Believe it or not, a day spent on the roof of an Airstream can be kind of fun.  That is, as long as the news from roofside isn’t too bad.

We had left off yesterday with a few mysteries up above: a rain water leak and a non-functional air conditioner/heat pump.  With perfect fall weather and no rain, Sunday was the best opportunity for me to climb up onto the roof with Super Terry.

We had thought the AC problem was likely to be a control board, and in fact already had the spare part on hand.  But it wasn’t.  A few minutes after removing the shroud and firing up the unit, we noticed a burning smell and then the blower motor began to slow down.  It’s burned out.  That’s really bad news, since the motor is not designed to be replaced.  The typical “fix” is to replace the entire unit.  A quick check of prices for this combination AC/heat pump shows that it runs about $1200 plus shipping (nobody has it in stock locally).  An AC-only unit would cost about $850.  Not psyched.

Fortunately, he isn’t called Super Terry for nothing.  Just because the blower motor isn’t designed for easy replacement doesn’t mean it can’t be.  The job requires ripping up glued insulation and other bits, so it won’t be a pretty process but I expect the result will work out fine.  The real problem was that we didn’t have a spare blower motor and it was Sunday.  So, we set aside the problem until Monday and planned to extend our visit here so Super Terry can find one with his x-ray vision.

The other mystery was The Case of the Dripping Speaker.  The ceiling mounted speaker above the kitchen area was dripping rain water on Saturday.  I suspected the center Fan-Tastic Vent.  This vent has a bit of a history.  It’s original to the trailer, and I had re-caulked it 11 months ago in Florida.  At the time I couldn’t find the right caulk and eventually used some common “self-leveling RV caulk” that was sold by Camping World.  I was not happy with the stuff but it appeared to still be OK when I inspected yesterday (photo below).

Super Terry pointed me to a tube of Sikaflex 221, which is a very good polyurethane sealant, basically white Vulkem.  You know it’s great when a tiny smudge is absolutely impossible to remove from your clothing even after multiple washes. I have a pair of pants with a gray Vulkem smudge that is still pliable and sticky after several years.  For this reason I never start a caulk job without sacrificial clothing.

I took a few minutes to strip and re-seal some of the older caulk points on the roof (the FM antenna, the cellular antenna) but couldn’t find a smoking gun.  I was looking for an obvious caulk failure, which is indicated by the caulk peeling up, gapping, or starting to break down in the U.V.  Eventually S.T. found a small crack on the corner of the plastic flange that surrounds the Fan-Tastic Vent that wasn’t covered with caulk, and we had the culprit red-handed.  It doesn’t take much of a crack to let in a lot of rainwater.  The crack was in exactly the right spot to be allowing water to run to the ceiling speaker, given the tilt of the trailer.

Once we pulled off the caulk to inspect, we discovered that the entire flange surrounding the fan body was badly cracked.  The caulk was holding, but the multiple cracks were creating water entry points.  About half the screw heads were rusted underneath the caulk.  At this point there was not much hope for caulking our way out of the problem — the best solution was a replacement fan body.

We’ve got some time pressure, so although the warranty on the fan would allow us to request a replacement body from the company, I chose the more expedient option of going to the store and buying a basic model of the same fan to replace this one.  Super Terry transferred the advanced features of our old fan to the new one (rain sensor, power open/close, smoked cover), and so the $100 basic fan we bought became the equivalent of a $300 model, and we installed that with the Sikaflex.

It won’t be leaking again for quite a while.  From my personal observations, the OEM caulk will last 5-6 years under average conditions, but as little as 3-4 years if left full-time in a sunny environment like the desert southwest.  A good quality polyurethane caulk like Sikaflex or Vulkem stays good and pliable for a much longer time.  I’ve seen Vulkem on vintage trailers that is decades old and still holding tight.  It pays to use the good stuff, but you do have to hunt for it a bit.

Now that we knew we’d be spending at least another night here, waiting for the replacement blower motor, it was time to discuss our future plans.  Since we left Vermont we had expected this stop in North Carolina to be a literal fork in the road, and we’d have to make a choice:  go for an extended trip with several weeks in Florida, or hang a right and start west toward home.  The difference was basically $1,000 in camping and fuel, and 1,000 miles, which would get us three or four weeks of Florida fun.

But our decision has been made for us.  Late last night Emma’s orthodontic appliance failed again — for the third time — and after consulting with her home dentist we have come to the conclusion that the best choice is to head home.  The appliance will be disconnected by a local orthodontist in Winston-Salem today.  To avoid a major setback in her treatment, we will aim to get back to Tucson in less than two weeks, which means no long visit to Florida.

We knew this might happen, and even discussed the possibility months ago.  An orthodontic problem (or really any sort of medical problem) can easily derail a long trip.  Sometimes there’s no choice but to go back to home base.  The important thing is that everyone rolls with the punches and there be no recriminations.  Today it was Emma’s issue, but tomorrow it might be mine.  At least traveling by Airstream gives us the flexibility to re-arrange our plans without paying penalties for cancellation fees or last-minute airfares.

So, starting Tuesday we will be heading westward.  There are still several interesting stops to be made along the 2,000 mile journey back, so it won’t be a waste.  I’ve started mapping out possibilities and will work up a fairly definite plan as soon as we button up the air conditioner.

I have been paranoid about our disc brakes since about 5,000 miles after we got them, and our tires almost since we first started traveling with this particular Airstream — for good reason.  The brakes have had a long history of wearing unevenly and the tires … well, let’s just say we’ve had our share of problems with them.  (If you haven’t been a long-time reader of this blog and the prior Tour of America blog, just try searching the word “tires” in either of them.)

But after about five years of traveling and trying various solutions, we seem to have finally gotten it all worked out.  We installed Michelin LTX M/S LT235/75R15 tires (Load Range C) on the trailer in January of 2010 and replaced the ceramic brake pads with semi-metallics at the same time.

About a year ago, in October 2010, we met up with Super Terry to do a maintenance check and everything checked out perfectly.  Since then, we’ve put about 8,000 additional miles on the trailer, for a total of approximately 18,000 miles of towing on this set of brakes and tires, so I decided it was time to do another check.  And so here we are with Super Terry again, about one year later.

I figured that we’d probably need something at this point, so my other goal was to learn the full disc brake replacement procedure, along with best techniques for re-packing wheel bearings.  But when we pulled the wheels, everything was perfect.  Absolutely no service needed.  So I didn’t get a chance to observe much of anything.

The tires currently have 12/32″ of tread depth remaining (they started with 13/32″, so barely any wear so far).  If we eventually replace the tires when they reach 4/32″ of tread, we’d have over 160,000 miles on them.  That’s incredible.  Realistically, with uneven wear that usually occurs or just aging, we’ll replace them with about 75,000 miles on them — still incredible compared to the 30,000 mile life I would get if I could wear out an ST tire before it had a belt failure.

The disc brakes were similar.  I could not see any wear since last year.  (We didn’t measure the pads but they are still in excellent condition.)  I’ll continue to do annual brake and tire checks but that’s just good practice.  We finally have a really reliable running gear setup.

Given the excellent condition of everything we observed, we decided to skip wheel bearing service at this time.  We did notice slightly more wear on the rear tires, which is normal, so we rotated the tires front-to-back.  We also took the opportunity to replace the remaining original lug nuts, which were cheap-o type with fake chrome caps on them.  The chrome caps tend to come loose at inopportune moments, which makes them very hard to remove.  They also stretch so that fitting them into a socket can be difficult.

We found solid nuts at Autozone.  The replacements take a 13/16″ socket instead of 3/4″, which is slightly less convenient.  The Hensley hitch strut jacks take a 3/4″ socket and so do all the stabilizer jacks, so now I have to carry one more socket, but that’s no big deal.  In the photo, the solid nuts are pictured at right, and one of the original capped nuts is on the left.

I am still finding reminders of the summer of storage in Vermont.  It was sprinkling lightly this morning, so I opened up the awning to cover us while we were working on the curbside.  Rolled up inside the awning was a colony of very large ants.  They appeared to be dormant, and began to wander randomly around the awning.  I knocked them off easily enough, but it was not a pleasant surprise.  We’re still carrying quite a few spiders too.  They are slowly being captured and removed.   I am just hoping we haven’t picked up a load of stink bugs on the east coast like last year.

With the rain coming and going we didn’t feel like getting on the roof for the final scheduled repair, the air conditioner.  It started getting wonky a few weeks ago, spontaneously shutting off or blowing hot air.  We suspect a bad circuit board, which has to be replaced from the top.  That’s part of today’s plan.

So instead of doing anything significant in the rain, we added a few LED lights in strategic places for future boondocking episodes, including this one in the porch light.  The standard incandescent bulb that comes with the light (an 1156) generates too much heat and eventually melts the plastic lens.  I don’t know why the OEM puts that bulb in there.  Ours had started to melt but was still usable, so to prevent further damage we swapped it with this plug-in replacement 24-LED array from a fine Airstream Life advertiser, LED4RV.  It works great.

There’s one other job for today while we’re on the roof.  The rain revealed a roof leak somewhere.  Water was dripping through one of the ceiling-mounted JVC speakers.  Now, we’ve had rain several times before on this trip and not noticed a leak, which provides a lesson.  Sometimes leaks aren’t noticeable until the trailer is parked a particular way.  This is another example of how using your Airstream regularly is the best way to keep it in good shape. A leak like this one could have gone unnoticed for months while in storage, until an expensive floor repair became necessary.

In this case, we are very slightly nose high and very slightly lower on the street side.  This suggests that the leak is coming through the Fan-Tastic Vent in the center of the trailer.  I re-caulked that vent last year and was not happy with the caulk I ended up having to use, so I’m going to remove all of the caulk and do it over with something better.  While I’m up there, I’ll probably do a few other spots as a preventative measure.  I’ll have more to say about that issue in the next blog.

Those who are wondering about E&E: they spent the day in the trailer just puttering.  Both of them have a cold and will be running at low speed for a few days, but in the gloomy fall sprinkles it wasn’t a bad way to spend Saturday.

Our stopover in Falls Church turned out to be a working stop.  We had entertained thoughts of taking a day to go into Washington DC to tour some monuments and museums (Eleanor particularly wanted to see the new Martin Luther King Jr monument), but obligations took over.

Normally when I plan our travels I try to keep enough days open to get my work done, but this week I botched it and ended up with an obligation to drive all day Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.  That left just two full days for work, plus the little “fringe” times I find at the beginning and end of each driving day.  Things were complicated by our visit to Penn Wood on Monday, because I wanted to have a quick client meeting (the park advertises in Airstream Life) and I had forgotten that the park is a “no-Verizone”.

The end result was that we arrived in Falls Church at Bobby/Danine/Elise’s house with piles of work and household tasks which had to take priority. I set myself up on their dining room table while Emma did homeschooling and Eleanor shuttled back and forth to the laundry room and grocery.  We also visited Elise’s orthodontist to get a better fix to Emma’s braces.

The braces seem to be stable enough that we can continue our planned travel and won’t have to fly E&E back to Tucson early.  We did have to make a minor adjustment later, which involved a nail file to remove some sharp bits of glue that were cutting into Emma’s tongue.  This was done at a rest area somewhere along I-85 — redneck dentistry at its finest.

Having the braces issue resolved would be more exciting news if we actually had a firm plan. But we don’t.  Our only plan, after bidding a fond farewell to our friends in Falls Church, was to drive 300+ miles to Winston-Salem NC for a visit with Super Terry & Marie. After that, we have ideas and wishes, but no firm plans.

We are now parked in their back yard, beneath a canopy of mature maple trees (a few of which we had to trim in order to fit in here).  It was a long and tricky back-in, down a driveway, around a 90 degree bend, descending a slight grade and past a brick wall.  It took a few passes and lot of patience but we made it.

This weekend is dedicated to learning to do the brakes and bearings myself.  In the past I have relied on Super Terry, chasing him across the country from Florida to California to North Carolina in order to get a decent and trustworthy repair.  This time, I’m asking him to teach me all the tips & tricks so that I can be completely capable & equipped of doing a 4-wheel disc brake job and bearing service in my own driveway annually.  Self-reliance is really a key to survival when you travel a lot, and I’m overdue to get competent at these simple jobs. I’ll be taking notes and photos as we go.

In the meantime, E&E will be convalescing and perhaps going to an apple festival with Marie.  The weather has changed and it’s now a damp gray fall day (where it was a scorching humid summer a few days ago).  It’s the kind of weather that makes you want to bundle up and watch old movies with a cup of soup.  They might just do that, but hopefully the colds won’t keep them from also getting out a little to breathe the fall air.

For those who idolize the traveler,  I feel compelled to occasionally offer tidbits of reality.  It’s not all fun and freedom out here on the road.  Our past couple of days have been pleasant enough but certainly not free of worry.

We left the Buffalo area with a bit of a problem.  Emma’s ultra-fancy orthodontic appliance had come loose from her left molar.  On Friday we found a local orthodontist who gamely re-cemented the thing but warned that another tooth was causing interference, and the temporary repair might  not hold.  It didn’t.  Saturday it popped loose again while we were in Toronto.  It doesn’t cause any discomfort or trouble eating, but it needs to be fixed soon.

On Monday we were due to head south through the rolling hills of southwestern New York and western Pennsylvania to Penn Wood Airstream Park, which is one of the parks that advertises in Airstream Life magazine.  Our home-base orthodontist was out on Monday, so we set the problem of Emma’s appliance aside and started towing.

Arriving at Penn Wood, I remembered that the park and the surrounding area is a total no-Verizon zone.  Our Verizon Internet didn’t work either, even with the rooftop antenna, but fortunately the park has wifi.  Sometimes it’s nice to be isolated by a lack of communication, and sometimes it isn’t.  On this occasion it didn’t matter much since we were only there for an overnight.  We met up with Alex K and whipped up a big dinner in the Airstream.

There was one task I needed to complete in the morning: deposit a check.  Our checking account was nearly depleted and we were going to need cash soon.  This is where modern technology really helped me out.  I have an app (from USAA) on my iPhone that allows me to deposit checks simply by taking a picture of them with the phone.  I walked over the park office, where the wifi signal was strongest, and in less than a minute I had turned the paper check into money in the bank. Gotta love it.

Earlier I mentioned doing maintenance on the road.  We’re still finding things that need a little help after the summer of storage.  The bathroom was a bit funky so Eleanor did a thorough cleanup while we had the luxury of full hook up at Penn Wood.  In the process, she noticed that the sink drain was leaking.  It needed plumber’s putty, and I didn’t have any.  We asked Alex, who has every repair tool & supply known to man stored in his shed, and he came over immediately with a golf cart and a tool kit.  A few minutes later we were good to go.

Leaving the park on Tuesday morning, the first order of business was to get diesel.  I hadn’t noticed that we were at a quarter-tank when we arrived at Penn Wood.  We began hunting the moment we left, but unfortunately our route took us further into the boondocks of Pennsylvania, where gas stations are few, diesel stations are fewer, and ones that have both diesel and room to fit our 48-foot rig are rare indeed.  In retrospect I should have ignored the GPS and gone directly back to the Interstate where fuel would have been much easier to find.  It wasn’t long before I regretted heading into the rural country with insufficient fuel.

The problem was made much worse by the incredible rolling hills in that area.  We were crossing perpendicular to the ancient flow of glaciers, which meant that we were climbing and descending steep grades repeatedly.  Where we would have gotten 13 or 14 MPG, we were getting 10 on average, and the fuel gauge was dropping rapidly.  At one point the car’s computer was estimating about 30 miles to empty and the nearest major highway (where we would be likely to find fuel) was 18 miles away, but soon the computer gave up and simply defaulted to saying “RANGE” with an alarming picture of a fuel pump.  That’s its way of telling us that we’ve pushed the limit too far and we are now officially into the “reserve fuel” allowance.

This has happened once or twice before when we’ve failed to plan ahead, and it’s always unnerving.  (Read: on the way to Banff, in the Adirondacks)  We got to the point of looking for a place to ditch the Airstream but there were no available flat spaces.  Finally, with 8 miles left to go before the highway, we stumbled upon a miraculous fuel station in the middle of nowhere that had diesel and room for us to pull in.  Saved again!  The tank took 27.7 gallons, and the manufacturer’s stated capacity is 26.4 gallons, so we had consumed all of that and were well into the 3.4 gallon reserve.  I can’t really complain since we got 430 miles out of that tank (which included some non-towing time up to Toronto and back).  I had just gotten too comfortable with the enormous range of the GL320, and suffered the dread that results from complacency.  Like the license plate we saw (PB4UGO) you need to fill up before you tow.

We are now courtesy parked at Bobby & Danine’s house in Virginia.  Once again, Verizon doesn’t work at the house but I’ve got their wifi, their house phone if I need it and Skype.  The bigger challenge here is the sloping driveway.  Bobby lent us a bunch of wood and extra plastic blocks, and we’ve managed to get the trailer close to level.  (Still, it’s a big first step up to the entry door.)

So you can see that there are always challenges along the way.  Plans get changed for you, glitches happen, things break, and sometimes the trailer ain’t level.  The point is, it’s all small stuff, and you know what they say about that.  Don’t sweat it.  We’re still having a good time even if things don’t always turn out the way we expected.

Congrats to Airstreamers David & Ariadne on the birth of their new baby!

We are now officially back on the road.  For how long, I can’t say.  We have a trip of about 3,500 miles planned, and that’s if we don’t dip into Florida (then it becomes closer to 4,500 miles).  At our pace, that’s a good long time in the Airstream — at least a month.  I’ll get back to my usual posting schedule as long as we are on the road, which means several times each week.

Our last days in Vermont ended with a weather whimper.  There was a final respite of passable weather on Sunday for the belated birthday celebration (maple themed edible gifts abounded), and then the beautiful late-summer days faded into steady cool showers that lasted all of Labor Day, while we took care of the final Airstream packing chores.  Then the remnants of Hurricane Lee slid up to New England and the result has been three days of fairly continuous rain, which is something nobody up here needed.  Flooding became a threat again in many areas.

Despite that, we had set a schedule and so we left on a chilly Tuesday morning, with wet decaying leaves stuck to our feet and tracked all through the inside of the Airstream.  I normally like to leave with the trailer interior cleaned up, but it was not possible under the rain forest-type conditions, so we’ll do a better job on the interior floors if this endless rain ever lets up.  Once I had pulled the trailer off the leveling blocks in the driveway, I could see the rear dome for the first time in months (it had been obscured by trees) and it looks miserable, stained with tannin and leaf mold.  Another roof washing session is due, but I think since we are on the road it may become a job for the Blue Beacon boys.

I am very pleased that all systems seem to be “go” with the Airstream.  After three months of sitting in fairly inhospitable conditions you might expect a few problems to crop up, but we’ve been lucky and found no major issues.  Even the Michelin tires held their pressure at exactly 50 psi each.  Sitting is really one of the worst things for an Airstream (or indeed, any brand of RV).  That’s when the rodents get in and start nesting.  That’s when spiders and mud dauber wasps begin to clog the furnace vent and water heater venturi.  That’s when water from a small leak gets a chance to cause rot, unnoticed.  Left without exercise, tires fail more quickly, axles stiffen, batteries go flat, wires get chewed … I always recommend that anyone who has to store their trailer for long periods of time make a point of getting inside regularly to check things out, sniff for strange smells, inspect for signs of insects or critters, etc.

Using the trailer is a good way to find issues, if you don’t mind fixing them as they crop up.  So far we’ve found the need to lube the entry door hinges and entry step with silicone spray, replace a cabinet latch, and replace a couple of light bulbs.  Nothing really of consequence.  I expect to replace a lot more of the bulbs soon, since they are mostly original and reaching the end of their expected lifespan.  I’ll buy a 6-pack of the 1141 bulbs and a few of the 10-watt halogens at the hardware store next time we go by.  The darned cabinet latches are another story: they wear out with distressing regularity and so far the only source I’ve found for replacements is Airstream and Airstream dealers, at $7-10 per latch

Our route has been conservative, at least initially. With flooding closing many lesser roads, I opted to take the safest possible route via the Charlotte-Essex ferry, I-87 (the Adirondack Northway) and I-90 (the New York State Thruway), connected by Rt 8 through the Adirondack Park.  This kept us away from detours but it wasn’t particularly exciting since we’ve covered that route many times in the past.

At least we ended up at a different place, Verona Beach State Park on the shores of Oneida Lake.  On prior trips passing through New York we’ve tried many state parks, including Cayuga Lake, Delta Lake, Letchworth, Darien Lakes, Fish Creek Pond, Mills-Norrie, Thompsons Lake, and Watkins Glen.  They’ve all been good. New York has a great & huge state park system, so there are still dozens more to visit, even if we are trying to stay within a reasonable distance of the Thruway.

I had no idea when we randomly picked Verona Beach that it was next to the famous old Sylvan Beach, with the small but active downtown (at least during summer) and the old-time Sylvan Beach Amusement Park.  It had stopped raining for a while, and I didn’t feel like unhitching the trailer for just one night, and we needed some exercise after being in the car for five or six hours, so we hoofed it about a mile and a half from the state park to downtown Sylvan Beach and found Eddie’s beckoning to us with a giant neon sign.  There wasn’t much else open in town, being a gray cool day after Labor Day, but even if there were I think we would have had to try Eddie’s for dinner just because it’s a historic piece of Sylvan Beach.

Camping and traveling in the off-season like we are right now, is a bit of a crapshoot. On the plus side, reservations are generally unnecessary, crowds are absent, and we can be as spontaneous as we want.  On the negative side, the weather can be iffy and lots of attractions are closed or have severely reduced hours.  Arriving at Verona Beach we found the entry building unmanned, so we just picked out a nice site and settled in.  No camp host or ranger was evident, and the park was about 90% empty.  In the morning a nice lady came by in the pouring rain (“and I’m driving an electric golf cart!”) and accepted our check for $22.75 for a night of camping near the shore of the lake.  Even with the steady rain it was a nicer experience than many a peak-season summer stay I’ve had in other places, just because it was quiet and uncluttered.

Tech note: I’ve been trying out some apps on the iPhone to see how they help us on the road.  GasBuddy (free) has been pretty good for us, usually allowing us to find diesel at $0.20-0.40 less than the going rate without detouring more than five miles.  This morning it directed us to the station closest to the state park and we saved about 20 cents per gallon on the fillup compared to the stations along the Thruway.  It hasn’t been 100% accurate, since the fuel price reports come from ordinary folks who sometimes get it wrong, but I’ll trust it enough to go a few miles out of my way.

The other app I’m evaluating is the Allstays Camp & RV app, which costs a few bucks.  So far I am finding it interesting but I need more time to be sure if I can recommend it.  Like GasBuddy, some of the data comes from volunteers and so may not be entirely accurate.  It’s useful for finding campgrounds, Wal-Marts, and various other popular stops for RV’ers.

We’re going to hunker down near Buffalo for a couple of days to get some work done, and then continue onward on Friday.  It won’t be an exciting period, but hopefully we’ll wait out the rain and have nicer weather for the next few stops that are planned.

We’re getting serious about gearing up for travel now. The Airstream has been stored all summer in the most unfavorable conditions: exposed to sun, rain, falling tree branches and leaves, in a humid environment, and used essentially as a giant storage locker.  It is our joint mission to turn it back into a habitable travel trailer in the next 48 hours.

It’s always best to work from the top down, so I started with the roof disaster.  The debris was so thick that the first step was to get on the roof with a broom and sweep away most of the accumulated branches and leaves.  It was pretty nasty up there with older leaves that have composted and filled every possible corner and crevice — worse than I remember from the previous year.  I think an extra layer of tree bits landed in the past week thanks to Irene.

Then I got into the detail work, using only water and a soft brush.  I never use soap on the roof because there’s too much chance of slipping off.  Working outward from the centerline is most efficient, as things tend to wash down to the sides.

It took quite a while to clean up the detail spots, like beneath the TV antenna, under the solar panels, the upper gutter of the awning, and around the refrigerator vent.  The work would go faster if I wasn’t working on a wet sloped roof with numerous delicate obstacles (like plastic roof vents) and hardly any open space to stand.  I recommend extreme caution if you ever do this.

The rear solar panel was so obscured by tannin from decaying leaves (far more gunk than you can see in the top picture) that I had to spend several minutes scrubbing it.  A small amount of brown stain on the glass can have a large impact on electrical generation capacity.

Once the roof was done, I gave the rest of the trailer a conventional wash.  I got the bulk of it with a telescoping brush and Eleanor followed up with a plastic scrubber, cleaning up the details. Even after our efforts, the trailer will win no prizes in a Concours d’Elegance but at least it is no longer embarrassing. If I have time today, I’ll also wax the front dome, as that seems to make it easier to clean off squashed bugs later.

Getting ready to go is obviously important.  (I spotted a tree turning color yesterday — a warning sign from Mother Nature that the cold weather is coming.)  But we’ve got other important things we must do before we leave, including eating birthday cake.

We missed the normal time to celebrate my birthday (in mid-August), because I was in Tucson.  Being of a certain age, I am not really all that hung up on birthdays, but for some reason my birthday is a well-attended event every year.  I am pretty sure that the entire family takes an interest in my birthday primarily because Eleanor always makes a special cake with butter-cream frosting, and each year the cake is different.  Usually a few weeks or months prior, I dream up a rough idea and then Eleanor figures out the details.

The cake this year stems from the fact that I am an admitted and unrepentant maple fiend.  There is no ten-step program for people like me and if there were, I wouldn’t follow it.  The Addison County Fair (held in August) is my annual maple pig-out, but again, I was in Tucson and missed it this year.  You have no idea what a serious loss that was to me.  The Fair has an entire building dedicated to all things maple.  Maple frosted donuts, maple milk, maple creemees (“soft serve” to the rest of you), maple milkshakes, maple bread, maple candies, and this year they added some sort of baked confection that had walnuts on top.  Having been entirely deprived of all these goodies in maple-free Tucson, I requested a maple-walnut cake for my late birthday celebration.

So Eleanor did some research and has developed her own recipe, which starts from scratch.  Some of it is roughly based on an Italian cream cake recipe that we got from (believe it or not) our insurance company USAA some years ago, but at this point Eleanor has modified it so much that it is truly her own.  The cake contains about $30 of ingredients, as real maple sugar and such things are rather expensive, but as I often point out to anyone who will listen, I’m worth it.

The cake, which you can see here during construction, is not only maple-flavored batter with fine-chopped walnuts, but between layers contains a whipped chocolate ganache with maple flavor.  (If you’ve never tried maple and chocolate together, you need to.  I can recommend the maple crunch chocolates from Lake Champlain Chocolates as a source for aspiring addicts.)

The final layer is a maple butter-cream frosting that literally melts in your mouth, leaving a buttery coating and a strong desire for more.   So we’re looking at triple maple cake with walnuts and chocolate ganache.  Talk about decadence … there will be no leftovers.

There are a few other rituals that we must complete before departing.  Last night, for example, the humidity and temperature rose and so I was finally motivated to go jump in the lake.  Lake Champlain is running a bit cooler than normal, due to all the rain and storminess (which stirs up cold bottom water).  It’s a “refreshing” lake at the best of times, usually peaking around 68 degrees, and I think yesterday it was a few degrees cooler than that.  But this is what I grew up on, and I’m used to it.  On a sticky afternoon it’s just right — a thrillingly icy splash as you dunk under for the first time, and then in just a few minutes your body core is cooled down and it feels like no amount of heat and humidity will ever bother you again.  Emma and I got in and played a few splashing games.

With that, another summer tradition has been accomplished.  Only a few things left to do.  It looks like we’ll be ready to hit the road by Tuesday.

Birthday menu:

lobster ravioli with an orange saffron cream sauce
mushroom ravioli with browned butter & sage sauce
grilled asparagus with lemon & parmesan shavings
endive, mushroom, & artichoke salad with mustard & white wine vinaigrette
maple walnut cream cake

Orange Saffron Cream Sauce for Seafood Pasta

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 3 thinly sliced strips of unsmoked bacon, most fat removed, cut into 1/4″ dice
• 1 small shallot, minced
• 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
• zest and juice of 1 orange (preferably Minneola Tangelo or Blood Orange)
• saffron threads (about 6, crumbled)
• 12 ounces light cream
• freshly ground black pepper
• kosher salt

OK, let me get this out of the way before I say anything else:  WE ARE FINE.

I continue to get daily emails from folks who are concerned that we might have been affected by the recent storm.  The media frenzy about the “devastation” in parts of Vermont has painted a really distorted image of the situation here, especially up in northern Vermont where it’s hard to find visible impacts from the storm.  At our current base of operations, the worst thing that happened is that my brother had to pull up the dock and boat lift due to Lake Champlain rising a few feet.

My previous blog entry was intended to make it obvious that we were relatively unaffected, but it seems to have backfired.  One friend even wrote, “OK, I read the blog.  You are safe, parent’s house is fine, the trailer is fine,  All sounds good. Now, what’s the rest of the story?”  Sorry, that’s all there was.  Any further drama will have to be self-created, and believe me, we’re good at that.

On Wednesday I took a roadtrip up to Plattsburgh NY, fifty miles away by car and ferry, to make a client visit to Colin Hyde Trailer Restorations.  About two years ago Colin opened up his own trailer restoration shop and has been doing quite well with it.  I spent a few hours checking out every Airstream in the shop and catching up on everything.  In the afternoon Colin donned his bunny suit and demonstrated how he can paint an entire chassis (in this case the restored/improved frame of a 1953 Flying Cloud) in less than an hour with just one quart of POR-15, using a sprayer and his “rotisserie” set-up.  The rotisserie allows the frame to be rotated in the air for ultimate convenience.  This is a much more efficient method of painting a frame than the old “bend over and brush” technique that many people still use.

It’s interesting to me to note how the vintage trailer restoration business has matured over the past several years.  When I started the magazine in 2004, there were only a handful of restorers out there and most of them didn’t know what they were doing.  They’d come out of the hotrod business, or evolved from trailer repairs, and frankly there was a lot of overpriced hack work going on.  Only a few really understood how these trailers were intended to work (from a design perspective) and so I saw a lot of horribly botched trailers coming out of “professional” shops.

Actually, that still happens quite a lot.  It’s pretty easy for anyone to hang out a shingle and say they are in the trailer restoration business, with no licensing, no real knowledge, and little accountability (since the customers themselves generally only see the surface of the work).  There are still a lot of hacks out there.  But a few have studied the history, engineering, design intent, period materials, and even philosophy of Airstream and other vintage trailer manufacturers.  Those people are doing the good work these days.

I’m very happy to say that most of them are advertisers in Airstream Life.  As one non-advertiser put it, “Being in Airstream Life sort of says you’ve ‘made it’.”  We don’t vet the advertisers for quality but I do find that when they are willing to make the investment in advertising their business, it indicates a seriousness and professionalism that usually carries over to their work.

Being at Colin’s shop (and MEL Trailer, C&G, etc., a couple of weeks ago) has reminded me of the work I want to do on the Safari.  After 100,000 miles of towing and six years, it has accumulated a bit of wear around the edges.  I want to replace all of the flooring with Marmoleum, refurb the Hensley (again), add another Vista View, wire in an inverter, convert to LED lights, re-upholster the dinette, rebuild our microwave/laundry storage, replace the curtains, repaint all of the steel (A-frame, bumper compartment, entry step), re-caulk all the roof openings, upgrade the stereo with MP3 input & better speakers, etc.  This will not be a quick or cheap refurb, but in the process I expect to renew the trailer so that it is ready for our next 100,000 miles. As I’ve written previously, I see no reason why a new Airstream can’t last a lifetime with proper owner maintenance (including annual leak tests).  Like an airplane, a periodic refurb is to be expected.

This week, however, I just need to get ready for our upcoming trip. The Safari has been stored all summer, and now it is covered in spider webs and debris from the cedar trees overhead.  I’ll need to get on the roof and wash it down, lube & inspect the hitch, check the tires & reinflate as needed, re-organize tools that have gotten spread out over the summer, and re-stock.   That process has already started, and we’ll finish this weekend so we can depart on Tuesday.

The trip plan is already growing.  I had planned to zip back across the USA in a relatively straight line to economize on fuel (diesel is running $4+ per gallon up here) but there are too many things to do.  I like to treat every trip as if it might be our last, just so there are no regrets.  Or to put it another way, I’d rather regret spending a lot of money on fuel than regret passing up once-in-a-lifetime travel opportunities.  So our route currently brings us west through NY state, briefly into Canada, then down to western PA, near Washington DC, a stop in NC for service, a quick stop in central AL, and then Florida.  From there, we may spend a few weeks in Florida or we may head west toward home, depending on circumstances.

After a long pause at home base, you can’t just assume that the trailer is completely ready to go, especially when the next trip is an expedition.  We aren’t just going camping for the weekend, we’re going out for what will probably be an 8,000 mile trip and a total of 100-120 days of occupancy in the Airstream.  For the average Airstreamer, that’s several years worth of use.  So I look at the car and the trailer in that light, and try to consider what might go wrong with them in the next few months.

Being only about two years old and well maintained, the car is pretty easy.  I had it serviced in December and I know it will need a maintenance stop again about the time I return to Tucson, so I’ll get that done when I’m back.  The Airstream, however, is much more complex.  Checking it over before a major trip takes the better part of a day, but I usually spread it out over a week or so, just in case I run into something that requires parts.

I start with the easy stuff, by simply using all of the systems in the trailer and verifying that they work as expected.  Eleanor wanted to practice her demonstration meal in the Airstream last night, so that gave us a chance to run the hot water, stove and oven, air conditioning and vents, and lights.  Everything in the kitchen was fine.  Separately I checked the shower, bathroom plumbing, windows, doors.

You might think it’s unlikely that something like plumbing would go bad while the trailer is just sitting, but actually that’s exactly the type of thing I suspect the most.  In the past I’ve found that the toilet seal has begun to leak during storage (which lets sewer gas into the trailer, not a pleasant thing), or that a water pump has died over the winter.  It’s obviously much nicer to discover these things a week before launch, rather than letting it be the first memory of your vacation.  Fortunately, this time the inspection turned up nothing awry.

Even seemingly maintenance-free things like doors and windows often need a little help after storage.  Usually it’s a matter of the hinges getting squeaky, or the seals beginning to stick — things that are easily remedied with a little cleaning and lubrication. There’s a good feeling that goes with checking all the systems and tuning up the small stuff, so it’s a practice that’s beneficial for your mental state as well as the Airstream.  The guy who wrote, “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff” wasn’t talking about travel trailers.

After the systems check, I start running through the routine tasks.  This includes filling the fresh water tank, dumping the holding tanks, getting a propane re-fill, lubricating the hitch, charging the cordless drill batteries, plugging in the TPMS (to check the tire pressure), and putting the tools back in place.

That last item bears explanation.  Do you have in the trailer the tools and parts you’d need to:

• remove a flat tire and install the spare?  (Does the spare have air in it?)
• temporarily or permanently fix a dragging belly pan  (rivets, drill, rivet tool, washers)
• replace a burned out clearance, brake, or tail light  (screwdriver, spare bulbs)
• clean corrosion off the main ground wire, or the metal tabs of the 7-way connector?

I find that the tools tend to migrate away from the Airstream during periods of storage, and need to be put back before a big trip.  So I never take anything for granted until I’ve located the part/tool and verified it’s where it should be in the trailer.

At each step of the routine tasks I have a chance to see if anything has come loose, begun to leak, gotten rusty, or been misplaced.  If insects have made nests in the furnace or water heater, or if packrats have chewed the electrical wires, this is the time to catch those problems.  I also check all the critical and consumable supplies like grease, silicone spray, and maple cookies to see if they are running low.

This time while I was puttering around I spotted the fire extinguisher in the Airstream and wondered if it was still functional.  It’s the original equipment, installed in 2005, and it has been through probably 100,000 miles of travel, which I’ve heard will eventually pack the dry powder to the point that it might not work.  A pair of replacement extinguishers (better ones, in fact) were just $30 at Costco, so I bought them and put one in the house kitchen, too.

While kneeling at the front wheel to fiddle with the TPMS, I took the opportunity to scan the underbelly of the trailer, and spotted a loose aluminum plate.  I’m not yet sure what this plate does (center of image), but regardless I’ll be under there later today with the drill and rivet tool to put it back in place.

Riveting up loose parts or areas of the belly pan is an easy job once you get into your working clothes. I recommend keeping the cordless drill, an assortment of small drill bits (1/8″ – 5/16″), and some buttonhead pop rivets and/or washers in your tool kit, because belly pan rivets have a habit of letting loose at inconvenient times.  (It’s caused by dissimilar metal corrosion — the aluminum rivets are drilled into the steel frame.)

Another problem I found was that the sewer hose was getting a bit elderly, and my cardinal rule of Airstreaming is “Never trust an old sewer hose.” They’re like the brakes on your car, you replace ‘em before they break.

I wrote up a bunch of “springtime de-winterizing” tips in my book about Airstreaming (see page 74) and believe it or not I do actually take my own advice once in while, so I have checked the 9-volt batteries in the smoke detectors and inspected the hitch receiver on the Mercedes.  This time the smoke detectors were fine but the digital clock was blinking.  Replacing its batteries reminded me: did we have a bunch of AA and AAA batteries in the trailer? Yes, we did.  More “small stuff,” but all good stuff.

OK, at this point I’ve checked all the systems, verified that the tools and parts are in place, checked for items that may have failed or been damaged during storage, serviced the items that are due, and replaced all the maintenance consumables.  Meanwhile, Eleanor has been packing the household items, which is an even bigger task.  On Wednesday we’ll cross-check each other as we get to the home stretch, and deal with prepping the house itself for its vacation from us.  There’s much more ahead …

Have you ever noticed how we rarely bother to look at the things that we trust with our lives?  People will go hurtling down the highway with an 8,000 pound trailer strapped to their butt and never check the tire pressure, even though a blown tire on the tow vehicle can mean a disastrous end.  And few people ever look at the connection between trailer and tow vehicle, the thing that keeps the trailer from becoming an unguided aluminum missile.  I’m talking about that ugly chunk of welded metal underneath called the “hitch receiver.”

The hitch receiver gets bolted on either at the factory or shortly before you buy your first trailer, and then generally it never gets examined again.  Most of the time people get away with ignoring the receiver because they don’t do much towing.  But if you tow a lot, or you tow heavy trailers, you really need to take a look at this thing once in a while — because what you haven’t noticed can hurt you.

I’m saying this because it seems like about once or twice every year a friend of mine reports that he discovered that his hitch receiver was in dire condition — and sometimes this fact is discovered too late, as you can see in the picture.   That’s a Class V Original Equipment hitch receiver on a late-model truck, and it is ripped clean off.

This happened at low speed, right after exiting an Interstate highway.  That’s when receivers usually fail, because the stress encountered from sharp turns, dips, and potholes is usually greater than the stress on the receiver when cruising on the highway.   (Andy Thomson talked about this in one of his recent articles about towing, which was published in the Winter 2010 issue of Airstream Life.)  The apparent causes of this failure were metal fatigue and rust — the owner lived in a northern climate where the roads are salted.

Last year another friend reported that his hitch was “bouncy” and I encouraged him to examine the OEM (Original Equipment) receiver.  He took it to a local hitch specialist, where they found it was riddled with serious cracks.  The receiver was replaced that day with a far superior aftermarket brand.  Both of these friends are long-term, experienced Airstreamers, but they just never crawled under the truck to take a look at this crucial equipment.

That’s why I advocate that every travel trailer owner take a few minutes every year to conduct a simple hitch inspection — or have it done on a lift by a mechanic.  Today I took a few minutes to do mine, and it was very easy.

The tools are simple.  I used a cordless drill with a brass wire brush attachment, and a second wire brush with a handle (not pictured) for the tight spaces.  Those tools are to clean up rusty spots.  A bright LED headlamp and a flashlight are needed to closely examine the corners and crevices, and a can of spray paint can be used after inspection to make the receiver look new again.

When underneath the car, I looked for shiny lines on welds that would indicate a recent crack, rusty lines against painted areas that might indicate an old crack, broken welds, bent metal, and loose or rusty mounting bolts.   This took me about 10 minutes, as I lay beneath the car and carefully studied every weld with the flashlight.  (A magnifying glass can be useful if you have trouble seeing things up close.)

If you want to see what cracks in the receiver might look like, click here.  This picture is from a GM OEM hitch, not my vehicle.

I also studied the receiver box itself.  Notice in the picture of my hitch (above) that there’s a strengthening collar on the back end.  This is a common feature in receiver boxes.  However, receiver manufacturers seem to rarely put a strengthening collar on the front end of the receiver box, even though both ends endure the same stress.  For this reason it’s a good idea to take a close look at the front end of the receiver box to ensure that the box itself it not splitting or cracking at the corners.  The picture of a splitting receiver box (at right) is not from my tow vehicle!

If you look closely at the picture of my hitch (above, before cleanup), you might see that there has been a small amount of elongation of the hitch pin hole, making it slightly oval.  This is caused by the hitch pin shifting slightly under load, which is a sign that it is not a tight fit.  This amount of elongation is not a problem in my opinion but I’m going to keep an eye on it.

Once I was done, it was time to clean up the hitch.  My goal was to remove all the surface rust and repaint so that if a weld broke or a fatigue crack formed, I would be able to spot it immediately.  This is where the wire brushes came into play.  I scrubbed the rust until the metal was shiny (easily done with the cordless drill attachment) and wiped it clean.  Then I inspected the spots I’d cleaned once again, just to be sure I hadn’t missed a possible crack or broken weld.

I had two leftover cans of spray paint, silver and flat black, but decided to go with the black.  A few sheets of paper and some blue painter’s tape masked off the car’s bumper while I sprayed.  Since I expect to do this procedure annually, I wasn’t super fussy about the paint I used.  It will get removed or at least scuffed up next winter when I inspect again.

This spring, when you are de-winterizing your trailer, take a few minutes to do a good inspection of your tow vehicle’s receiver.  It has to manage thousands of foot-pounds of torque from the torsion bars, and goes through thousands of stress cycles every time you tow.  I don’t think there’s any other part of your tow rig that has to bear up to so much repeated stress.  By the time you can feel something from the driver’s seat, it may be too late.   If you don’t want to crawl under the car you can take it to any hitch specialist and have them check it for you.  Prevention of a problem is easy, and it’s well worth the effort!

In our rush to go from Florida to Texas, we covered about 750 miles over two days, finally ending up in Austin TX.  Our plan is vague: hang out here for a few days while waiting for the weather to clear.  Then we’ll head down to Corpus Christi and camp on the beach.  Meanwhile, we are doing a few favorite things …

Item: Along Rt 290 on the way Austin, in the town of Brenham, you can tour the Blue Bell Ice Cream factory. We were delighted to find that they have a special lot just for RVs, but our luck stopped there: no factory tours on the weekends.  Still, there was a “virtual tour” (a movie) and of course an ice cream bar that we couldn’t resist.

Item:  Whole Foods has a mega store in downtown Austin less than a mile away from our campground. Eleanor cannot resist the place, with its massive, exotic, and sexy (to a foodie) inventory.  We spent two hours and came away with a smorgasbord of delights, heavy on the desserts and cheeses this time.   Last night’s dinner was bluefish with a homemade mustard sauce, followed by an assortment of little desserts.

Item:  Zilker Botanical Park is also very near, is free, and has a wonderful Japanese garden that was really inspirational to us.  Next year we’ll be converting our blank backyard into something attractive and usable, and with ideas gathered at Zilker our plans are starting to gell.

Item:  The state capitol of Texas is worth seeing.  It’s huge, thanks to a massive underground expansion on the north side.  There’s also a good state capitol visitor center nearby.  All free.  Photographic opportunities are limitless, but regrettably I didn’t bring my camera.

Item:  Texas barbecue remains our favorite in the country, hands-down.  Today we drove out to the small city of Taylor for a late lunch at Louie Mueller’s with our friend John.  It’s about an hour’s drive from Austin, so to make the trip even more worthwhile we took home two pounds of beef brisket from Mueller’s, and two pounds of turkey sausage from Vencil Mares’ Taylor Cafe.

On the way back from Taylor, along Rt 79 in Round Rock, we spotted yet another Airstream-turned-food-stand.  Rock-A-Billy’s is a relatively new one, established 2009.  Too bad it was closed when we went by; a little shaved ice would have been just the ticket after barbecue.

We’ve got two days left in Austin, which is hardly anything for a town as interesting as this one.  Extending our stay is not feasible if we are going to make the side trip to Corpus Christi, so we’ll just have to make do with the time we have.  At this point we have towed the Airstream 6,500 miles since we left Tucson in May, and we have approximately 1,200 miles left to go, and just 10 days before our hard stop date in Tucson.  I can feel the time pressure and that’s a drag.

In the Maintenance Department, I am pleased to note that our experiment with tires has been a glorious success so far.  We have towed the Airstream about 8,000 miles on the new Michelins that I bought in January, and have suffered not one puncture or tread separation.  On the Goodyear/Carlisle/Green Ball/Trailer King/Power King/etc.   ST (Special Trailer) designated tires that we used formerly used, we would have had at least one or two failures in this amount of mileage.  The Michelin LTX LT tires even hold air pressure better.  I haven’t had to adjust the air in months. Better still, I can’t see any wear in the deep tread of the Michelins.  I’ll measure them precisely when we get back to Tucson.

Last item. I got a new battery for my MacBook Pro because the two year-old battery in died an early death.  This was much harder than it needed to be, because Apple has designated my laptop battery as obsolete.  (By that measure, my shoes are obsolete as well.  I’m lucky I can still get shoelaces for them.)  Thus the battery can’t be purchased in Apple stores.  I found it in Apple’s online store at $129 and through various third parties at about half that price.  I bought mine through a Buy.com re-seller for $65, and it came with this helpful warning (click the image for a larger view).  I have refrained from nailing the battery to a wall because I was warned, and instead I put it in my laptop where it is working perfectly.