April 2, 2007 at 9:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
The people here in Tucson have been making ominous comments about the hot weather that is coming. I’m hearing things like, “Yeah, it’s beautiful today. Better enjoy it while it lasts.” Heat is coming and people are already recoiling from it like northerners do when winter is coming.
Personally I like it. When its in the 80s and above (as it will be all week here), it’s perfect weather for the pool. So we are going every day in the late afternoon, when work is done. With a light breeze it’s even better: step out of the water dripping and in no time you’re dry, thanks to the low humidity.
The best thing about the southwestern climate is that you can change it anytime you want. In the east, weather is mostly a matter of latitude, but here weather is determined by altitude. One terrifically hot day we will drive up into the Santa Catalinas and experience the change of temperature just for fun. They’re still getting snow up there, just 25 miles from our campsite.
We continue to wrestle with the reasons to settle down. On one hand, I’d like a view of those mountains every day, and this weekend we also found a school for Emma that we really like a lot. On the other hand, we’ve got major trips in mind for later this year and as far out as 2009. I think I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: full-timing can ruin you for normal life. We may spend the next few years trying to recover.
As the saying goes, “Why be normal?” It may be that we are destined to have a hybrid lifestyle forever. We just have to figure out how it’s supposed to work. I suppose this is one of those leaps of faith I talked about a few days ago. We’ll take a chance with a residence here in Tucson and figure the rest out as we go along …
But not right away. We’ll be leaving this area in a few weeks and resuming travels. With school schedules looming next fall or winter, it seems like we should take the opportunity to visit as many of the national parks in the Four Corners region as we can. The month of May might be our last good chance for a while. This summer is booked with northeastern stuff, and this fall we have a tentative plan for September & October, if all goes well. I’ll update you on that when it firms up.
April 1, 2007 at 10:42 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
I was re-reading some entries from the Vintage Thunder blog we used to do, researching a few things, and found an entry from September 11, 2005. The entry had to do with a comment from a friend who wanted to hear about our experiences with a new trailer. At the time we hadn’t yet taken delivery of our new 2005 Airstream Safari and I was as curious as he was about how well it would hold up. Both of us had heard all kinds of horror stories about new trailers not having the “quality” of old ones.
In part, I wrote: “I don’t expect a perfect product. I do expect a product that works as advertised. I expect Airstream will stand behind it when there is a real problem. And yes, if we need service along the way, I’ll blog it and talk about what we had done. You can decide for yourself if Airstream QC and Service up to snuff, based on our experience.”
Well, we’ve been on the road for 18 months, full-time. We’ve towed this trailer nearly 40,000 miles, crossing the country five times from coast to coast. Every sort of road condition you can imagine, we’ve driven (except snow). It’s been “rode hard and put away wet”, pounded by washboard roads and putholes, and yet not a rivet has loosened.
Yes, there have been problems, but they have been mostly minor: a balky water heater, some loose trim, a couple of latches, a bad kitchen faucet, etc. All were fixed under warranty. The leaky front compartment was probably the worst problem we’ve encountered; It seems to be a design issue specific to the Safari 30 bunkhouse. Overall, I’m favorably impressed.
This probably means more to people who knew us when we traveled in our 1968 Airstream Caravel and 1977 Argosy 24. We were “vintage snobs” then, and didn’t trust new trailers because we’d never owned one. The feeling among vintage owners is often that new trailers “aren’t built as well,” and “could never survive the kind of trips they did in the old days.”
Now that we’ve had a new one, I can honestly say that the rumor of new trailers not being up to snuff is, at least from our experience, not true. Ours has been well-used from Maine to Mexico, from Glacier to the Keys, and shows every indication of being ready to keep on going steady for many years yet. The method of manufacture and materials have changed over the years, but in the final analysis our new Airstream still has that sturdy all-aluminum riveted construction that just keeps going and going …
So I’m sitting here the trailer trying to figure out why other makes tend to be ready for “trade in” five or so years after they’re made. There was an article in Good Sam’s magazine a few months back where a pair of RV experts were repeating the common wisdom that after five years you ought to be looking at trading in your rig because at that point they’ll start to fall apart and get uneconomic to maintain.
Maybe that’s true for other brands. I don’t know, I’ve never owned one. All I can say is, in five years I expect my Airstream to be just about broken in. Heck, our other Airstream is 39 years old, and I’d take that trailer to Africa tomorrow. It’s still rock solid.
Speaking of Africa, I heard from Bert Kalet today. He’s organizing the Capetown to Cairo caravan in 2009. Bert told me something rather shocking: the WBCCI leadership has refused to approve the caravan. This means it will have to run as a private caravan, without the support of the Airstream club.
On one hand, this is an opportunity. Now anyone who wants to take an Airstream on the trip can go, without having to join the club. Bert says they already have 52 couples signed up for both the north- and south-bound legs. More are welcome. We are even considering it, although I have no idea how I could possibly break away for four months by 2009.
On the other hand, it’s a really sad moment for the club. This was the club that, back in the 1950s under the leadership of Wally Byam, caravanned in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Central America, and around the world. Now the club is such a timid shadow of itself that a single African caravan is considered too much, and European caravans don’t even take Airstreams (they rent other brands locally). They’ve lost the spirit of adventure that once made the club great.
If you want to have the adventure of a lifetime in Africa, send a note to me via the Contact form on this website and I’ll send you the email addresses of the administrators who are organizing it.
March 31, 2007 at 10:33 am · Filed under Uncategorized
This afternoon we dropped in on an Airstream rally being held about 25 miles away, by the newly-formed Four Corners Unit of WBCCI. We didn’t know a single person attending, but a couple of them invited us by email anyway. Rather than move the trailer out of our current campground, we just drove over in the afternoon, and on the way we encountered the International Wildlife Museum by chance.
The museum houses an impressive collection of stuffed and/or mounted creatures, from butterflies to elephants, and everything in between. The only live creature we spotted was a tarantula; Everything else is a creation of taxidermy or model-making. It’s a lot of dead critters but the presentation is good and well worth the $7 admission. The only part that we didn’t linger over was the extensive presentation of scat from dozens of different animals … each specimen extremely life-like and fresh-looking.
After the museum we cruised over to check out the Airstreams. Not bringing the trailer turned out to be a missed opportunity, because the rally was being held at the beautiful Gilbert Ray Campground in a county park. The views at Gilbert Ray are panoramic, and from many campsites on Loop C we could see the observatories of Kitt Peak to the south as well as the Tucson Mountains to the north. It’s a sweet spot to go camping, especially with the skies as crystal-clear as they have become.
Even though we didn’t know anyone, it took only about a minute to meet Brent and Tiffany, the hosts of this event, and then we were quickly introduced to the rest of the crowd. Although we planned to stay only a few minutes to say hello, they dragged into the potluck dinner, Emma hooked up with another little girl, and then there were tours of people’s trailers, and it ended up being about 8 p.m. before we finally said goodnight.
Most of the rigs at the rally were new ones, but we did spot an immaculate 1989 Airstream Land Yacht “Squarestream” and get a quick tour of it. The Squarestreams may be regarded as “not true Airstreams” by some but I think they are a fascinating part of Airstream history and fun to have at any rally.
Had we towed our Airstream over we’d probably still be sitting up with some of the folks, talking and making some new friendships. As it was, we got invited to a couple of other events, including the Albuquerque Balloon Festival in October, and we’ll probably go to one thing or another. The balloon fest sounds ideal — we get to park on a hill overlooking the launch site and watch balloons flying around for days. I’ll have to reserve that soon.
March 30, 2007 at 11:02 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
My friend Brett had a t-shirt made for me a few weeks ago, which I picked up at General Delivery, Borrego Springs CA. It has a stick-figure drawing of a person at a computer and the slogan, “Time to make the blog”. That’s me every night. I’m like the Dunkin’ Donuts guy who has to get up at 4 a.m. to make the doughnuts, every day.
(I like “making the blog” but it is a chore many times and there are a lot of times I wish I could just go to bed and forget about it. But you, the dedicated reader, make it all worthwhile.)
However, the t-shirt joins an alarmingly fast-growing pile of t-shirts which I have been given in the course of this trip. I now have an entire tub full of nothing but t-shirts beneath the bed. Every single one is a great memory — the initiation ceremony with the Dixie Campers, the weekend at Ft Wilderness with Trailerworks, visiting the Airstream factory, etc. But my limited wardrobe space means that the heap must be culled down periodically.
Perhaps this is the true reason we need to buy a house. I could decorate the den with framed shirts commemorating stops on our trip. Forget the “home base” discussion, and school for Emma — we just need a hangar for all the souvenirs we’ve accumulated!
Of course, the shirts are only one example. We’ve also managed to collect a rather substantial pile of rocks, and amazingly, fish sculptures. We never set out to collect sculptures of fish, and yet we have three so far: two of glass and one of pink gypsum. All have been spontaneously given to Emma, and all of them are substantially heavy. Needless to say I never expected fish sculptures to be one of the major outcomes of traveling full-time for 18 months, but here they are.
As I’ve mentioned, we periodically off-load excess items to our storage unit in Vermont. The problem is that some day we’ll come back to that storage unit and have to deal, somehow, with all the souvenirs. When I think about getting a house, I think about that storage unit and the many mysteries contained within it, and I have an involuntary shudder. There are boxes in there that we still do not fully comprehend, secrets of our former life that we have long since forgotten. It’s like an ancient Egyptian tomb filled with artifacts for the afterlife, except we have to deal with them while we’re still alive.
I can see what might happen. We’ll find a house here in the southwest, and call for all the stuff in storage to be put on a moving truck. Thousands of miles and thousands of dollars later, the truck will drop off a hundred cardboard boxes, and we’ll sort through them, only to find 572 assorted t-shirts, 200 pounds of rocks, and three fish sculptures. It will make for an interesting decorating theme.
March 29, 2007 at 8:57 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Tucson is one of the nation’s best cities for bicycling. Great weather all winter long, generally flattish trails, plenty of scenery and lots of bicycle-friendly areas. We grabbed the two folding Birdy bikes and Emma’s $39 Wal-Mart special, to take Emma on her first bike path ride ever.
The trail we chose today runs along both sides of the Santa Cruz River near downtown Tucson. The Santa Cruz, like all the riverbeds in this area, is dry most of the year. The scenery varies from bad to great. Our starting point was at 29th St near the Pima County prison, so the view started with razor wire and guys playing basketball in orange jumpsuits. But it quickly got better, with a nice view of A Mountain, and lots of little critters along the path (ground squirrels, a large lizard, roadrunners).
The Garden of Gethsemane is a nice stop along the trail. An artist named Felix Lucero dedicated his life to sculpting religious statues, and he made a set of them from concrete with sand & rock taken from the Santa Cruz river bed in 1945. The statues are in rough shape from weathering, floods, vandalism and other attacks, but undergoing restoration. Their present location is a lush garden inside a tall iron fence, free to the public.
Emma’s first major bicycling outing was a success. Yes, she managed to stop every 300 feet for one thing or another. Everything got her attention and called for a pause in the action: birds, dogs, amusing signs, itches, wedgies, plus multiple stops for water and snacks. But at the end of about five miles she was still lively and said, “That was awesome!” when we pulled into the parking lot. I expect we’ll be doing a lot more cycling as a family in the near future.
This trail is officially part of Tucson’s linear Santa Cruz River Park, and is also part of the historic Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail. We last encountered the story of de Anza when we were at Channel Island National Park in California over a year ago. His voyage to scout land for the Spanish crown is an incredible story, ranging from present-day San Francisco south well into Mexico. I would like to find a good book on that tale next time I’m prowling through a NPS bookstore.
March 28, 2007 at 9:22 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Our days seem progressively more ordinary as we sit here without moving. The adventures have been limited. Today, a haircut, some groceries, drop off a disc at Blockbuster, check out the local Thai restaurant, work, work, work … all very suburban and completely at odds with what we’ve done for the past year and half.
Eleanor has reminded me that it was only 11 days ago that we left Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Funny, it seems like weeks to me. And here I was thinking we needed to break out this weekend for a trip …
Normally after a cold front passes through I’m used to seeing clearer skies. It has been beautiful today but the dust from yesterday’s high winds is still visible against the backdrop of the mountains. In a few days it should be settled, perhaps even as soon as tomorrow, and if there’s a chance to break away from work we may take half a day to drive up to Mt Lemmon.
Sunset between the ocotillo
Another symptom of wanting to hit the road again is finding myself idly browsing the National Park Service website. Coming up on our list is Chiricahua Nationa Monument, not far southeast of here. Chiricahua is at higher altitude so we were waiting for the weather to warm a little more before going.
Today I noticed that the roads in the park and the park campground have a 29-foot trailer limit. Our trailer is called a 30 but in reality is 30 feet 10 inches long, so we can’t stay in the campground. But we can still visit the park. We’ll just have a few logistics to work out.
Eleanor has been reviewing schools and their schedules. Turns out that the 3-month summer vacation we remember as kids no longer exists. Now schools give a couple of weeks here and there, with school being in session nearly year-round.
Whose dumb idea was that? A schedule like that is going to cause us huge trouble, since I have a travel schedule (rallies, events, meetings) that will persist even after we stop full-timing. Will I have to go alone, thus taking us apart for weeks at a time? We’re not psyched. We’ve been together every day since Emma was born, with few exceptions, and we like it that way. This is going to take some serious consideration.
March 27, 2007 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
Arizona has an interesting range of weather. Today the forecast was for “blowing dust” due to high winds. Here, dust is a form of precipitation, like rain or snow in other parts of the world. The wind whips it off the ground and into the air where it hangs and spreads for miles.
The effect is interesting the first time. The mountains that ring the Tucson metro area grew hazy and indistinct today, and walking around we felt the delicate pelting of sand on our shins. I opened my mouth too wide while walking into the wind and found my tongue coated with dust. It’s sort of a desert equivalent of having snow flurries blowing into your face.
In the summer a “monsoon” season comes. This means thunderstorms rolling in from the west, filling all the dry riverbeds and washes with surging brown water, which disappears within a few days. All over this town there are “riverside” parks with no water, and bridges that cross nothing but rocks and sand. They come to life in the monsoon season, when Tucson goes from having very little water to more than it can handle.
We have resolved to slow down on the house-hunting. In the past week it has been consuming every spare moment. Now that we’re getting up to speed on the local market and neighborhoods, we’re feeling like we should slow down and put more of our spare time into exploring the attractions of southern Arizona. There’s still so much more for us to see and do in this area.
Today is Eleanor’s 23rd birthday. Ooops, that’s a typo. Well, you know what I mean.
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