TRAVEL COMMEMORATIVE IDEA FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

A few months back, I went fishing for novel travel commemorative ideas on Air Forums and, while many good ideas were floated in that thread, nothing quite resonated with me for my intended purposes with our Airstream Interstate motorhome.

My goal was to improve upon a tradition I started more than a decade ago when I was a tent-camper and began recording the locations of my overnights on the rain fly of my REI Half Dome II.  The idea was that, once this tent was worn out, I could take a pair of scissors and cut out this section of the fly and frame it for wall display, as a memento of all those trips.  But obviously this wasn't a very sophisticated means of commemoration - the Sharpie faded over time, and I was not consistent about recording my destinations - many weeks of camping and entire states got accidentally left off this list.  

My chosen improvement - small aluminum trophy plates!!

They look spiffy, they are inexpensive, and they are extremely versatile - they could be incorporated into a wide variety of crafty commemorative ideas.

The supplier I chose was the eBayer known as Tajave.  If multiple plates are ordered, shipping gets combined, so the effective price converges toward $1.75 apiece.  

In part, my choice was a nod to NASA and its proud tradition of making commemorative wall plaques to acknowledge each of its individual missions.  This is my husband (an aerospace engineer) and teenage daughter inside the Apollo era Mission Control Center last week, when we had the great privilege of attending a showing of the movie Apollo 13 here in the location where it actually happened.

We don't use our Airstream Interstate in the manner of casual retirees who take frequent long and relaxing vacations.  Some of my trips really are "missions" of a sort, but I won't get into that here. 

I wanted to make the trophy plates look as Airstream-y as possible, so the first detail I looked into was typography.

This is "the" Airstream font, but I did not think it would lend itself very well to engraving - it's kinda busy.  Screengrabbed from Google.  

Airstream itself does not use "the" Airstream font.  I took a screengrab of their current corporate logo and ran it through the WhatTheFont webpage to see if I could identify it.

Really?  OK.

So, no definite ID on Airstream's chosen font but it was close enough to all-caps Arial Black so that I just went with that.  And I requested rounded corners on the plates to correspond to the Airstream window shapes.  And the black plates correspond well to the black trim around our Interstate's windows, to maximize artistic cross-referencing (these little plates can be ordered a variety of ways depending on one's style and usage goals).

I tend to change my mind routinely where artistic expressions are concerned - I like to keep my future options open.

I'm commencing my Airstream Interstate overnight commemorative list by using the product known as Skinny Strips, which is the same product I currently use for photo display (I recently replaced my initial art focal wall idea with these - what did I say above?  I like to change my mind).  

Here is the initial reveal... bear in mind that we are still newbies and we had a winter filled with terrible weather during which not much recreation could be enjoyed.

There they are on the left - only four overnight destinations so far - bummer (but more are planned).  Each of the shorter Skinny Strips is capable of accommodating nine different place names.  

Skinny strips are intended to be used with super-strong magnets - that's what's holding the pictures and artwork in the photo you see above.  But for the aluminum trophy plates, I used double-sided adhesive.

One could instead stick these onto a refrigerator door.  One could run a succession of them down the wet bath door.  Or across the ceiling.  The display and crafting possibilities are endless. 

Much like my REI tent, one day our Interstate will also wear out.  At that point I will remove the sequence of place names from the Skinny Strips or the ceiling of the vehicle or from wherever else we manage to stick them, and I use them some other way - in a photo album, in a wall frame, or some other idea.

Aluminum goodness!!  A lot of fun can be had with this commemorative method.  One of the things I did was order a bunch of intended destinations in advance - places to which my husband and I are aspiring to take our Interstate. What if we were to flip the not-yet-visited place names upside down and then just picked one?  Would that be a good way to decide where we are traveling next?
:-)

I put the pending trip plates into my "take with" 3-ring binder of important Interstate documents, which is the pared-down set of insurance, roadside assistance, users manuals, etc. that stay in the Interstate during travel (I reduced the total load from Airstream's original as-delivered 10 pounds of documents to just 3 pounds of the most important stuff).

I used a business card plastic sleeve to separate them so they won't get scratched up. As each trip is taken, I can peel the place names out of here and add them to the wall in real time, so that I won't accidentally skip any or get them out of order like I did years ago with the place names that I wrote on my tent.  

Small-world factoid: With all the jiggling and jostling that takes place in the Interstate, I decided to use this compound rubber band to hold the book tightly closed, so that I would not have individual trophy plates drop or slide out of their sleeves by accident.  I bought this rubber band several years back in Bavaria after finding it in a curio shop.  Then, when I was writing this post, I decided to research the source of it.  It turns out that it is called a Hercules rubber band which is apparently sold only by the German company known as Manufactum.  So my German Sprinter's reference book is bound by a German device in an unintentionally odd and unrelated purchasing coincidence.  

So there's the present incarnation of the travel commemorative.  Happy Airstreaming!

Said the former tent-camper, now RV-camper.  It sure is more comfortable camping in the Interstate, especially in bad winters such as the one we just had. 

FANTASTIC VENT COVER INSTALLATION ON AN AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

I mentioned in the post tag-lined "the hike that didn't happen" that our area has been receiving abnormally heavy rain.

Several hundred percent of normal on the upper Texas coast, in fact. 

When we bought our 2007 Airstream Interstate, it did not come with an external rain shield for the Fantastic vent fan.  Therefore we had to add one.  Given the recent rain intensity and my propensity toward boondocking (which means I can't run the A/C and need the Fantastic to ventilate the Interstate for long periods as a result, particularly in conditions of high humidity), it became an urgent necessity, which resulted in us doing a quickie installation instead of our typical thorough work (read: no scope creep on this job even though it probably needed it).

We could tell that all was not perfect when we pulled out four of the screws from the existing sealed vent perimeter, because they were heavily rusted below the heads, which they should not have been.  But more on that in a minute. 

There are several vent cover brands on the market, but we selected the Fantastic Ultra Breeze vent cover for three reasons.

1. It was advertised as being compatible with the Fantastic vent fan in our Interstate, to the extent that we would not have to drill any new holes in our roof to add it.  
2. It gets excellent reviews on the internet.  Five out of five stars on Camping World - that's rare. 
3. It was promoted as not restricting air flow or stressing the existing fan motor, as this video shows.

URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1fhkbl_1yQ

Embed:

The following short series of pics shows the installation, which is quite a simple process.

Whence that screwy screw came:  You simply remove four existing screws from the sides of the vent, screws that correspond to the brackets for the cover.  

Put a dab of RV elastomeric sealant over each hole.  One day I will re-do the existing re-seal that was done here.  It's pretty sloppy.  

Add the brackets to each hole.  Fortunately, the cover came with replacement screws, because we needed them. 

And then the cover attaches with cotter pins. 

I have no complaints about this cover.  It does not make noise during high speed driving (we were worried about that because it is not sealed to the roof and there is a gap at the bottom - we were afraid it would whistle but it does not).  I have driven with the Fantastic open and left the fan open in torrential rain without incident.  One day I will get around to climbing up there and re-doing all that sloppy sealant, but until that time, this arrangement appears as if it will work just fine.

Well, in the subtropics, RV season never really stops.  Much like the rain this year. 

Little Lake Creek Wilderness, and the hike that didn't happen

Ah, the rain insane stays mainly in the coastal plane.  After suffering through a drought of record that apparently peaked in 2011, it seems this year that the precip is never planning to stop here on the upper Texas coast.

This is what the radar looks like as I write this post.  It wasn't any better two days ago when I was up in the Sam Houston National Forest.  

Ordinarily I would not venture out in that kind of weather, but I had business in the area and I decided to divert for an overnight boondock.  I was hoping the rain would let up long enough for me to explore a trail or two in the 3,800-acre Little Lake Creek Wilderness Area.

I saw a lake, alright, but it wasn't where it was reported on the map.  It commenced in the parking lot and continued over basically the entire wilderness.  The ditches in the area were overflowing onto the FM roads, which is something you don't see every day.  

Not looking good, is it??  But I had journeyed all the way to this trailhead north of Montgomery, Texas, so I had to at least give it a proverbial shot.  A token effort.  

The ground was so saturated that every step was a slip 'n' slide.  The trail is not well-compacted and has not been mulched or covered in aggregate.  This is good information to know.  In heavy rain, it's almost impassable.  I couldn't walk more than about one mile an hour due to the uncertain footing in these conditions.  

This bridge sorta summed up my mood.  

Signs pointing east and west toward areas of interest that I will have to return one drier day to explore.  

This guy was trying to keep from drowning.  Hug that sign!

I hiked for about 20 minutes total, but the downpour was so intense that it was literally deafening on my umbrella.  This is where zip-off pants really come in handy, though.  The umbrella kept the top part of me relatively dry, and I was able to remove and wring out the pant legs without having to get undressed.  I hung them up to dry using Container Store's magnet clips.  

All was not lost, however, as I had a peaceful and relaxing boondock that night in the nearby Conroe area.  We are drawing closer to the time of year where boondocking will be difficult to impossible due to the subtropical summer heat.  Our Interstate has an Onan generator that will run the coach A/C, but I find it difficult to imagine a restful night with that noisy little sucker running all night long. So it will be RV park or bust for the coming months.

I never have a boondocking overnight without learning something new, and this time was no exception.  What I learned is that I still haven't identified a workable butter travel solution. I don't like to put it in the fridge where it would become rock hard and unspreadable, but I haven't found a good receptacle for containing the inevitable slop, either.  This is the standard Rubbermaid butter dish that has been manufactured for years, but even used upside-down from its intended orientation, it still found a way to leak like a sieve all over my tiny little Class B floor.  The search for a better butter solution continues. 

But I did get some yoga done.  Believe it or not, one can successfully do a lot of yoga in the narrow confines of an Interstate.  More about that later.