October 27, 2006 at 8:36 am · Filed under FAQs
As we were leaving Virginia Beach I was tempted once again by a local “RV/Truck Wash” place, and once again I regretted even trying it.
Towing in urban areas and down Interstate highways eventually results in a brownish oily film on the Airstream which will not rinse off in the rain. When it gets to the point that we don’t even want to touch the trailer, it’s time for a wash.
But not just any wash. There are only two good ways I’ve found to get an Airstream clean: (1) Hand wash with sponges (we use a microfiber towel to wipe it down after the sponge); (2) Take it to a Blue Beacon truck wash.
The local do-it-yourself washes have never worked for us, and we’ve tried many of them. If you use the brushes they supply, you will put small scratches in the clearcoat that look horrible in the sunshine. (Don’t ask me how I know that, it’s too painful. But I can tell you that wax minimizes the damage.) If you don’t use the brushes, the trailer comes out approximately as dirty as it went in no matter how many times you hit it with the high-pressure soap wand.
The other thing that annoys me about the do-it-yourself washes is that they never seem to have the proper clearance in the parking area for a big trailer like ours. So the end result of about 30 minutes and $15 in quarters at the RV/Truck wash yesterday was a dirty trailer and a few gray hairs from trying to shoehorn the trailer into the “truck” bay and then get it out again. Very disappointing.
Never again. Blue Beacon is $36 for the truck and trailer, but it’s the only wash we’ll use in the future, unless we do it ourselves. They are easy to access, they use only the wands when I ask them (not brushes), the staff have always been immensely polite, and they tolerate me standing around taking pictures and asking dumb questions. I guess they use a better grease-cutting soap than the local car washes because the trailer always comes out beautifully shiny.
We keep a little fold-up paper directory of Blue Beacon locations in our truck, and visit them about every 3-4 months. No, they didn’t pay me to give this endorsement, I just really like their service and the job they do. (But hey, if Blue Beacon management is watching, I sure wouldn’t mind a few coupons or something …)
Yesterday we managed to avoid the dozens of exhortations by “Pedro” to visit South of the Border, and scuttled right down to Florence, SC, where we are overnighting at the Cracker Barrel. The Blue Beacon was about the pinnacle of excitement all day, but we did manage to meet some other Airstreamers in the parking lot of the Food Lion grocery in Emporia VA in the morning. They’d come over from Washington state a month ago in their 2005 Airstream International CCD Bambi 19. We gave each other quick tours of our trailers before heading down I-95. It’s always fun to randomly meet people with whom we have things in common.
October 26, 2006 at 9:40 am · Filed under FAQs
Since I wrote that I was buying the 1953 Flying Cloud, I’ve received a number of comments from friends about the wisdom of my choice. A few samples:
Tim Shephard of The Vintage Airstream Podcast: Well, you have blown all hope that you were my *level headed* AS buddy.
J. Rick Cipot, contributor to Airstream Life: That is awsome! What a fantastic find. Do you get to keep all the clutter too? It looks like everything is there. This is museum quality stuff. I hate you!
Dicky Riegel, group VP of Thor: Cool trailer, and I always love seeing the California trailers with the vertical front and rear. So different from my trailer, yet still the same lineage.
Fred Coldwell, vintage Airstream historian: …check closely around both wheel wells even if you have to move a bunch of junk to see back there …. and check the frame outriggers at each end of each wheel well for rust and some disintegration. Good luck!
You get the idea. Everyone has a different perspective on it, but in the end we are all Airstream nuts.
Evaluating this trailer’s condition made me think about the classes of vintage trailer projects that we commonly see. Normally, people either look at trailers as “poor, fair, good, very good, excellent,” or they just look at the polish and figure it must be good if it’s shiny. I have come up with the following classification system to better rate vintage projects:
Parts trailer: Less than 30% of the trailer remains in restorable condition. A few random parts are usable. Body is heavily damaged. Appliances, furniture, running gear and accessories mostly damaged beyond economic repair or missing. OR, body severely damaged (as in an accident) and only interior parts remain.
Shell: Like the parts trailer, the parts are gone. But the body is very good. Use it as the basis for a custom trailer project (as in Project Vintage Lightning). Plan on expending serious money, since you’re building a new trailer with this type of project.
Refurbishment trailer: Body is lightly to moderately damaged, but 30-70% of the major components need replacement. Floor rot is present. This is the most common vintage project trailer I see, ideal for the “makeover” type of refurbishment, where the interior modified with modern parts and/or new floorplan.
Restoration trailer: Light damage is acceptable to all components, but less than 30% is destroyed, missing, heavily modified, or in need of replacement. There may be limited floor rot but leaks have not severely damaged the furniture. These trailers are fairly rare, especially in the 1950s and early 60s, since few have managed to last through the decades without major accidents or leaks. These are great candidates to be brought back to original condition.
Survivor: The rarest type of trailer. These need less than 20% of their parts refurbished. Few owner modifications have been done. Nearly all of the components are in good condition and need only light clean-up or maintenance. These are excellent candidates for museum pieces, but usually only can be found when the trailer has been stored out of the weather for many years, or in a dry climate.
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The 1953 Flying Cloud I bought falls somewhere in the upper end of the “restoration trailer” category. It’s about 90% original but one piece of furniture is missing and it has known floor rot. All of the appliances are there but all need clean-up and maintenance. The body has several owner modifications which need to be un-done, and there are several body panels which require replacement.
The classification system above refers only to trailers in “as found” condition. Trailers that have been “restored” by a modern owner need their own classification system, because there are a wide range of restorations going on. I’ll talk about those tomorrow.
Today we are heading out to I-95 for what may be a dull day of driving. But we’re in search of warmer weather, and no doubt some small adventures will come our way today!
October 25, 2006 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We’ve made a change in plans. While it’s very pretty here in the state park, and the beach is nice, we are well past the beach season. So instead of taking the coastal route down the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and slowly exploring the seaside, we are going to head for Florida.
Rushing ahead to Florida means a couple of days in the car, which we wanted to avoid. But the cold, windy, and occasionally rainy weather we are expecting in the next few days makes even the prospect of a couple of days on I-95 somewhat appealing. We’ll have a longer stay in Florida than we had planned, instead.
Our scammer has written back to Ayres. He didn’t comment on the check having a bad routing number, but he promised to send another check in the next week. It’s obvious now that as long as he thinks he can steal $1800 from a dumb American, he’s going to keep pursuing this scam. Any gullible person who falls into the clutches of one of these people will be robbed, without the slightest remorse.
October 25, 2006 at 8:31 am · Filed under Places to go
Well, not quite as much progress as I expected yesterday, but in keeping with our new “go slower” philosophy, that’s OK.
Before we even left Onley I got a couple of calls with urgent business that mandated me finding an Internet connection right away. Sprint had no coverage at the house, so we pulled out and started war-driving. That means Eleanor had the laptop open while I drove, and when we spotted a likely location for open wi-fi, I slowed down while she monitored signal strengths.
Eventually we settled at the clam shack (mentioned in my previous post). Unfortunately, there were programming problems on some of our new back-office software and other delays that kept me there for hours, working with our programmer in California. Eleanor said she didn’t mind and Emma stayed busy, so I sat until I got as much done as I could, and then we headed out again. At that point it was nearly 4 pm, so our plan to drive to Kitty Hawk NC yesterday was blown.
We decided to just cross the bay and then camp in Virginia Beach at First Landing State Park, where we are now. This shorter trip gave us time to enjoy the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, which is really amazing. Driving it with an Airstream is no big deal, except that the winds were blowing fiercely today. Our rig handles very well with a cross wind, fortunately. I have to give the Hensley hitch most of the credit for that.
The route goes like this: bridge – natural island – bridge – tunnel – bridge – tunnel -bridge. It’s about 17.6 miles in total.
Looking from one island to the next. Between is one of the two tunnels.
We stopped on one of the man-made islands that connect the tunnels and bridges for a few photos, but the wind was unbelievable. The Airstream was getting hit broadside and rocking like the top car on a Ferris wheel. I would have been tempted to park overnight with stabilizers down, just for the experience, but parking is limited to 7 a.m. -7 p.m.
The trailer got coated with salt spray even this far from the water!
I’ve got business calls all day today, so we’ll be parked here in the state park two nights. We are waaaay behind the schedule I thought we’d keep, but so what? Our only real deadline is to be in St Augustine FL for Halloween (so Emma has a place to trick-or-treat) and Orlando by Nov 2. Eleanor and Emma will explore the beach.
Solar-wise, we didn’t do very well yesterday. It was partly cloudy all day, and combined with the low sun angle this time of year, and my hours of work on the laptop, we netted only about 25 amp-hours in the batteries. That would be fine to extend us a bit, but not sustainable over more than a few days. It doesn’t matter today because the state park has electric, but in the future it seems we need to get our furnace use under control.
I’m thinking we will need to install a catalytic heater, which uses no electricity. I’ve owned two of them (in our Caravel and in Vintage Thunder) and they are great. The only problem is finding the right place to mount it.
Finally, a shameless promotion. Check out this video on YouTube.com, entitled ” ‘Dog’ Sledding”. It comes from my brother’s company that makes the Hammerhead sled. (I co-founded the company with him in 2003.)
The sled has been picked up by Hammacher-Schlemmer, LL Bean, REI, and many others but still nobody seems to know about it. So he made a video of the Hammerhead in action, which is pretty fun to watch. Check it out if you’ve got broadband. We’d like to sell more sleds this Christmas!
October 24, 2006 at 1:04 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
From the congested and complex highways surrounding our nation’s capitol, the road has given way gradually to the smooth and quiet Route 13, which beelines down the Delmarva peninsula. Escaping the frantic and seemingly endless suburbia of the Baltimore-Washington corridor has also yielded other benefits: the road is more scenic, we are less tense about driving, and gas prices are lower. Yesterday we filled up for $1.98, the lowest price we’ve paid since we started our Tour in October 2005.
In short, while we’ve all loved the visiting we’ve done over the past weeks, it’s nice to be out in the more rural areas on our own again. Now the little things feel like adventures: the long toll bridge to the eastern shore of Maryland ($7.50 with our Airstream), passing through the small towns (every one of which has an “historic downtown”), even the indescribable stink of the Tyson and Perdue chicken processing plants further down the peninsula.
Last night we enjoyed one of those most sublime boondocking situations. We are parked behind a very old empty house in a rural part of town, bordering nothing except open fields and forests. It is wonderfully quiet here, with not a sound except the breeze in the trees and a few birds talking about the coming winter. Because the house and trees completely hide the Airstream, no one knows we are here except the owner, who lives in New Jersey, and a hunter who happened to be parked on the land when we arrived.
We are here to check out an Airstream, a rather old one that I am going to buy. It’s a 1953 Flying Cloud. The 80-year-old owner has had it stored here for 20 years, and it has not moved in at least seven or eight years. This means two things: it is still in remarkably original condition, and it is definitely going to be a challenge to get on the road again.
When we arrived I spent the last two hours of the daylight carefully photographing the trailer inside and out. It has been unfortunately modified with modern clearance lights on the outside, meaning a few holes will have to be filled with rivets later, and there is a partially crumpled rear dome, and some deep gouges along the curbside affecting the door. Other than that, the body is very nice.
Inside, it is amazingly original, including the floor, cabinetry, and kitchen. The ceiling has been repainted white (over the original Zolatone “splatter” paint), but that’s not unusual. The layout is a very unusual rear bedroom with a narrow side bath & shower arrangement that I’ve never seen before. The bath and shower are separate and only about 2 feet wide, placed longitudinally along the streetside, one in front of the other. They are separated from the bed only by curtains. The front is the typical Flying Cloud layout with a center table that folds down to create a wide-open living area.
The trailer has been used to store things, so the interior is cluttered to the point that I can barely stand inside to take photos. Every closet and cabinet is packed to the brim, making close inspection difficult. But from what I can see, the trailer is in good condition ““ for 53 years old! It will need considerable renovation to be useable, but I can see the potential.
Being the first night we haven’t been able to plug into house power in many weeks, we are now testing our solar electric system under Fall/Winter conditions. Last night we were flagrant with the power use, watching three movies (Emma watched Disney’s “Return of Jafar” and Eleanor & I used a laptop to watch “Double Indemnity,” the classic film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, then after Emma was in bed we stayed up late to watch “The Fifth Element”), using lights and water pump extensively, and running the furnace to chase off the 50-degree temperatures outside.
As a result, at 8:30 a.m. the Tri-Metric shows we have consumed an incredible 83.7 amp-hours! That’s about 1/3 of our total capacity with four batteries, and about half of our maximum useful capacity. I doubt we will be able to recover that amount of power in one day. This time of year, in the east, there are more clouds than sun. I will be satisfied with regaining about 40 amp-hours today, and even that will be a challenge.
Part of the reason is that I expect to be underground part of the day. We are only about 30 miles from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, one of the most fascinating pieces of engineering in the world. We’ll drive through that, and then come down through Virginia along a scenic parkway, and stop for a seafood dinner or lunch. With luck, we’ll end up tonight on the Outer Banks of North Carolina near Kitty Hawk. Today will be a really fun driving day.
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This blog entry is posted courtesy of The Great Machipongo Clam Shack, right along Rt 13 in Nassawadox VA (26 miles north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel). Colin Hyde tipped me off to this place. Free wi-fi in the parking lot, plenty of RV parking, and great food! I had the “lump crab cake sandwich,” Emma had steamed shrimp with apple sauce and a granola bar, and Eleanor had flounder stuffed with shrimp and crab on a sandwich roll. We also got a corn and shrimp chowder with roasted red peppers and spicy seasoning, to share. Mmmmmmm…. we’re planning to order some seafood frozen for later, too.
October 22, 2006 at 9:45 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
We took the morning slowly, to catch up with things before heading out to be tourists again. I caught up on some work items, Eleanor did the laundry, and Emma slept in until 10 a.m. At noon, we met up with Bobby, Danine, and Elisa for another trip into Washington DC. This time our goal was the Museum of Natural History, located on The Mall.
The Smithsonian visitor center
The Museum of Natural History is filled with things kids like: animals, dinosaurs, insects, colorful stones, and skeletons. So we had no trouble keeping the two girls entertained for hours.
This is our last day in the area. Tomorrow we’re heading down to Cape Charles, south of the eastern shore of Maryland. We had one last dinner with our new friends and said goodbye. But I’m sure we’ll be seeing them again, hopefully in their own Airstream next year!
October 21, 2006 at 10:34 pm · Filed under Places to go
Our trailer has been invaded by little girls lately.
These are all local girls playing with Emma in her bedroom area in the Airstream. They seem to really like the cozy little space in the back, with all of Emma’s toys, white board, the bunk bed, and her various collections. After school on Friday they all showed up and piled in. It’s interesting to see how readily kids take to the trailer. I’ve never seen a kid who didn’t love it.
I think Emma would say that a day at the zoo with another six-year-old girl is the best way to go.
It was pretty fun for us adults too. The National Zoo is, like all Smithsonian museums, free. It’s pretty good, with an extensive new exhibit area called the Asian Trail, and enough creatures to see and learn about to absorb most of a day.
For Emma, a big part of the fun was riding the Metro rail system. She doesn’t have a lot of experience with subways, since we usually avoid major cities when we travel.
The red pandas were only one of the many beautiful animals living in the zoo. I’ll be posting a new album on Flickr with many more pictures, as soon as I can get access to broadband Internet. I haven’t been able to find any wifi from the houses in this cul-de-sac! 😉
The only sour note of the Zoo is the food … I guess they make up the free admission with the food markup. A soda from the machine is $2.50. A hamburger (lacking lettuce, pickles, condiments, cheese, etc.) is $3.25. Movie theater prices.
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