3 Days, 6 States, and 2 American Pickers

The first day of the trip we left Buffalo, NY and headed west. Quickly passing through the corner of Pennsylvania, then heading across Ohio. Watch out for that 90 degree left turn on I-80 in Cleveland!  At the end of the day we ended up once again at Pokagon State Park which is just over the border into Indiana. Pokagon is a 6 hour drive for us and is in just the right place for the first night when we are traveling west. That night we had 3 to 4 inches of rain which drove some the nearby tent campers to pack up their stuff and head home and reminded us of one of the reasons we started shopping for a trailer in the first place. Based on experience in our previous trip west we we decided to avoid the Chicago area traffic so the next day we drove south to Fort Wayne and then crossed Indiana and Illinois via US 24 which worked out extremely well, we also got see a few small towns along the way instead of just pavement. We stayed at Jubilee College State Park just west of Peoria that second night. Jubilee has a large campground but was pretty empty early in the week. From there we headed north a to Davenport, Iowa were we stopped to check out the Antique Archeology shop which is just off I-80. The shop was closed for filming, but we did get to see Mike and Frank drive out of the parking lot in their van while filming an episode of American Pickers. I was hoping to get a few photos of our Shasta in front of their shop, but there was an RV was blocking the alley, turned out it belonged to the film crew. Later that day we made camp at Prairie Rose State Park in western Iowa, the same place where we had stayed on our 2010 trip.  

Another long road trip!

We recently completed another 3 week, 5,000 mile road trip with our vintage Shasta!   

Starting from our home in the western part of New York state we traveled through 8 states spending the majority of time in Colorado and at several National Parks in Utah. We stayed at 10 different campgrounds as well as spending a week with family in the Rocky Mountains.  We all had a great time and the trailer continues to work well for our family of four with practically no issues. We did a lot of prep for this trip including re-packing wheel bearings, installing new tires, and creating a planned itinerary that included several options for where we might camp each night depending on how each day went. We made reservations far in advance at campgrounds in the National Parks and for potentially busy Friday nights, but stayed in first-come, first-served sites for most others. Overall a fantastic trip!

As I recover and dig through our photos I'll try to post some highlights here on the blog over the next several weeks.

Jalousie Window Repair

This will be 5th year of camping with our Shasta Airflyte since we restored it. While the blog has been pretty quiet we've been making plans and doing some work to get our trailer ready for this years adventures. One of the things that needed attention was a louvered jalousie window on the front of the trailer. Late last season we found that one of the windows no longer operated, a post had broken off of a cast linkage between the crank and the vertical piece that each louver is attached to. Luckily I was able to fix this without removing the window. I removed the crank assembly then drilled out what remained of the post and replaced it with a simple pop rivet and short section of plastic tube that you can see in the photo above.  Overall this seems to be a good quick fix that hopefully will last. 

Fall in the Finger Lakes

Once again we made it out late in the season for a long weekend of family camping in New York's finger lake region. Although the weekend started out with a lot of rain on the first night this year proved to have no disappointments. This year we made stops at the Corning Museum of Glass and several wineries along eastern shore of Seneca Lake. I've posted about the virtues and the luck-of-the draw of fall camping before, always memorable and often great time!

2012 TCT NE Regional Rally

Another year and another Tin Can Tourists Northeast Regional Rally! We are amazed at how fast time seems to be moving along these dates. This was the 5th year this rally has been held at Sampson State Park on Seneca Lake in central New York state and for us this this rally has become a "must attend" annual event. We enjoy seeing friends, swapping stories, and checking out a range of vintage trailers that have been fully restored, renovated with modern touches, or have just been pulled out of the woods. We had fun prepping for the rally this year with a new "family game night" theme" that included an outdoor bowling ally, a handmade checkers board, vintage scrabble, and other card and board games. This year it seemed like the Airstream crowd was back after being down in numbers a bit for the last two years. I'm always amazed at how many nice vintage Airstreams there are in the area. There were a number trailers at the rally for the first time this year, some of our favorites included our friends 1958 Trotwood that we saw earlier this year in the ADK's, an perfect 1954 Aljoa, a 1961 Hi-Lo that you could crank down like a pop-up, a 1964 Shasta 1500, a tiny Metzendorf, and a 1972 Apache tent trailer. For a while now I've been thinking that we ought to start seeing a few more tent trailers showing up at  vintage events and am starting to see some hints that it's starting. Several recent issues of the TCT newsletter Tin Can Tales has included a multi-part article about the history of Popup campers. A big thanks goes out to the Fletchers who have organized this rally since it's start and to the others who've helped make this rally a success over the years.  This year as we saw last year there were quite a few day visitors who heard about the rally and stopped in to take a look. I've included a few photo's above but if you want to see more I've created a 2012 TCT NE Regional Rally set on Flickr. 

Cranberry Lake, NY

Last month we carved out some time and spent another week in the woods camping, this time at  Cranberry Lake in New York's Adirondack Park. The ADK's are our favorite place to camp and we try to spend a week there every summer. We've camped at a lot of the state campgrounds and had heard good things about Cranberry Lake but this was our first time there. The campground was fairly quiet even though there was a huge Ranger School reunion going on across the lake at Wanakena. We picked our site looking only at the online campground map and google satellite photos but it turned out to be just right.  We had a small beach and were able to keep our boats right at the site. During our stay we paddled the local cove a bit and did an 8 mile paddle around the point into Brandy Brook Flow and Bear Mountain Flow.  Cranberry Lake itself gets pretty windy but proved to be pretty nice keeping to the edges. We also did a 10 mile paddle on the Raquette River from Axton Landing to a place called The Crusher near the town of Tupper Lake. We ran into some vintage trailer friends who happened to also be camping there. They had sold their Shasta Compact a the end of last season and were camping in late 50's Trotwood Cub trailer that they had just restored. The Trotwood looked amazing and had lots of details rebuilt and customized to their preferences yet it still looked original inside. There are a lot of different approaches to bringing a vintage trailer back to life, my favorite is when folks create something that is functional to meet their needs yet at the same time looks true to the original.  Our friends gave us a lead to some short hikes at Copper Falls and Rainbow Falls just a bit to the north and we spent an afternoon checking them out. One of the last days there a fast moving storm front blew through with severe winds and lightening, the wind knocked down the Shasta's awning without any damage. Our modern Coleman GeoSport dome shelter however didn't fair so well with some of the Y joint getting damaged beyond use. We were lucky that nothing happened to the trailer or boats. Another friend of ours was recently caught in a storm where several branches damaged his vintage Bonanza requiring some new sheet aluminum on the back section of roof. These two incidents are a good reminder to look up when choosing a campsite or lust where to position your trailer on a site. I also can't forget to mention the interesting, um, trailer at a house on the road into the campground, take a look at the last photo in this post above. I'm pretty sure there is a trailer in there someplace!  Overall we had a great time and would definitely camp at Cranberry Lake again.  

Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario Canada

Recently we took our vintage trailer out of the country for the first time, spending a week in Canada's Algonquin Provincial Park. While it was only about a 6 hour trip from home it provided for some new experiences. Crossing the border early in the morning worked out well and went smoothly. I tried not to laugh too loud when the customs agent asked if we were "bringing anything" with us into Canada, perhaps she hadn't noticed the Shasta behind and the four boats stacked on the roof of the car. But after a few basic questions we were on our way again. Once into Canada we made a planned stop to pick up a few groceries that the customs guidelines had noted as prohibited to bring across the border. During that stop we noticed that one if the car tires was really low on air and ended up at a truck stop where I found a compressor with a hose long enough to use without requiring us to drop the trailer. I've got a small 12volt air pump but it's on it last legs and needs to be replaced. The rest of the drive up was uneventful as we drove from the outskirts of Toronto into more rural county. Algonquin park has several campgrounds suitable for small trailers and many more paddle-in sites for canoe camping. We were really pleased with our site which was on the water and quite private.  So private that our hard to not notice trailer got almost no attention which was nice. While we really like attending trailer rallies and showing off the Shasta, it's also really nice just to be camping. We launched another new kayak that I had built in the previous months and spent a lot of time paddling. We also hiked a number of short interpretive trails, checked out the visitor center, and visited the logging museum. We saw a bunch of wildlife including a black bear, fox, great heron, beavers, and got one brief glimpse of a moose that was so far off it was hard to say that we actually saw it. One thing we found interesting was that the park draws both english and french speaking campers from Ontario and Quebec which gave it a unique feel compared to places that we typically camp. Overall we had a great time and hope to make it back from time to time. The trip home was mostly uneventful except for some traffic and a tight corner out of the customs checkpoint coming back in to the US. Since the trip I've been spending some time looking at the map again and hope to explore more of that new country that we just discovered to the north.