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.

Camping Reservations!

Not much activity going on with our Shasta over the winter, however we have been busy planning a few trips. It's amazing how early you have to make reservations if you want a nice spot in the words these days! So far we have two week-long camping trips booked and I'm working on plans for a few weekend trips closer to home. Something new that I'm trying to do is to have a few extra weekend trips somewhat pre-planned that we could easily do on the spur of the moment if we can get away. The summer weekends fill up fast but hopefully we will spend a little more time camping next summer than last. If you haven't made any camping reservations for the coming summer you might think about making some plans soon!

Back to Watkin's Glen and the Finger Lakes

For the fourth year in a row we returned to Watkin's Glen, NY  for our last camping trip of the season.  Some years we've found our limit for cold temperatures, but this year we were treated to an amazing Columbus Day weekend. The weather was so nice it was hard to believe that the campground was closing for the season on the following day. Over time we've noticed that each year seems there seems to be a different crowd at this campground. We've camped with vintage race cars during the vintage weekend, a Scotty rally last year, and almost no one this same weekend when it was cold. This year there were a lot of loud guests at the campground. There was a large extended family spread across as many as eight sites, and a group of sports fans who drained their car batteries while various games blasted out their open tailgates. There was still plenty of quite time, and I'm sure we will be back. As usual our vintage trailer stood out as being pretty unique. As for other interesting campers there was a pair of Toyota mini  motorhomes, a super cool Airstream Basecamp that turned out to belong to one of the kids teachers from home, and we got glimpse of another vintage trailer leaving the park on our last day. While in Watkins Glen we hiked the gorge and stopped at couple of wineries along Seneca Lake while we enjoyed the Finger Lakes region that we used to call home. We also spent some time just taking it easy around the campsite, something that we often forget to make time for. Now back home, the Shasta is back in the garage and tucked away for the winter. We didn't make a lot of trips out this year but enjoyed the ease of just going camping now that the trailer is finished enough to just pack some food and clothes and go.