Category Archives: Airstream

Go east, old man!

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We set up a plan to meet the Chen’s(George and Marcia) in Kingman, AZ about a week after we were to leave Redding. We drove down to Sparks NV and stayed at the Sparks Marina RV Park. It was a nice place to stay but it was HOT! We stayed in a back-in space around the perimeter and ended up with a bad black ant infestation! After a few cans of ant spray and not having any part of the trailer touch the dirt, we recovered. We headed toward Vegas but stopped overnight in Tonopah, NV. Not much there but more than I thought!

We planned to stay in Vegas and found a different place to stay there. The Clark County Shooting Complex! It is in North Las Vegas, very north, up an incline with a great view of the entire basin. This is a pretty amazing setup. They have different shooting areas for pistols, rifles, shotguns, and archery. They have a campground (think tents) and a very stark RV park. It is gravel parking with full hookups for $30/night. We needed the 50amp because it was hot there also! It was good to stop as we had to sign some papers for refinancing our home. The mobile notary came to our trailer and we signed away. She said it was the first time she ever signed in an RV.

We did an overnight in Kingman to break up the drive to Flagstaff. The morning we left Kingman we stopped by the Discount Tire store. When I had them put in the TPMS senders in the trailer in Visalia, I had always had issues with one specific tire slowly losing air pressure. I had stopped previously about this in Redding and Medford with no great resolution. We had to wait at least 2 hours for them to look at but they DID fix it!

We headed to the Flagstaff KOA to meet our friends. We have been trying to stay in this campground for years! It always seems to be booked when we want to go there. The story with this KOA is that the owner (before he passed) was my mother’s boyfriend for many years. A few years after my father died in 2002 my mother moved to Arizona and started the relationship. The KOA has since been sold to the owners of the Chula Vista KOA and time moves on!

Then Chen’s arrived about 2 hours after us (they drove from the LA Basin that day) and we knew they would be tired. We went out to get a bite to eat. The weather was so nice and cool in Flagstaff! On the drive to Flagstaff, we hit some monsoon-like torrential downpours which dirtied up our nice clean trailer.

The next morning we all headed off, caravanning east! The weather started to heat up a bit and we started doing touristy stuff. We stopped off in Winslow AZ to stand on the corner:

We had stopped here before in 2009 on our way to the Balloon Fiesta with Bob & Phyllis:

A new addition is the Route 66 sign at the intersection:

We had lunch at La Posada hotel and continued down the road. Heading to Gallup NM for the next one-night stop.

We figured out a great way to travel together that was easy for both of us. We both don’t mind using our cruise controls when traveling. However, no two vehicles have cruise controls that will be perfectly synced. One will be either too slow or too fast compared to the other one. My truck has a feature called adaptive cruise control. It uses a radar system to keep a specific distance between you and the vehicle in front of you up to the speed you set. So George would travel in front at a specific speed set on his cruise control. I would follow with mine set also and it would keep us just the right distance apart.

Day 2 of our travels had us destined for Santa Fe NM. George had a friend he wanted to visit just outside of town so we stayed 3 nights there. We stayed at The Trailer Ranch RV Resort. It is a great little RV park in town but not downtown. I recommended a stay there if you can.

We had two incidents with the trailer while staying there. We had to disconnect the trailer to get in the spot, which we would do anyway. We had to put the orange lego blocks under the tires to level and we used the lego wheel chock to keep the tires on there. Ever since the trailer rolled off the blocks in Desert Hot Springs, I have been gun shy. We disconnected and moved the truck away and the trailer rolled off the blocks again! The chock was not attached correctly. This time we jacked up the trailer and put it on the ball and set it up right this time!

George and Marcia went to visit their friends a bit and we met all of them later in the afternoon. We went to Bandelier National Monument which is a site of some ancient dwellings. There are a lot of these locations throughout this area. We went on a hike and saw the sites.

The next day we got to do laundry but in the evening we went to downtown Santa Fe and walked around the old church there:

We were preparing to leave Santa Fe and I was dumping the holding tanks. Then the second incident happened. I have started a procedure where I block off the sewer hose with an attachable valve, I then backfill the tank (grey or black) with a hose. This works best when you DON’T block off BOTH tanks with their valves. This is what I did. I filled it with the hose but there is only limited space in between all three closed valves and something has to give. What gave was a rubber connector between two pieces of hard pipe. It appears that the pressure built up and relieved it right there. However, I did not know that when it actually happened. I thought the worst. I had just repaired/rebuilt the entire valve setup under the tanks. I thought I had broken a piece. George was nice enough to crawl under the trailer, take off the metal plate covering the valves and investigate. We found nothing wrong. I felt much better but still thought about it numerous times.

Off to our next stop near the eastern border of New Mexico. It was here that we were able to find alternate routes to travel instead of sticking on the Interstates. We continued east from Santa Fe to Las Vegas (NM), and then started on New Mexico route 104. The road takes us to Tucumcari over 110 miles of a lot of nothing. It was wonderful. We started up at a higher altitude and dropped down over the course of the route.

We had some lunch in Tucumcari at Del’s:

A few other sights in Tucumcari. The Blue Swallow Hotel:

The Route 66 Memorial:

We ended up the night at Ute Lake State Park for a whopping $18/night.

The next day was a big day. We had a lot of stops to make on our journey east. We were heading into our state. Texas! The first stop was in Adrian, the mid-point of Route 66:

Our next stop was Amarillo TX. We were going to have lunch at Longhorn Steakhouse as it was my birthday and I love to go to Longhorn. We needed to stop at Sam’s Club for fuel and Walmart for supplies. However, as we drove into Amarillo from the west we noticed a bunch of people on the frontage road. It was Cadillac Ranch!

Obviously we want back to see it. After lunch we stopped at Conway to see an alternative to the Cadillac Ranch. The Slug Bug Ranch:

The next roadside attraction was The Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ in Groom TX. A 40 story high cross with the stations of the crosses around it. A replica of the tomb and much more:

And at the other end of Groom was the Leaning Tower of Texas:

We ended up the night just over the Oklahoma border at the Double D RV Park, a Passport America park for $14/night:

So, this old man, his wife and friends are still going east!

Reminiscing in Redding

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We made it to Redding and stayed at the Premier RV Resorts, asking for a shady spot for a week. We got a surprisingly shady one across the creek and near the back. Some of you know the history of this location but for those of you who don’t, I will enlighten you. If this is old news, just skim through it.

My history, with my family, of Airstream travel, has been documented on this blog. However, with a love of RVing, comes a love of camping whether it is in a government campground or private RV park. In 1970 we were living in Thousand Oaks CA, my father working for Westinghouse and we were camping whenever we could. Westinghouse decided to close the office where my father was employed. They gave him the choice of moving to Baltimore MD or leaving Westinghouse. Growing up in the Pittsburgh PA area, he chose to leave. His next move was to purchase a KOA in Redding CA!

I was 10 years old when we moved there in January, and I was ‘privileged’ to change schools in mid-year! We were now owners of a campground and we got to see the other side of RV’ing.

It was interesting growing up on a campground during my ‘teenish’ years. During the non-school days, I had a built-in job, working all summer at the campground. My job usually involved cleaning the bathrooms!

My parents did a lot of improvements to the campground over the 10 years they owned it. One addition was the expansion of sites on the other side of our creek. We added about 40 extra sites and had to build a bathroom there (I am standing by the door of it above). Since they were on the other side of the creek, a bridge needed to be built.

I don’t have a picture of the original bridge, which was just a set of culverts covered by dirt and asphalt. I do have a picture of the current version of the original bridge:

Ironically, it still looks basically the same. A level of concrete, and asphalt egress, has been added but it still will flood just like it used to. It happened to us many times, the heavy rains came, the creek swelled and we would have about a foot or two of water rushing over the top (like the washes in Texas)! This made it very difficult for RVs on the other side of the creek to get out. We needed a second bridge.

My dad, being a frugal person, found a different solution than a fully engineered and commercially constructed bridge. He decided to use a railroad boxcar. Now, this might have been taking his love of trains a bit too far! He purchased a boxcar, had the top portion cut off, leaving just the floor and frame underneath. Concrete supports were placed at each end and they placed the boxcar:

My dad thought there might be some trepidation from people that needed to use it so he took some promo shots showing it was safe:

He drove our trailer on the bridge to show the strength. We ended up using it a lot during flooding and even when the creek was dry. It took some very precise alignment when crossing the bridge and straight-line accuracy. Flash-forward to now:

The bridge is still standing! Some enhancements have been made and it is no longer in regular use for RVs, but you can bike or walk across it whenever you want. At the behest of some neighbors in the park, I asked if we could pull our current Airstream on the bridge to recreate my dad’s shot. My request was not received favorably, so this is all you get.

We have visited the old KOA (as we call it) numerous times in the past few years. It is very strange to call them as they still have the same phone number (albeit with a different area code): 246-0101. Since we were a KOA, in the phone book we were listed along with radio and TV stations (young people, Google ‘phonebook’). We would get phone calls from people and they would request a specific song to play. After many times, explaining we were not a radio station, but a campground, we came across a better response. We would tell them we would try to get that song on the air and hang up.

The staff at the current campground have learned who I am during this time (we still have not received any free nights – wink) and I have sent them many old pictures in the past:

They even have taken some of the photos and made a collage they have in their Rec room:

You can never really go back to the way things were but you can always relive memories. That is what happens whenever we go camping here.