kids.
A fire near the Dragoon Mountains, north of our position, cut our hike short. The smoke began drifting to the south and put a haze in the air, as well as apparently discouraging the birds. We never found out what caused the fire but it was still burning hours later.
Seeking clearer air, we drove up Carr Canyon Road into the national forest. There are three canyon roads that lead into the Huachuca Mountains. Carr is in the middle, and undeniably the roughest. It’s a single lane of very rough dirt, riddled with potholes and twisting so tightly that even long pickups can’t make the turns without taking two passes. It’s a challenging drive, and occasionally scary, since none of the road has any sort of guardrail and the drops are intimidating.
Six miles up the road, if your kidneys survive the pounding of the seat belts, is a nice national forest campground (Reef Townsite) at 7,200 feet. But no Airstream is going to go up there, unless it is under 12 feet long. I could see coming back there to tent camp in the summer. At that altitude the temperature would be perfect, and there are a lot of very interesting-looking hiking trails.
In the photo you can see Eleanor ambushing the girls with a tiny snowball on one of the trails. There was very little snow up there, but they all managed to find some and have fun with it. In the background you can see Sierra Vista through the smoke, about 3,000 feet below us.
Brent turned on the radio in his truck and of course we heard Mexican music come through. This close to the border, it’s no surprise. Listening to it always feels fun and it put Brent in the mood for a Mexican beer, which led to Eleanor suggesting Mexican dinner at the Airstreams, which led to a shopping trip for fresh tortillas and other ingredients.
My job was to wrangle the girls (or at least keep an eye on them) while Eleanor and Brent shopped. The girls seemed to have far too much energy left in them, but that made them interesting photographic subjects, at least until I was apprehended by the management of Food City and told that the store “absolutely” did not allow photography.
That sort of thing happens regularly to me. Unless I see a sign specifically advising me that cameras are not allowed, I assume it’s up to my judgment to decide whether to bring one into a situation. Most of the time it’s perfectly OK, and other times I know better (and don’t take photos), but once in a while somebody gets bent out of shape over me taking a photo in a situation where I felt it wouldn’t be a problem. That’s one of the minor risks of photography.
Really, if you only take pictures when they are specifically approved, you’ll miss a lot of good shots. I figure if I don’t get busted by an authority figure at least 3-4 times each year, I’m probably not using my camera enough. Last time was in Hawaii in another store where I was preemptively warned not to take photos of the erotic netsukes (miniature sculptures). That was in November, so I’m fulfilling my quota of socially-incorrect photographic conduct.
We have discovered another dark side of having a home base: it’s too easy to leave things there. Not long after we headed off yesterday, Eleanor remembered she forgot her crock pot, and I realized I’d forgotten my cell phone charger. It’s a good thing we are heading back this week. I’ve started a list of things we might forget to do (or pack) so that we won’t repeat these mistakes when we leave for the summer.
March 17, 2008 at 11:56 pm · Filed under Home base, Maintenance
Back on the road!
Getting hitched up and ready to go always takes longer when you’ve been parked for a while. When we are moving every few days, our departure routine is quick and efficient. After a week of parking, it can take a couple of hours to get everything packed up, and after several weeks, it seems to take most of a day to get ready.
It would have been much easier to leave if I hadn’t had a pile of frustrating tasks to complete first. I am relocating the company’s official mailing address from Vermont to Florida (for complicated reasons having to do with mail forwarding), and this means literally dozens of phone calls to vendors. Those people have managed to make “customer service” an epithet. Of 13 vendors on my list for today, nine had dysfunctional websites that could not or would not accept my new billing information.
So I had to call again and again, wading through voice-response menus and answering security questions about “the last four digits of your social,” and “your mother’s maiden name.” It took about six hours to effect 11 vendors. The other two proved so well-defended against customers who might try to make changes to their accounts that they defeated me today. I’ll have to attack them again another day.
Vonage won the award for most irritating “customer service”. Their rep was beyond obtuse, and I finally had to threaten to close my account completely before he would make the billing plan change I requested. Sprint won the award for best defenses against hackers and customers, by instituting a new web system that required me to set up a new username (8-30 characters with a mix of letters and numbers), a new password, a new PIN, a new security question … and then provided no way to give them a new credit card for billing.
FedEx deserves an honorable mention for their incomprehensible website, which was so baffling that even their own representative could not at first tell me how to navigate it to make a simple billing change. (He figured it out after I did.) Verizon’s website became convinced that my VISA card was a Mastercard, and thus would not accept it. And so it went all day.
After six hours of this, you can see why I was eager to pack up and hit the road, and maybe chuck a few Molotov cocktails toward the call centers of certain companies. It was not the most inspiring day, and the rather uncharacteristic weather we had today (occasional rain and temperatures in the 40s) didn’t help. But I went out and hitched up anyway.
I’m always suspicious when we’ve been parked for a long time. Everything gets a more careful check, especially hitch, tires, and brakes. Scanning the tires, I noticed one had a definite thin patch in the tread. This is a sign that a belt inside the tire has broken. The broken belt allows the tire to bulge, and that causes uneven wear.
This not the sort of thing you want to ride on for long, so even though we were eager to get going, I called a local tire shop and verified they had a replacement tire (the Airstream takes ST225/75R15 tires), and that they could handle a 30-foot trailer coming into their parking lot. Assured on both counts, we headed over to the nearby “Big O” tire shop.
After a 40-minute wait, the tech came over and said, “The tire is still on the trailer? I’m not allowed to take a wheel off a trailer.”
Huh. And here I thought I was at a tire shop. So we got the manager over and he explained first that “We don’t have a jack big enough for a trailer like that.” I pointed to the hydraulic jack sitting nearby and said, “That one will do just fine.”
“No,” the manager said, “that one is only rated for 10,000 pounds.” Well, the Airstream’s max weight is 8,400 lbs. Once I clarified that, the manager told me that it was a “liability issue” and that he had to protect the technician. The trailer might fall off the jack and smush him, you see.
I refrained from pointing out that the trailer was unlikely to topple over, that it was hitched to the Armada with the parking brake set, that we can chock the wheels, and that it has a spare axle which makes it impossible to “fall”. But I did point out that I had called in advance to verify they could do this job and was told they could. That got me nowhere.
So I volunteered to do it myself. Nope, still not good enough. Liability again. I finally clarified, “I’ll use my own equipment.” And finally the manager said, “I have no problem with that.”
Well, that’s a relief. I was allowed to remove my own wheel with my own tools, and roll it over to the service bay, whereupon they removed and remounted a new tire, balanced it, and returned it to me for $150 in total. (That’s no bargain.) I mounted it back on, using my torque wrench, and fled. So I can’t recommend Big O Tire to anyone with a trailer.
Once on the road, the whole rig felt perfect. It was like putting on a worn old baseball glove. The trailer towed as beautifully as ever, the road was smooth and the short 60-mile drive (now at sunset) was scenic. I haven’t driven the Armada or towed the Airstream since early January, but it was still as easy as ever.
Our trailer is now a tire test lab. As the original tires (Goodyear Marathons) have been replaced, either due to wear or failure, I seem to always end up with a different brand. In Idaho when we lost a wheel in the summer of 2006, I bought a Trailer King because that’s all that was available. I was wondering about it at first, but it’s still on the trailer and seems to be wearing very well. In December 2006 we replaced two of the worn-out Marathons with two new Marathons. In Oregon last October we bought a TowMax from Les Schwab. Now in Arizona we have replaced one of the Marathons with a Green Ball tire. This means that we have four different brands on the trailer, counting the one Goodyear Marathon still on the trailer.
Of the seven Goodyear Marathons we’ve owned, two have had belt failure, two have worn out, one suffered an irreparable flat, one was destroyed when the wheel came off, and one is still on the trailer. I’m not happy with the loss of two tires from belt failure, but until I wear out a few of the other brands without similar failure, I’m not ready to cast aspersions on Goodyear alone. Another year on the road will be a good test.
Having taken a wheel off means I’ve got to check the lug nuts periodically, but again I’m so used to that routine that it’s really no big deal at all. Whenever a wheel is removed we check the lug nuts at 10, 25, 50, and 100 miles. When in doubt, check ’em again — it only takes a minute.
UPDATE: Here’s a link to a very good article about trailer tires and why they fail.
Tonight we are in Huachuca City, AZ, near Sierra Vista. We are parked directly beside an identical 30-foot Safari bunkhouse owned by our friend Brent. Tonight Brent made corned beef and cabbage for all of us (in honor of St Patrick’s Day) and we unwound at his place for the evening. I’ve still got work to do this week, but I’ll keep it to a minimum in order to enjoy the little break. I definitely won’t be calling any more “customer service” departments.
March 16, 2008 at 7:06 pm · Filed under Home base, Travel / lifestyle musings
This morning we dropped off our houseguest, Christine, at a friend’s to go horse riding. All around Tucson there are pockets of “horse country,” where you can show up with your horse trailer and RV, park for a few months, and ride all winter long.
These places are basically spacious campgrounds in the country with horse boarding. The place we visited this morning is called Spirit Dog Ranch. It sits in a shallow valley near the base of the Santa Catalinas in Oro Valley, bordering Catalina State Park. We watched the horses playing for a few minutes, then headed out to do a little shopping.
Based on suggestions from blog readers, I bought a sacrificial anode rod for the water heater. As full-timers, it probably would have been a good idea to get one two years ago, but better late than never. The version I bought incorporates a quick-drain, useful for easy winterizing.
Our travels will resume tomorrow, at least for a short time. We are heading to Sierra Vista for a few days, just to blow the cobwebs off the trailer. Officially, our purpose is to do some birdwatching and hiking, but in reality we’re just getting out of town to avoid sitting around another week waiting for the countertops to show up.
Having been stopped since January, when I got back from Quartzsite, it’s interesting to experience the pre-trip excitement. I’ve been talking to Brent, who we are joining in Sierra Vista, every few days to “prepare” for the trip. There really isn’t that much preparation needed, but when you are looking forward to a trip, the preparation can be half the fun.
We have always anticipated each new phase of our trip, and every major stop, but of course there’s more contrast when you are parked and waiting to go. This trip is a mere 60 miles, less than we drove today to go shopping, but it has become a major event in our otherwise-sedentary lives. It’s not the distance that matters, it’s the change of scene.
Our other anticipated travel to Sonora, MX has attracted even more attention. Our friends the Neels have been emailed every few days with reports of their preparations. They are coming from California to meet us here, and then head across the border with us, around the 29th. Today’s email from David reported the status of his tires, wheel bearings, propane, insurance, family health, and iPod.
I also heard from Adam today. He and Susan are up in Maine, feverishly working to escape the damp, snowy, northeast and join us here for the Mexico trip as well. His reports are like David’s, and every few days I get an update on the progress.
I like getting the progress reports from my friends. It shows that they, too, are excited to travel. People who get excited about travel are the sort of people we like to travel with. There is no doubt we will have a superb time because of our friends, and that’s the best type of trip to be anticipating.
March 14, 2008 at 11:52 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
I cannot imagine a more frustrating subject than that of health care for full-time travelers. How do you make sure you are covered, if a problem crops up while you are on the road? It is one of those questions that has no good answer.
I have spoken to dozens of people about this, and numerous full-timers, and it is clear there is no “magic bullet” solution. Most of my retired traveling friends have government- or corporate-sponsored retirement health plans, so they don’t worry about it. Others are carrying over their health insurance from their last jobs, under the COBRA act. Some are covered under a spouse’s plan. But quite a few are “bare” — meaning they have no insurance at all, or inadequate insurance.
We fall in the last category: our coverage is really inadequate. For everything except emergencies, we have to go back to Vermont. When Eleanor had a major migraine episode two years ago, we paid cash for medical care in Tampa, then flew her to Vermont for follow-up. Obviously that’s far from ideal.
For those who do have health insurance, when I ask what happens if they get sick while far from home, most don’t know. They aren’t sure if their health insurance covers them out-of-state, and if so, for how long. Emergencies only? Follow-up visits? Full reimbursement, or just partial? When I ask, I usually get a blank look.
Most people aren’t sure if they are covered in while traveling in Canada or Mexico. They don’t know if they will have to pay up-front and fight for reimbursement later. They don’t know how to get a doctor referral in a strange town.
And even if you know all those answers … can you afford health insurance without an employer to pay most of the premium?
I hate to dry up the blog with a subject like this, but it’s a huge problem — for us, and for many others. We are at the intersection of two negative factors: we are full-time travelers, and I am self-employed. That means we need coverage that goes everywhere in the USA, and we need something that is affordable. But in the US, you can have a nationwide network of doctors, affordable prices, or good reimbursement for your expenses — pick any two.
The current presidential campaign certainly has brought up the issue of health care cost and availability, but I am not filled with hope that any of the candidates will be effective at doing something about it. The problem is huge. It seems likely that for the foreseeable future I’ll be responsible for paying for the health care of my family.
On the plus side, we have small advantages. We can become residents of a state where there are more healthcare insurance options. As my own employer, I can institute any health plan that is available to us. A lot of people are going to partially self-insured plans, or “consumer directed coverage” such as a Health Savings Account (HSA). That may be an option for us.
But in the current health care environment, any solution is complex, filled with little “gotchas” and highly individualized. What works for us may not work for you. So when people innocently ask me, “What do you do about health care on the road?” I can only sigh … because I know any answer I give will probably not be useful.
Status report: Little things are happening, but still not much. Jim Breitinger (“the Airstreaming Meteorite Dealer“) is in town, and he dropped by for lunch on Wednesday. Contractor Chris has been here to work on the shower tile both Thursday and Friday, but with grout drying time and sealant, the shower won’t be available to us until next week. Still no word from the countertop guys, and we don’t expect to hear anything for a week.
We gave the grapefruit tree a major trimming yesterday. The poor thing has been badly neglected and allowed to grow in all sorts of crazy directions. I’m trying to convert it from a fluffy green bush to a real tree that can produce more than a dozen grapefruit. Now it looks like a kid with a new military haircut. That’s the first step toward improving the backyard. Up to now it has been just a dumping ground for the contractors. It’s basically made up of weeds, cut-off bits of tile & slate, and junk. Rather than try to fix it up, we’re going to leave it looking like a back alley this summer. It’s a project for another day.But I will at least make sure the old toilet, junk plywood, scum-encrusted shower doors, and garbage cans are cleaned up before we go.
I’m thinking about stuff like that because our departure is looming in a serious way now. Time to start on the checklist of items: set up house-watching, clean up the junk, clear out the refrigerator and freezer, re-pack the Airstream, pump up the tires and lube the hitch, etc. The list is not long and that’s a good thing, because we bought this house with the intent of having it be easy to live in, and easy to leave.
March 11, 2008 at 10:01 pm · Filed under Home base
With me posting only every other day instead of daily, you might expect each post to be twice as good. But that’s like crossing the International Date Line and expecting to have the same day you had yesterday…
I realized why I am so stymied right now. We are caught between two worlds. At one time this was a travel blog (and it will be again!), and then I promised it would become a house renovation blog. At this point it is neither, because we can’t go anywhere and yet there’s nothing happening to the house either.
This is what most people would refer to as a stable, normal lifestyle. A lot of people prefer an uneventful life: get up, go to work, come home, watch some TV, repeat ad infinitum. They like to avoid surprises, at least those of the unsettling variety. We have an opportunity for that right now. We could easily settle in here. Just enroll Emma in the local school, start attending the PTA meetings, join the local uke club, and enjoy a completely safe and reliable lifestyle in a lovely spot in suburbia.
But if this break from full-time travel has taught me anything, it is that I am not cut out for that. I may lost a few of the more prickly edges in recent years, but I am far from ready to sit still. I love where we are right now, but then, I’d love where we are going, too. I have become a travel junkie.
And it’s not just me. I suppose some people might have thought that a year or two on the road would have caused us all to “get it out of our system,” or “appreciate being home more,” but the opposite seems to have happened. Having lived in the Airstream for two years, we can’t seem to get out of it. In the house, we have a ready made bedroom, with curtains, bed, new mattress & pillows, and a pair dressers. It has a lovely view of the Santa Catalina mountains, and beautiful morning light. So why are we still sleeping in the Airstream in the carport, where there is hardly any light and much less space?
Because it is home. Eleanor logically points out that if we slept in the house, with the sinks and showers still not fully operational, we’d have to go back to the Airstream to brush our teeth at bedtime, a small nuisance. But I think a lot of people would be eager, even desperate, to get into their new house — the one they’ve owned for nearly a year, and have only slept in once. Let’s face it, what she’s really saying is the Airstream is more comfortable. That is a direct result of living in it, and loving it, for two years.
At some point, we will sleep in the house, and if we can get somebody to show up and actually install the countertops, the rest of the details will fall into place, making the house fully functional. At that point, however, it will probably be too close to our departure date. So we’ll just spent a perfunctory night or two in the house and then take off in the Airstream. Score: Airstream 362, House 3.
Absolutely nothing has happened on the house since last week. But we did receive a package of glass tile from the UPS truck on Monday. (Mail deliveries are a big part of our daily excitement these days. Emma loves to run out and catch the mail truck, hoping for letters or magazines addressed to her.)
The box of tile means that when Contractor Chris has a chance, he will be able to finish the hall shower. Since we are expecting a house guest on Thursday, who will be sleeping in the house, a working shower would be appreciated as soon as possible.
Come to think of it, when we leave Tucson, our guest Christine, and our previous guest Brett, will both have slept in our house many more times than we will have. Perhaps that is why we bought it: guest quarters!
This fall our friend Doug Keister will be releasing his new book, “Teardrops and Tiny Trailers.” He’s the guy who wrote “Mobile Mansions,” “Silver Palaces,” and “Ready to Roll,” all books about vintage trailers and RVs. I think we have them all. Doug offers signed copies of his books if you know the right people.
Fortunately by reading this blog, you do. If you care to buy any of his books and want a signed copy and want to support this blog, use this link to buy books from Doug Keister. Right now only Mobile Mansions and Silver Palaces are available as signed copies, but I’ll post a reminder on the blog when “Teardrops and Tiny Trailers” comes out. Using the special link above means I get a small kickback on the book sales.
Uke song of the day: “The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea” as performed by George Harrison. This is a fun one, but it requires the somewhat tricky E chord, which I haven’t mastered yet. Chord tabs here.
March 9, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Home base
I’ve decided to put you all on half-rations for a while. I’m going to give the blog a rest, and post only every other day this week.
There are two primary reasons for this.
- After over 900 nearly consecutive blog entries, I think I’ve earned a vacation for a bit.
- Let’s face it, our life is just not very interesting right now, even to me.
The past few weeks I’ve been struggling to tell you something, anything, interesting that relates to Airstream travel. But I’m getting tired of hearing myself re-hash old themes: planning the next trip, maintenance on the Airstream, travel philosophy, budgeting, etc. I have to face reality: right now we are just sitting here and waiting for a chance to run away.
And while we are sitting here, our lives look a lot like everyone else’s. We brush our teeth in the morning. We work and go to school. We buy groceries and take out the trash. We pay the bills and work on the house. Except for the fact that we still live in the driveway in an Airstream, our lives are hardly distinguishable from the other people living on this street.
This will change in a week, when we have a trip to southern Arizona planned with our friend Brent and his daughter Kendal. And in three weeks we’ll head out again, this time to Sonora with our friends David, Ariadna, and their son William. A couple of days after that, we’ll start trekking east through NM, TX, LA, MS, and FL. But right now, we’re parked and there just isn’t a whole lot to be said about it.
This is a good thing, really. It’s time for a little vacation. Since I began working from home in 1993 as a self-employed person, I have tried to take full advantage of the opportunities for vacation that self-employment can offer. Most of the time working for yourself is rough. As my friend Steve Bertocci used to say, “Working for yourself is hard because the boss is a bastard.” It’s true. Like most successful self-employed people, I work much longer and harder than I ever did when I was working for other people.
But I’ve learned that if you are willing to work hard when the job calls for it, you should be ready to vacation whenever you get the chance. In other words, when things quiet down unexpectedly and you’ve got a dull afternoon, just leave the office. Don’t sit around filling the hours browsing the web or playing Solitaire. Get out and have fun, because there will come another day when you are locked in the office for 15 hours straight.
It all balances out in the end. So the signs are telling me to take a vacation this week (from the blog, but not from the day job, sadly), and enjoy it, because soon we’ll be back on the road and I’ll hopefully have more blog material than I can handle. In the meantime, hang in there. I’ll blog every other day this week and resume the daily blog as soon as events warrant, probably next Monday.
March 8, 2008 at 11:07 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
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:
———————-
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
————————-
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.
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