Having fled Louisville for Tampa in the last blog, I was hoping to regale you with fantastic adventures in Florida.  But the virus I was given somewhere along the way came with me, and settled in for a nice long stay. So I’ve mostly seen the inside of Brett’s apartment while I do the usual sniffle-cough-ahem routine.

But we did get out on Friday for a nice roadtrip in Brett’s 1974 Mercedes SL450.  Those of you who are car geeks will recognize it as the R107 chassis, a long-lived and nearly iconic car for anyone who was around in the 1970s and 1980s.  I had seriously considered buying of these myself.  Because of the massive quantity that was made, they are very reasonable in good condition (running $5-10k) and they are a real joy to drive.  The ride defines “grand touring,” while the beefy V-8 propels the car like a dream, and best of all you can take the top down on a sunny Florida day in December, as we did.

We took the SL across Florida to Titusville, sticking primarily to the lesser-traveled highways, and ended up at Pierre Hedary’s shop.  Pierre is a character in the Mercedes world, a tall bear of a man with crazy hair and an encyclopedic memory for every mechanical bit of every pre-1993 Mercedes car.  He writes a regular column on maintenance for Star magazine (published by Mercedes Benz Club of America) and we’ve crossed paths at a few car events.  Brett and I felt it was well worth the 150-mile drive to have Pierre take a look at the car and help sort out some of the bugs.

The photo at left was taken at Starfest 2011 in Winchester VA. Pierre is overwhelming the passenger seat of a nice 280SL, a generation prior to the 450SL we drove.

We ended up at the shop for most of the day, and left with the car feeling considerably happier than when it arrived.  When you buy an old car, there’s a process of “sorting out” in which you try to rectify the errors of prior owners and get everything back up to optimal condition.  You have to pace yourself during this process, otherwise in your eagerness to get it all worked out you can find yourself broke and/or overinvested in a car that may not deserve it.  Brett has been slowly sorting this car for the past year or so.

In this service, Pierre replaced black and dead transmission fluid, a Jurassic-era fuel filter, some shift linkage bushings, a vacuum hose and a few minor bits.  The car’s fuel pump was tested and a few potential issues were ruled out after careful inspection.

There’s still a considerable list of issues to resolve but with every step it becomes a better car to drive and there’s immense personal satisfaction when you feel the difference in a Mercedes after repairs.  I’ve sorted out old Hondas and old Mercedes and old Volkswagens.  With a Honda or a Volkswagen, after fixing everything you end up with a good reliable car.  Not bad.  With a Mercedes, you end up with, well, a Mercedes.  When it drives like new, the ride and handling are extraordinarily pleasurable.  The delta between “before” and “after” with an old Merc is just astonishing.  It makes the steep cost of the parts feel like they were worth it.  This is why I really enjoyed my 300D, and hope to get another one in a couple of years.

We took turns driving the SL back across Florida that night, with a quick stop for fried chicken on a picnic table next to some highway.  It made for a fine roadtrip.  Given that my brain has turned to mush from the virus, I can’t think of a better way to have spent the day.

Our other minor task this weekend has been to pick up a trio of custom-made grills over in St Petersburg.  Last year at Alumapalooza we started a program called “open grill,” where everyone was invited to share a big charcoal grill with whatever they wanted to cook.  We had Alex K light the grills theatrically by breathing fire on them, and the Fire Department showed up to demonstrate their Jaws of Life machine by chewing up a car while we chewed our dinners.

Last year’s grills were borrowed, but now we have our own set.  Brett specified what we needed and a local fabricating shop built them.  We checked them out at the fabrication shop yesterday (photo), and they look perfect. The cooking surfaces are 3 feet x 3 feet, with 4″ of space below the grill surface for a bed of charcoal.  The legs unbolt for easy transport.  We’ve got three of these, which can easily accommodate 8-10 simultaneous users each.  If they prove extremely popular we’ll have more made for the 2013 event.  Open Grill will be held on three nights at the 2012 Alumapalooza.  Our plan is to try out one of the new grills this week while I’m here.

Plenty of time for that.   My original plan was to fly out on Monday but with this cold I can’t equalize my ears, so I re-scheduled for Thursday.  That little change cost $264 extra, which did not make me happy but it beats the alternative.  I’ve had too many flights with ear pain in the past.  I’m hoping to be completely recovered by Tuesday so we can have a little fun running around the Tampa area before I go.

Tomorrow the air bus takes me to the snow flurries in Louisville KY, so I am savoring my last day with my family in sunny Phoenix AZ.  Flying from Phoenix means I can get to Louisville on a direct flight instead of getting routing past the slot machines in Las Vegas, and coming here a day early saves me a pre-dawn drive up from Tucson.

This is all part of my annual effort to make the RVIA trip less tedious.  Brett and I have the essentials of the trip narrowed down to two nights and one day, we’ve managed to figure out how to eat reasonably well while in tradeshow-land, and now I’ve got direct flights to and fro.  My goal is to get this trip down to the point where we fly early in the morning, do our work, and fly out the same day.  Can’t do anything about the dismal weather, however.

Since we were in Phoenix today, we decided to drop in on IKEA in Tempe for a couple of things.  Emma was predictably bored with this prospect but soon found a way to entertain herself. She grabbed one of the free pencils and started noting the Swedish product names that amused her the most.  These included FARKOST, PULT, ERBIUM, FANAHOLM, SMYCKA, JANSJO (the name of the flexible LED light we bought for her bedroom), and FORTRAFFLIG.  Having selected a couple dozen names, I suppose the next phase of the game would be to come up with definitions for each name, but we rescued her from the depths of the IKEA maze before she got to that part.

We wrapped up this evening with a hike in the nearby South Mountain Park.  I had wanted to explore this desert park last July when Eleanor was in town, but the 110-degree heat kept us away.  This time of year it’s just perfect for hiking, mountain biking, walking the dog, and running — all of which were going on while we visited.  I recommend it for an easy short hike at sunset if you’re in town this winter.  Keep in mind it is an urban park.  While we were at the summit of a small hill we heard a little boy exclaim, “Daddy, I can see IKEA from here!”

Tonight we are having a simple smorgasbord (another Swedish word) in the hotel room, made up of goodies we bought at AJ’s Fine Foods this afternoon.  French bread, two cheese, pear & raspberries, chicken kabobs, salmon, curry chicken salad, celery & cucumber, plus several interesting desserts from the pastry case.  I’ll have an early breakfast with E&E in the hotel Monday morning, and then hop the jet.  Expect updates from RVIA.  I’m hoping for something new and exciting to be announced — by anyone — but I’m not holding my breath waiting.

By the way, I am sending out tweets on Twitter these days as part of my ongoing analysis of the use of social media, so if that is your sort of thing, just follow “airstreamlife” on Twitter.  The tweets won’t contain much info that doesn’t appear here, however. The blog still predominates my communications with the world, as I find it hard to be interesting and descriptive in 140 characters.

Thanks to Eleanor and Bill for putting an appropriate literary theme on my few days in the Caravel.  Like Howl’s Moving Castle, the Caravel never paused for long in this recent chapter of its four-decade adventures.

The saga left off on Friday, when I was making a coffee last for three hours so I could recharge my stuff and get some work done.  It was a beautiful sunny day and things were going well.  After the work was done, an electronic trail of crumbs (a waypoint stored in the GPS) led me back to the campground, otherwise I might never have found it again.  I spent all of 10 minutes installing the new braided-stainless hoses in the Caravel’s bathroom and — ta-da! — no more leaks.   Or so I thought.

That afternoon the bulk of the rally participants showed up and things got lively.  Among many other people, I ran into Tiffani and Deke of “Weaselmouth,” who I’d last seen at Alumapalooza in May, and we got into an evening-long conversation during the potluck dinner.  I went back to the Caravel that night pleased that the rally was turning out well, but a little sorry as well because it would be time to get going homeward soon.  The rest of the people were just getting started with their Halloween decorations and friendly yakking.  For me, the Moving Castle (aka Caravel) was destined to depart in the morning.

I lingered on Saturday until about 10 a.m. while the gang was cooking up a huge breakfast outside at the pavilion.  People kept asking me how far I had to drive to get home, and when I said, “Oh, about 1,000 miles” the second or third time it really hit me: I’ve got to get going. There were about 16-17 hours of driving ahead of me, plus stops, and very little of it would be interesting driving.

Like the little Bubble I pulled from Santa Fe, the Caravel is a joy to tow.  There’s no fuss, no bad behavior, no complicated hitching equipment.  I try to keep the fresh water tank at least half full to give the trailer better stability, but otherwise I just drop it on the ball and away we go.  I don’t trust it as much as I do the big Safari with the Hensley hitch, because I know the Safari absolutely cannot sway with that setup, but the Caravel is marvelously stable at any speed I care to drive.  Of course, it is equipped pretty close to the original factory configuration.  Often I’ll see small vintage trailers that tow horribly, and inevitably it’s the result of owner modifications (air conditioners, rear-mounted spare tires, altered floorplans or heavy household-style cabinetry) that corrupt the delicate center of gravity.  The original designs took care to ensure that when the trailers were loaded with water, food, personal items, etc., the trailer would remain stable.

I made a few stops along the way for errands.  The day before the GL320 gave me a warning that it wanted a top-up of “AdBlue” fluid, which is also commonly known as Diesel Exhaust Fluid.  These days you can find the stuff in any auto parts store, truck stop, and even some Wal-Marts, and it’s cheap at about $12.99 for 2.5 gallons.  I put five gallons in the special tank that holds the AdBlue, which should be good for another 7,000 miles or so.  I’ll top it off this week for a full 15,000 mile range.  I mention this only because a lot of people are still scared about the stuff, thinking it’s expensive, or complicated, or frequent, and it’s really no much more hassle than filling the window washer fluid.  Three-tenths of a cent per mile is a small price to pay for clean diesel emissions, in my opinion.

I’ve wanted to spend a night at Monahans Sandhills State Park (just off I-20 a little west of Odessa TX), but the timing has never worked out before. This time I hit Monahans about a half hour before sunset, which made it a great stopover point.  The park has only 26 spaces, which made me think I might get skunked on a spot since it was Saturday night, but it turned out to be only about half full.  About half of the spaces are short back-ins that were perfect for the Caravel but wouldn’t have worked for the 30-foot Safari.

I have to take this opportunity to gripe about a small thing.  Many state parks use an honor system for late arrivals.  You fill out a little envelope and put your nightly camping fee in it.  This envelope gets deposited into an “iron ranger” (a metal box) and picked up by the staff daily.  You have to indicate your campsite on the envelope, but you haven’t gotten a campsite yet, which means you have to go to the campground, find a site, then come back to the iron ranger.

At Monahans the iron ranger is at the entrance gate, but the campground is about 1.3 miles away.  By the time I was parked in the site, it was nearly dark.  Being an overnight stop I would have preferred not to unhitch but I also wasn’t psyched to walk 2.6 miles roundtrip in the dark along a narrow, winding, shoulder-less road in the cold.  I wanted to make dinner and fire up Calcifer, and I also needed to refill the water tank.  To get it all done quickly, the easiest thing was to unhitch and drive back to the entrance gate to deposit my envelope.  Other state parks set up two iron rangers, one at the gate and one at the campground for the convenience of their visitors, so there’s my suggestion to the powers-that-be.

This minor quibble aside, I liked the park, which is billed as the “Sahara of the Southwest.”  It’s not perfect by any means, but it is very scenic for a place that’s just off a major Interstate.  The downsides stem from the fact that this is oil country.  I caught an occasional whiff of petroleum in the air, and through the night I could hear the sound of an oil well being drilled somewhere off to the northwest:  WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP-whumpwhumpwhump…

The morning found me with 555 miles to go.  I debated whether to plow ahead or to stop along the way.  There were places I would have liked to stop, and friends to visit, but there was also a place I wanted to be more, namely home with E&E. Back in Tucson they were decorating the house for Halloween, and Eleanor was cooking things.  On the other hand, in the Caravel I’d discovered yet another leak, this time under the kitchen faucet.  I took this as a sign that I needed to get back to home base and have a long chat with the Caravel (wrench in hand) about its incontinence problem.

To be fair, the trailer is doing spectacularly well, especially considering its age.  (The leaks are all from the same type of flexible plastic faucet hose, at the compression fittings.  I don’t know if they are failing from age, heat, bad design, or over-tightening, but they are all getting replaced this week.)  Other than that, the Caravel has performed admirably.  We covered 1,000 miles at highway speeds, and encountered some pretty awful back roads too.  Not a rivet was disturbed on its tight little structure.

More important, I was entirely comfortable through the entire trip, with my little aluminum soap bubble to house me at night and Calcifer to keep me warm.  No matter how much I had to drive, at the end of every day I knew I would be back in my home, with my familiar things and favorite foods waiting.  An Airstream really is a moving castle, where you have everything you need with you no matter where in the world you go.  This is the magic of trailer travel.  Even though I just finished unpacking from this trip, I’m looking forward to the next one already.  Most likely it will be in mid-December.

Hey, a day that went entirely according to plan!  That almost never happens, and especially when the plan includes a nearly impossible sequence of events like today’s did.

I started up at 5:30 local time in Santa Fe (an hour earlier than Tucson time, so 4:30 to my body clock).   I was the first guy at the motel’s continental breakfast at 6:10 a.m.  While I munched a bowl of cereal and yogurt I watched the local weather guru predicting a sharp drop in temperatures, gusty winds, and probably snow showers in the coming evening.  Time to blow out of town, I thought.

And so I did, with the ’56 Bubble complacently tagging along.  The trailer towed like a dream all day, even (once I adjusted the tongue weight and got my courage up) at a rollicking 70 MPH along the byways of west Texas.  I kept checking the tires, the bearings, the hitch, and the lights, but found no problems at all. The only minor issue was that a window cracked early on, which I taped up.  It was probably caused by flexing of the trailer body.  The trailer is known to have some floor rot, which will cause such issues.  I can’t blame it for being a bit crotchety, after all it has been on the road for more than half a century.  Eventually it will be all fixed up and I am looking forward to seeing it.

(Sorry for no pictures.  I was moving so fast and stopping so little that I never broke out the camera.  I wish I had taken a few more shots of the Bubble in action.  This is one of those times that I need a co-pilot just to help document the trip.  I tried to recruit a couple of buddies last week, but nobody was available.)

Fast-forward 520 miles:  I landed at my destination in Texas by 5 p.m., dropped off the trailer, visited with my friends for an hour, and pushed on 100 more miles to Paradise TX.  It was 8 p.m. by the time I arrived at Paul & Anne’s house, pitch-black out there in the countryside, and I found the Caravel neatly parked in the same place we had parked our Safari just about a month ago.  It was plugged in, with a full fresh water tank, and the refrigerator cooling.  After 1140 miles of driving in the past two days, the warm glow of the Caravel was a welcome sight indeed.

Now I’m set up inside, refrigerator loaded with drinks and snacks, my clothes put away, laptop and wireless Internet all set up, bed made — in other words, Home Sweet Home.  But I get only one night to relax because sometime tomorrow I will be hitching up and following Paul, Anne and Pat (in a third trailer) over to do some early setup for a weekend rally in the Grasslands.

The weather is supposed to be abysmal tomorrow (rain, 54 degrees) but who cares?  The early arrivals at these things are always good people to hang with — and if I don’t feel like going outside I can stay inside the Caravel and watch the rain while I do a little catchup work on the computer.  Now that the hard part of this trip is done, it feels like any small challenge I might face in the next couple of days will be absolutely nothing.

It has been a good day.  I launched from Tucson about 8 a.m. and figured I had plenty of time to make my 5:30 appointment in Santa Fe.  The weather was as perfect as I’d expect from the southwest in October, traffic on I-10 was light, and at 75 MPH (the speed limit) it looked like smooth sailing.

Alas, I forgot that this time of year it’s an hour later in New Mexico.  Arizona doesn’t observe Daylight Savings but New Mexico does.  Drat.  I trimmed my breaks to the bare minimum and opened up the throttle a tad.  The GL’s great range meant that I wouldn’t have a fuel stop all day, and Eleanor had packed snacks for the car, which meant that in 500 miles I only stopped three times for about five minutes each.  It all worked out.  By 4:30 I was in Santa Fe.

So I was an hour early for my appointment downtown, which gave me time to go check out the Bubble.  It was parked in a storage lot amidst a forest of weeds and sandspurs, which made kneeling down to check the underside a literal pain.  It had a cracked window, a bit of drooping belly pan (which I’m going to keep an eye on), the brakes don’t work, and the interior is gutted.  But it’s a cute little thing, only 15 feet long, and it’s one of those trailers that has obvious potential for an owner who cares to invest a lot of time and/or money.  I like it but I like the fact that the Caravel is done, more.  I taped the cracked glass, attached the temporary Texas ferry permit, and tested the 7-blade to 6-pin adapter to make sure the lights worked.  All good.

Since my next stop was downtown, I didn’t want to take the Bubble just yet.  In town I met Rebecca, who co-owns a food trailer called “Slurp.”  We had a very rushed photo shoot, trying to beat the sunset, and then I headed back to the storage lot to hitch up the Bubble.

It was nearly dark, so I worked by the light of a headlamp.  That’s when I discovered that the hitch mount I had brought was too low for the trailer.  The ball needed to be removed and installed upside down so that instead of yielding a two-inch drop, the mount would give a 3/4″ rise.  They’re designed for that.

I was patting myself on the back for being ready for this possibility. I brought with me a massive wrench specifically for the nut on a hitch ball.  Problem was, I couldn’t get the nut off. I fought with it for a while, and then of course the rain started.  That’s how it goes, from self-congratulation to humbleness in just a few minutes.  Eventually I got the nut off and completed the hitching job, installed the temporary license plate, and gave the whole trailer a good look-over one more time.  Then I slowly towed it through the lot with the windows open to listen for horrible sounds of impending mechanical failure (there were none), paused a few times to check that the umbilical line wasn’t binding, and got going to the hotel for the night.

Tomorrow will be another big day on the road.  The trip plan calls for 520 miles and they won’t be fast ones like I enjoyed today.  The tires on this trailer are from 2004, and atop that I am not yet sure that there’s sufficient tongue weight in the trailer (because it’s gutted).  Insufficient tongue weight can cause a dangerous sway at speed.   I’m going to load all my heavy stuff into the front of the trailer in the morning just to add some insurance, and I’ll be stopping several times in the first hour or two, to check everything over.

But I have to admit that I already like this little trailer.  It’s cute as a button, light as a feather, and it seems to be happy behind the Mercedes.  Tomorrow I wouldn’t be surprised to get a few thumbs-up from people on the highway as we toodle along through Texas.

Once again I am compelled to start the blog with the phrase, WE ARE FINE.  Yesterday some large dust storms swept across I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix, resulting in several major accidents, deaths, and closure of the Interstate for hours.  We were 300 miles away at the time.  We are coming home from Texas, and so wouldn’t be traveling that section of road west of Tucson anyway.  These dust storms are a serious problem and I hope that some better safeguards can be put in place for travelers so that we never see such a horrible series of pileups again.

In contrast, we were in west Texas last night and enjoyed a very pleasant drive down the last of Texas Rt 180 to the El Paso area.  Normally I hate going through El Paso with the trailer, as traffic on I-10 can be hairy. This time we were well positioned to try the Rt 375 loop around El Paso through Ft Bliss and Franklin Mountain State Park. That turned out to be a great way to go, except for the grade up the Franklin Mountains on the section known as the “Woodrow Bean Transmountain Drive.”  The GL320 didn’t like that.  Most of the time it does very well but with 7,500 pounds of trailer attached it does tend to bog down on grades over 8%.  Like the diesel Mercedes of the 1970s, it will always get there — just not very quickly.

The best thing about this route is that it drops you off very close to Rudy’s.  This is the last stop for Texas barbecue heading west.  We picked up a couple of pounds of brisket since it freezes well, and a bit more to give to friends in Tucson who have been watching our house.  From there, it’s quick two hour drive across southern New Mexico to Deming, where we have parked at Rockhound State Park, a place we have visited before.

The same weather pattern that brought dust storms to Tucson sparked numerous thunderstorms sound of here.  The campground at Rockhound sits on an amphitheater-like slope which gave us a fantastic view of the lightning all evening.  We got rumbles and a few spatters of rain but otherwise it was just a clear balmy night with a show provided by nature.

Eleanor filled up the memory card of her camera taking pictures of the scene (as you can see here, using the bumper of the car as a platform), and trying to capture some of the lightning on video (unfortunately, not very successful).  It was that kind of photogenic night, but I didn’t take a single photo with the D90.  I just wanted to watch it all happen.

From here our next stop is home.  Work has been piling up on me the past few days, and Emma needs to get her orthodontic repair.  For the last few days I’ve had a list growing of things that need to be done in order to make a smooth transition back to home life, and more things that need doing once we are settled.

From prior years I know that the hardest part of coming off a long trip is the psychological aspect.  It’s jarring to suddenly be parked at home after weeks or months away.  Nowhere to go, nothing new to see, just the routine of suburbia.  It can be a little depressing after the sustained exultation of a new place every few days.

That’s why I develop lists and ideas of things I want to do once we get home.  Being busy upon arrival helps smooth the transition, and the list gives us all things to anticipate.  The season is becoming ideal for travel and exploration in southern Arizona, so we’ll definitely look for outdoor things to keep us busy.

The immediate tasks are less interesting.  When we leave the house I use USAA’s “store vehicle” feature on the cars we’ve left behind, which cuts our insurance premium by 60%.  Now that we’re coming back, I need to get online or make a quick call to restore coverage.  Likewise, I’ll call our DSL provider and remove the “vacation hold” on that service, set up a new mail forwarding schedule with St Brendan’s Isle so that our mail comes to the house weekly, and finally put the Verizon Wireless air card on hold since we won’t be using it for a few months.  These little tricks save us hundreds of dollars every time we go on a long trip (or come home), so it’s worth exploring what services you can suspend when you travel too.

With repairs completed, we headed out from Paradise on Saturday morning.  The air conditioner is working well, and the refrigerator seems to be passable.  No cause was found for the refrigerator warming up into the 50s on hot days, but it works well enough when ambient temps are below 90, so we are just rolling with it (literally) for now.

Still, until Saturday we weren’t sure if the thing was just going to croak, so Eleanor kept cooking up things from the freezer.  On Thursday night she fed seven of us, on Friday she did it again, and on Saturday morning we had five for brunch.  It was like we were hosting a small rally, inclusive of meals.   We spent the balance of Saturday morning retrieving all of our stuff, which had become spread out across the Mayeux’s home, their little cottage, and the shop, and got on the road at a leisurely 2 p.m.

With our plans once again in disarray and this late start, we decided to tow just 97 miles to Breckenridge TX along Rt 180 and visit our friends Erica and Jef.  I last dropped in on them in April after dropping off the Caravel.  Once again Eleanor made dinner for all (risotto and salad, simple but great), Erica made brownies for dessert and we topped them with a little leftover chocolate ganache.  In the morning I had wanted an early start for a big day on the road, but with various putterings and ablutions and visiting we didn’t hit the road until well past 11.

So where to go now?  One of our earlier plans had called for going to Carlsbad Caverns National Park for a ranger-led tour of one Slaughter Cave.  This was no longer possible since the tour is offered only on weekends, but we realized that continuing across Texas on Route 180 and stopping at Carlsbad on the way to Tucson was actually 18 miles shorter than sticking to the Interstate.  So we resurrected Plan G (or was it Plan H?) and took the scenic route across west Texas.

Some people might say there’s not much to see along Rt 180, but those would be people who haven’t traveled I-20 west of Midland/Odessa.  It is true that the route is sometimes deadly boring and straight through dry cotton fields, but then it is peppered with little one-stoplight towns (each with a steakhouse) and little businesses that reveal the nature of this land: oil field service, farm equipment, and uncrowded fuel stations with dyed diesel for off-road use.  Crossing into New Mexico there are massive operations for potash, salt, and — in the wide-open spaces of desert & prairie — landfills.  The rest of the road provides plenty of opportunity for conversation with one’s passengers.

I actually preferred the drive to I-20 by a long shot, at least when towing.  The speed limit runs 65-70 most of the time, which is more than enough for the towing purposes, and there are always opportunities for pleasant breaks in the many roadside Texas picnic areas.  If I were not towing and just trying to get across the country quickly, then I-20 makes more sense because of the amazing 85 MPH speed limit along part of the route (75 the rest of the way).

We’ve been here a few times before, so we know that White’s City (which is actually just a small arrangement of tourist businesses at the side of the road just outside Carlsbad Caverns National Park) is the closest camping to Carlsbad Caverns.  The campground is not much, but at least they’ve improved it since the last time we were here. The rusted-out grills have been replaced with new ones and the electric hookups seem to be new (although ours still didn’t work– had to borrow the one from the next site).  Now you’ve got to show up with a 50-amp adapter because the RV area no longer has 30-amp plugs.  Fortunately, that’s part of our regular equipment.

Our plan tonight is just to lay low after the long drive across Texas and get ready to visit the caves tomorrow. I’ll report on Carlsbad in the next blog.

Remember that 1970s-era Euro-pop tune by Kraftwerk?  “Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn”  (English: We drive drive drive on the motorway) That pretty well sums up the past two days.

We just needed to get the Airstream from the panhandle of Florida to north Texas as expediently as possible, and for that job there’s nothing like a nice boring Interstate highway.  Load the snacks, the podcasts, and some books and and the Gameboy for Emma — we’re going to check out half a dozen Interstate rest areas along I-10, I-49, and I-20!  Woo-hoo!

After an unremarkable overnight in Alexandria LA, where the height of excitement was discovering that we had accidentally spent the night parked next to a sign that said “NO OVERNIGHT PARKING,” we plowed up through Louisiana and across north Texas into the dark heart of the Dallas/Ft Worth metroplex.  The Louisiana roads were fine, quiet and even a bit scenic, but I do not enjoy the D/FW traffic nightmare when towing.  We encountered about 40 miles of construction zones (narrow lanes, signs missing, Jersey barriers) and the usual maniacal drivers making high-speed radical drifts across three lanes right in front of us while texting.

Twice we were forced off the road by a combination of “Exit Only” lanes that weren’t marked in the construction zones and drivers who would absolutely not let us enter “their” lanes.  At one point I decided to assert the mighty power of a 48-foot rig and almost literally crushed a small econobox that was being obnoxious.  He got the message. But most of the time we played nice and tried to be steady and smooth as much as the twisting and crazy construction zones would let us.

We survived D/FW once again and eventually emerged on the northwest side near Decatur.  We are now parked at Paul Mayeux’s home, where he is running his own 2-man Airstream service center.  Long-time readers will recall that last April I left our Caravel here for repairs and never got back to pick it up. So now we have two Airstreams here at Paul’s, 900 miles from home.

Our primary reason for coming here was to get a new air conditioner installed.  We’re going with a 15K BTU model (high capacity than the 13.5K model it is replacing).  We’re skipping the expensive dual AC/heat pump unit because we hardly ever used the heat pump and we have two other sources of heat anyway (furnace and catalytic heater).  That saves about $450.  Paul and Denver (who used to work on our Airstream when Roger Williams Airstream in nearby Weatherford was in business) will install the AC on Friday.

It always seems that when we get to a service center we find a bunch more things to fix or check.  During our last two days of roadtrip we’ve noticed that the refrigerator has climbed up to 52 degrees during the day.  That’s very bad, because it could indicate a failing cooling unit, which is very expensive.  The fridge has been running on gas during this time, so Paul checked the gas pressure with a manometer first and found that our pressure was below spec.  We adjusted the regulator and left the fridge running in a test mode (basically at top cooling capacity) all night to see if it would cool down.  This morning it is showing 42 degrees, which is better but not yet good enough.

Since it was packed full of food (thermal mass), it may be that a few more hours are needed to reach optimal temp (somewhere in the low 30s).  These gas absorption-type refrigerators are very slow to remove heat relative to your home refrigerator that uses an electric compressor.  That’s why you have to start them the day before you go on a trip.  Today we are expecting highs in the upper 90s, so it’s a good test day. If the fridge continues to cool, we’re fine, but if not, we’ll have to dig a little deeper to find the root cause.

We’ve also noticed that the bathroom vent fan seems to drip a little in the rain even when closed.  It probably has a crack in the plastic, so we’re anticipating replacing it on Friday as well.  That’s not a major job.

Parked next to us is a Canadian couple in an Argosy who are here for installation of solar panels, Marvin and Annie.  We’ve met before, way back in 2005 when Project Vintage Thunder was first displayed (unpainted and incomplete) at the Florida State Rally in Sarasota.  They remembered us and Vintage Thunder.  So it’s like being in a little campground here at the shop.

The best news we’ve had so far is that nights up here are cooling down nicely.  We’re getting 65 degrees by daybreak, and the humidity is low, so even without AC at the moment it’s very comfortable.  We finally used a blanket on the bed last night.  And added to that, we zipped up to Decatur last night and got our first Texas barbecue dinner of this trip, which is always something that makes us all happy.  I don’t know why, I guess it’s just a tradition now.  Memories of other great trips.

I hope that this will be the last maintenance post for a while.  It’s good to have gotten things tweaked and fixed but I’d rather write about our travels.

Just to wrap up the repair saga, Super Terry came through with an amazing job on the Dometic AC/heat pump.  He salvaged the 1/4 hp electric motor from another unit and installed it in ours starting at about 6:30 Monday evening.  The job, conducted entirely atop the roof of the Airstream, took until about 9:30 pm, so mostly in the dark by flashlights.

I went up and down the ladder a dozen times to fetch tools as requested, and otherwise just stood at the top of the rungs admiring a mechanic with 30 years of experience solving what appeared to me to be an insoluble problem. That unit is not designed for easy serviceability, and the motor didn’t come out without a fight.  But at the end it was in, the whole thing went back together and upon testing it ran like new.  I’m amazed and grateful that this effort allowed us to avoid an expensive replacement, which is normally the only option.

For those who suffer this issue, believe your mechanic when he says the best fix is a whole new air conditioner.  Counting the time it took to salvage the motor from another unit, Super Terry put in a solid five hours on the job.  He did this as a friendly favor, but if I were paying shop rates it would have been probably $500 plus parts, and I’m left with a 6-year-old unit that probably will have some other fatal issue in a few years.  At the risk of sounding like an old RV codger, they just don’t make ‘em like they used to.  Hopefully ours will hold on for a few more years but I’m not expecting decades of service.

With the late dinner and the usual post-dinner conversation it was a late night, and then this morning we had a slow-motion getaway.  It was 11 a.m. before we got on the road, westbound for Alabama.  We got as far as 30 miles past Atlanta (hit downtown right at rush hour, which was challenging), then stopped for dinner and overnight parking in a private lot. It’s pouring rain tonight, so I’m very glad we resolved the leak in the Fan-Tastic Vent.

Our goal tomorrow is Birmingham.  It’s a city we’ve never visited, and there are a few sights we want to see there, which I’ll write about in future posts.  From there, our travel plan is basically to head back to Tucson in two weeks or less.  We’re going to leave the exact stops loose, but this is familiar territory so if we want something different we’ll have to divert plenty from the beaten path.  There are a few days built into the schedule for that.

The big splurge of our two-week return budget is going to be this weekend.  I’ve actually made reservations — a rare thing indeed — for a park in the Florida panhandle for four nights.  We all want beach time, to fill that piece of our souls and sustain us through the dry interim in the southwest this winter.  Detouring to the panhandle will add 300 miles to our route but I’m sure it will be well worth it.

So that’s the sum total of our remaining travel “plan.”  Not much, really.   Rather than figure it all out, we’ll let circumstances and whimsy suggest the opportunities.  In the nearly 1,900 miles ahead, I have a feeling we’ll find more than a few interesting things.

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!