Sunday, December 31, 2006

And so it begins...

well, first of all, please excuse any possible lack of capital letters at the beginning of sentences.


Hi, I'm Vicki. This is my blog about our '64 Airstream Overlander Land Yacht International. i do hope you will be tolerant of my first post to this blog being quite long, seeing as how i have an awful lot of catch-up to play at this point.

Rewind to the end of last year...about September-ish. the super-short-condensed version of this story is... hubby decided his job and life sucked, and since he was very handy, he wanted to get into the boom of "house flipping". the plan was, sell the house, buy an RV, find a likely-looking dump of a house, park said RV on the property, and go to town, so to speak... sell for a profit, and roll out and head to the next house... taking "road trip" vacations wherever we saw fit.

fast forward to the end of December... house sold, sold both junky cars and bought a '98 dodge ram 1500 with the 5.2 magnum V-8... intended as a work truck for the business. hubby had always been enamored of motor homes, so thats what we were looking at. we drove from NJ to FL to stay with my parents. (no hotel $$$ = good thing) after much looking around and thinking, hubby finally conceded that a trailer was actually a better move than a MH... but he hated the boxy look. lo-and-behold, i was surfing e-bay trying to find something... ANYTHING... and i ran across an airstream for only $2000. HOLY CRAP the husband actually LIKES the "silver hot-dog" look! one click of "buy it now"... and 2 days later we were on our way to TN to collect our new trailer!

AFTER i had commited to buy, and even paid for half as a deposit, i checked the dodge out... and we totally lucked out. it had a factory installed heavy duty tow package... complete with the tranny cooler my dad recommended...reciever/ball combo, brake controller, and a simple plug-in wiring harness was all i needed to hit the road. so off we went (on an unrelated note, i also picked up a brand new 150cc scooter on the trip up... convinced hubby it would be much better for putting around town than the truck would be)

since i wasn't sure what kind of plug the trailer had, i didn't purchase an adaptor. i figured i could get something locally. well, we finally arrived just as darkness was falling and after a thorough personal inspection (it is, to say the least, awkward to purchase something you intend to LIVE in, with only pictures and someone elses description to guide you) we hitched up and set off... SLOWLY... down the road to the nearest autoparts store... no lights, no brakes, no nothin'... fortunatly, it was a short trip. BUT... i bought the only 7 pin to 6 pin adaptor that Advance Auto Parts had... and all my trailer lights came on just fine, but when i went to pull out... the trailer's brakes were locked! several frantic minutes later, the auto-parts guy says "Well... there is an Airstream dealer just down the road... I can call them and see if they have a different kind of adapter...?" holy crap. what luck! calls were made... 10 minutes to closing time. jump back in the truck and try to make our way thru 5pm city traffic on a trailer still without lights or brakes and arrive with 4 minutes to spare. plug in the adapter, and hallelujia! it WORKED! i hugged the guy, paid for my part, and we hit the road!

we drove for several hours, and for being a rather old tired looking trailer, it towed quite well. i held steady at 55-60 mph with practically no undue vibration or sway... only the occasional shimmy when a semi would pass. we stopped in a truck stop to sleep the night... unfortunatly i wasn't brave enough to try to figure out how to light the furnace in an untested trailer, so we near froze our hineys off! but we spent the night in our "brand new" trailer, darnit!

after another full, if uneventful, day of travel, we finally arrived back in FL... only to have my dad try to back the trailer into his backyard and smack it into his gatepost, wrenching the already shaky entry stairs and breaking several slats out of the lower jalousie window. thanks dad.

From that point we studied up on how to replace the floor in an Airstream, and discovered that the interior walls sit on top of the floor, so the interior walls came out, then the very rotten floor (see the picture? lovely, ain't it?), and all the old water damaged insulation, old petrified wiring, and a few old mouse nests and whatnot. we replaced the axles (which was a whole trial in and of itself), put in new insulation, new plywood for the floors, and replaced the single tank setup with a grey tank in the rear and a black tank between the axles.

many many more photos of the trailer in its original condition may be viewed in my Flickr account, here.
and since we've done SO much, i'll be filling in more details of what all we've done... and trying to put in rough dates of when it happened, until i get to the point of the current day. please be patient with me, it will probably take a while to get to the point of being all caught up again.