October 29, 2007 at 9:33 pm · Filed under Maintenance
The Airstream is moving again. This morning we towed it about two miles over to Skipanon RV & Marine to get the dead brake actuator replaced, and all went well. Joe the service guy shoehorned himself into the bedroom floor near the closet where the actuator is installed, and removed it without personal injury. That itself was impressive to watch, because Joe is a big guy and the floor area he had to lie on was extremely cramped. As he said, “I don’t get any smaller as the day goes on.”
UPS dropped off the replacement unit around 10:30 and Joe had it wired in place within 30 minutes. The job was about 1.75 hours of labor in total, including a few minutes to swap our spare tire for the new one we bought this week. By noon we were on the road. It’s great when the plan comes together.
I have to acknowledge the behind-the-scenes contribution of David Tidmore at Roger Williams Airstream in Texas. David’s shop installed these brakes originally, and he made himself available to consult with me several times during this episode, offering advice and facilitating the replacement unit from Actibrake. That’s really great customer service.
There is one small problem remaining to be fixed. During the swap of the actuators, a tiny bit of air may have gotten into the brake lines. Skipanon doesn’t normally work on hydraulic brake systems, so they didn’t know how to bleed the lines. During testing of the system, I could tell that the brakes are not quite as aggressive as they were before, and I suspect air in the lines is the cause. The brakes are still very good and the trailer stops well, but it could be just a tiny bit better.
So we put some miles behind us and headed straight down to Eugene OR, where we can visit our friends at George M Sutton RV (an Airstream dealer). I may have them bleed the brakes tomorrow, but mostly it’s a good excuse to drop in on George and Martha Sutton and say hello. George and Martha have been major supporters of Airstream Life magazine for over two years, and we’ve parked overnight in their lot every time we’ve been in Oregon. This is the third time we’ve visited with them.
By coming down to Eugene via I-5, we’ve made a conscious decision to skip the rest of coastal Route 101. Our next major destinations are in California, and the season is getting near the end for certain places at higher elevation. After a lot of discussion over the atlas, we made the tough call: we’ll skip the rest of the coast (most of which we’ve driven before) and speed up our travels through Oregon so we can get to California sooner.
If you’ve just started reading the blog in the past few months, you may be wondering about other great destinations in Oregon that we’ll be missing. Don’t worry, we’ve been to a lot of Oregon already. For a recap, see these blog entries:
Oregon Caves National Monument
Crater Lake
Bend and Sisters, OR
Medford, OR
Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area
I’ve discovered that just a few miles from here are the Monaco and Marathon Coach factories, and both offer factory tours. Tomorrow we’re going to drop in on at least one of them, while the Airstream is being serviced.
October 28, 2007 at 7:29 pm · Filed under Places to go
I remember spending Sundays at home when we lived in a house. I always felt challenged to find something different to do on Sunday in the winter, because otherwise there would be a tedious sameness to the day and by nightfall I would be feeling as though I had spent a day pacing a jail cell.
One of the things I like about moving around more or less constantly is that when Sunday rolls around there’s usually something new to explore. I’m not one for watching football, or walking the same walk with the dog. Even in a little town like Astoria there’s a bouquet of novel things to see and do, so Emma and I headed out today while Eleanor stayed back to finalize Emma’s Halloween costume.
Astoria is sort of a tiny version of San Francisco, a town with a harbor, a long bridge, a steep hill, and lots of interesting Victorian houses. Atop the big hill is Astoria’s version of Coit Tower, called the Astoria Tower. Take a couple hundred spiral steps up to the top and you get a superb 360 degree view of town, the Columbia River, the Pacific Ocean, and the inland forests.
Down by the river there’s a long multi-use trail that follows the river and reveals the remnants of a dozen canneries, several ocean-going ships anchored (waiting for a chance to go up the ship channel to Portland), a Maritime Museum, several piers covered mostly with restaurants, and a cute rickety old wooden trolley running east and west.
We walked most of the trail, down to Pier 39, and then picked up the trolley for the ride back. You can ride as much as you want for just a buck — a bargain — and the volunteers who run it tell stories about the history of the waterfront as it rumbles and creaks along the rusty rails.
From downtown we headed over to Fort Stevens, a state park just up the road from our current campground. I’d much prefer to have camped here, but cell phones are marginal in some of the camping areas and given that we needed a lot of communication when we arrived, we opted for a safer location.
Fort Stevens is a large state park, with great bicycling trails, long stretches of beach, big dunes, good campsites, historic sites, views, and even a shipwreck. The Peter Iredale ran aground here about a century ago, and the bones of the steel ship are still embedded in the dense sand just off the beach. Stripped of just about everything and perpetually leaning hard to port, the Peter Iredale is a skeleton. People walk up, snap a picture, and walk away, but I like to look at it a while and imagine how the ship appeared in life, and imagine what it was like the day it crashed ashore.
And speaking of skeletons, Halloween is looming. When we returned to the Airstream the costume was still in process, and it will be tough for Eleanor to get it done by Wednesday, particularly if we don’t have an electric hookup on Monday or Tuesday night to run the sewing machine. We also don’t know where we’ll be for Halloween, but we are aiming at southern Oregon to meet up with another 7-year-old girl who happens to full-time in an Airstream. More on that later.
October 27, 2007 at 9:08 pm · Filed under Places to go
Just down Route 101 from Warrenton we found another little surprise, Sunset Beach State Recreation Area. Just take a westerly turn and drive until you hit the sand (just past the trailhead for the Fort to Sea Trail) then head south along hard-packed gray sand toward Seaside.
You can drive for miles along this beach. I expect in the summer it might get pretty busy, but on a chilly Saturday in October there were probably only two dozen vehicles on the sand in four or five miles.
This would be a sweet spot to park the Airstream for a day at the beach. Overnight stays aren’t allowed, but you could easily put the trailer on the sand as a private cabana. We might even do that on Monday if we get out of the RV shop early enough.
October 26, 2007 at 9:39 pm · Filed under Places to go, Roadtrips
Things are turning around. The makers of our disc brake actuator, Active Technologies, came through promptly with some good news this morning. They have a few refurbished units which match ours, and put one in a box destined for delivery to us on Monday. This is better than getting the newer unit because it will be a direct-fit replacement and thus won’t mystify the local RV repair shop quite as much.
With this happy news, we embarked fifty miles south to Tillamook. Our friend Gunny has been parked in Salem in his Airstream 25FB, patiently waiting for us to show up and visit. I was worried we’d be forced to skip past Salem by the ripples from this delay, so we invited him to meet us at the Tillamook Dairy.
The dairy is the major attraction of Tillamook. Even now, in the off-season, the parking lot is busy with hundreds of vehicles coming and going all day. The Dairy is a cheese factory, with a casual restaurant and a couple of ice cream bars inside too. You can take a self-guided tour overlooking the production lines, which is fun for people from 7 to 60-something years of age, as we proved today.
There are a couple of other tours along this stretch of Rt 101, according to Factory Tours USA. These include Pacific Oyster, just a couple of miles north of Tillamook, and The Real Oregon Gift Myrtlewood Company a bit further north. We dropped in on Pacific Oyster but there’s only an oyster shucking operation to see and the line was closed when we arrived.
Route 101 is the real star of this trip. The road rolls and sways, dipping into cedar forest and then rising far above the ocean to reveal stunning views. It’s like this all the way from here to Humboldt County in northern California.
Seaside Oregon is another little gem along this route. This town looks like just a strip mall from Route 101, but if you head west across the river at Avenue G, you’ll find the Lewis and Clark Salt Works location neatly enshrined among a neighborhood of cute little shingled cottages. Park here and walk to the water. Seaside has a large flat beach insulated from the neighborhood by a deep barrier of sea oats, and it’s really beautiful. In the early evening we found dozens of people crabbing in the low tide zone while the orange sun set cast reflections on the skim of water that still covered the sand.
Now it is starting to feel like there won’t be time to visit all the things we want to see in this area. That’s perfect. I’d much rather feel I left a spot a little too early, than feeling like I stayed too long.
October 25, 2007 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Maintenance, Travel / lifestyle musings
If you believe that all things must be scheduled and everything must fit the schedule, you may not be well suited for a full-time travel life. Likewise if your fear of the unexpected paralyzes you into inaction. To live this traveling lifestyle, I have found that we need to deal with changes in circumstance that arrive like snowflakes in January.
The brake actuator is a highly visible example but far from the only one. In the past two weeks we’ve probably had a dozen small unexpected changes to the itinerary due to weather, road closures, campground closures, mechanical problems, work considerations, and fuel prices. It’s all part of the game.
Today the news is not good. The actuator we have is a discontinued model. The replacement model is not a direct fit. It requires a new bracket and different wiring, and thus it should be installed by someone who knows something about the wiring of an Airstream. But the nearest Airstream dealer is George M Sutton RV in Eugene, about 150 miles away, which is too far for us to go without brakes.
None of the local service centers have ever seen this braking system before. The automotive shops don’t know 12v systems and the RV shops don’t know electric-hydraulic disc brake actuators. So we will have to find a way to telephonically transfer the knowledge of the original installers (Roger Williams Airstream in Weatherford TX) to the local RV shop. I’ve found a local company that is willing to attempt the task.
The other bad news is that the earliest we can get the replacement part is Monday. We were not planning to spend more than about 10 minutes here but it seems we will have plenty of opportunity to get to know the local area. We have three days to wait, and I don’t like to wait, so instead we will pretend we meant to stop in Warrenton and explore some of the local attractions.
Primarily this is the heart of Lewis and Clark country. There are no less than twelve historic sites related to the famous expedition, including the Washington state park we just left (Cape Disappointment) and the Oregon state park just up the road from here (Fort Stevens). We can’t visit them all in a three-day weekend, and Emma would go insane if I tried, but we can at least visit one or two.
There’s also a scenic drive down Rt 101 to Tillamook. We were going to do it with the Airstream, but with this delay it makes more sense to just go down for the day without the Airstream.
Just between you and me, however, I will admit that I really want to hitch up and go right now. I’d like to be at a beautiful beachside state park, which was the major goal of driving down Rt 101 through Oregon. I’d like to be heading relentlessly toward the warmer temperatures of California (even with the wildfires burning down in San Diego County). And as with last summer when the wheel came off the trailer, it’s hard to remain calm in the face of a mechanical problem that has no clear resolution at the moment. We can only trust that things will work out.
I think the Lewis and Clark historical sites will help with this. It will certainly put our current problem into perspective. Those guys in the Corps of Discovery basically floated, rode, and walked from what was (to them) the known world, into a completely foreign land of plants, animals, people, and incredible obstacles. They didn’t know when they’d be back, and they knew their chances of survival were unpredictable. The nearest analogue to that expedition today would be hopping in a space ship to Mars with a big pile of canned food.
So at those times when I feel like I’ve received a sentence to serve under “trailer arrest,” perhaps it will help to make a visit to the nearby site where the Corps stopped for a month to make salt. My worst food problem is finding a grocery that stocks those tasty maple cookies I like. Looking at it that way, things aren’t so bad after all.
October 24, 2007 at 11:59 am · Filed under Maintenance
About a year ago we had a tough series of malfunctions, starting with a balky cell phone and failed hard drive, and culminating in a wheel coming off the trailer. At the time, it seemed like an odd string of bad luck coming all at once. And now, the luck seems to be returning …
It started with a tire that was wearing badly on one edge this summer. I figured we needed an axle alignment, but that procedure (completed about a month ago at the Airstream factory) didn’t arrest the unusual wear pattern. I’ve been eyeing that tire all month. Something hasn’t been right about it. So I finally removed it this morning.
The tire issue may not have been the axle after all. Upon removal, it looks like the tire may have suffered an internal failure (broken belt?) Still, it lasted over 20,000 miles. It’s the only tire failure we’ve had in 55,000 miles of towing that hasn’t been related to a road hazard (screw, nail etc).
Swapping out a wheel for the spare isn’t all that hard. I did the task this morning and we went on our way, across the Columbia River bridge to Astoria OR. But then we had another failure, and this one was far more serious.
Coming down the circular exit ramp from the bridge, in the rain, to a stoplight, I suddenly found that I didn’t have the usual braking power. It wasn’t a great place to discover this, but I managed to stop the rig without too much trouble before the stoplight.
At the time, I thought the trailer had been skidding on the wet road. But half a mile later at a rotary, I noticed the same lack of brakes. The brake controller reported that the trailer brakes were still connected, so again I thought perhaps I was imagining it. But just to be safe, we pulled into a Fred Myer parking lot for gas and quick check.
In the parking lot, I tried the manual lever on the brake controller. This is supposed to activate the trailer brakes. Nothing. I stopped the rig and pulled out the “breakaway switch” (an emergency device to activate the brakes if the trailer becomes disconnected from the truck). No brakes.
Well, they were working when we left. I know because I test them every day when I hitch up. I made some calls to the folks who installed the disc brake system, and after about 30 minutes of diagnostic work, we determined that the hydraulic disc brake actuator has gone away. It’s a goner. It is an ex-actuator. It has gone Tango Uniform.
So we’re facing a challenge here. No brakes means no towing. I gingerly towed the trailer about two miles to a nearby RV park and plunked it down. Here we shall stay, in Warrenton OR, until I can find a place locally that is competent to replace the disc brake actuator. I’m expecting some calls on Friday that should shed some light on this, and in the meantime it seems like an opportunity to get some things done. Eleanor went out this afternoon and bought a replacement tire, and as of this writing I have completed about 11 hours at my “day job”.
This little drama isn’t over for sure. I’ll have more reports on the problem and the solution in the next couple of days. But it isn’t a crisis. We have a roof over our heads and we are still home, even without brakes. There’s a nice state park nearby and the weather is expected to be nice for the next week. We’ll just have to postpone a few things we were planning to do in Oregon until it’s all worked out … and cross our fingers that nothing else goes wrong.
Ilwaco Marina, near Cape Disappointment State Park
October 23, 2007 at 6:49 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Cape Disappointment is another great state park along the Washington coastline. It’s too bad we can’t stay. It has everything (nice campsites near the ocean, full hookups, hiking trails, great scenery, historic sites, lighthouses) except the one thing I really need right now: cell phone coverage. There’s a spot of cell phone coverage in the nearby town of Ilwaco, but I need two full days in front of my computer, not just a quick email hit.
I hate leaving a nice spot to go work somewhere else, but that’s the essential element of full-timing and working simultaneously. People are clamoring for me to get things to them, and I have a stack of paperwork a foot tall in my bag that has to be dealt with.
So off we shall go tomorrow morning, in search of a nice spot along the Oregon coastline where I can get online and there are also things for Eleanor and Emma to do. I think we’ll find it, but it may take a few tries. I’m budgeting all day to drive only about 100 miles, with stops at various campsites to see if I can find the right spot.
This afternoon the Coast Guard has been practicing rescues off the rocky bluff by North Head Lighthouse, just down the beach from us. We’ve been hearing and seeing the big orange helicopters buzzing over our site, so we took a walk down the beach to watch the show.
They’ve staged a bunch of blue-suited rescue dummies on the cliff, and the helicopters hover overhead while orange-suited specialists comes down the line like a spider in a web. Eventually the dummy is hauled up into the helicopter and then for some reason they pull a few hundred feet away and hover over the water. The helicopter’s huge blades turn the rolling waves into fog, and then they fly back to base, and another helicopter arrives.
Being here has been a nice break from the week of rain and gray that we got from Vancouver all the way down to Hoquiam WA. The towels are finally dry, and our Airstream’s batteries are recharged. I think the consensus is that the Olympic peninsula was well worth the visit, even in the off season, and we’d do it again if we had the opportunity. But on the road our practice is to look forward, and rarely backward. Now we’re thinking about Oregon and the great things it has to offer.
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