Repair, Restore, Refit

We went to visit Sam Harkness at Vintage Airstreams in Tewkesbury. He has a yard full of potential, a collection of really old Airstream trailers just waiting to be brought back to life. It will be fascinating to see how they will be resurrected and where they will end up spending the next chapter in their stories.


We have seen Airstreams in various stages of restoration and it is always intriguing to hear what the plans are, whether for a true-to-style restoration, or a completely new interior design and transformation.

Pete pointed out that it was clear for the first time just how much work is involved in taking on a vintage project. We hadn't seen any right at the beginning of the process before.


Some have a lot of the original fittings, some have grubby marks where the fittings used to be. Whether a grotty empty shell, or lined from floor to ceiling with brown swirly carpet, having sat in a farmyard or been abandoned by a lake, or been cherished by generations of one family, the back story is often a fascinating part of taking on or owning an old Airstream.


Frustratingly, I forgot my camera and got by with using my phone. Not bad eh, after a bit of tweaking on iPhoto?

T

The Inadequacy of Words

After the last Airstream Gathering we moved on to a small site on a farm just outside Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, where we stayed for two weeks. We have started to notice a pattern now that we have held three of these gatherings, and it is that we experience a sort of post-rally slump, a deep feeling of 'what now?' And that wasn't helped much for those few days when we couldn't connect to the internet. We felt a bit cut off.

There are times when not being connected is appropriate, and even positively therapeutic. For example, last summer which we spent in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and the Hebrides. We rarely had a phone or internet signal. But being out of touch and unreachable went hand in hand with the feeling of remoteness and wildness of some of the places we found ourselves in. In a way, not being able to tell what it was like, as we were experiencing it, added to the sense of a special and personal journey. We were cut off for much of the time and we had no choice but to be where we were one hundred percent, without diluting the uniqueness of our experiences. Words couldn't have expressed how I felt at the time, and I was happy not to have to confine the spaciousness of where we were and what we felt with words.



One year on it seems a shame not to have shared. We have posted about the Outer Hebrides and received some appreciative comments, so we're going to at least post some photos from last summer, from time to time.


T

Gorgeous Cheddar Gathering

The Spring Gathering of UKAirstreamers in Cheddar was a very happy event. We are only now getting the chance to write and post pics because we used up our monthly internet bandwidth in the lead up to it and have been out of touch since. Such is the nomad's lot, dependent on mobile broadband.

Firstly, thank you so much to those who made it to Cheddar. It was, as always, a joy to watch you all arrive and to see you all circled in glorious, silveryness. For reasons that are far too tedious to go into here, we had delays in confirming the arrangements and that meant that some old friends had previous commitments. You were missed, but we are looking forward to seeing you in September.


We arrived a day early so that we could be there to welcome everyone. It was our first journey since November. After six months in one place the process of packing up and travelling with the trailer felt almost new again, with the flutter of nervousness that goes with wondering if you've forgotten to batten, check and switch on, off or over. There were some fairly narrow roads through the Somerset villages on the way to Cheddar so the pace was steady. And when we arrived we set up and enjoyed having an enormous field all to ourselves. We got out the Moon Chairs, cracked open a couple of bottles of the local beer and watched the sun set in eager but chilled-out anticipation of the next day's arrivals.





On the Friday it was exciting to welcome the arrival of each trailer, watching them glint and trundle steadily across the field towards us. In the end we had eight Airstreams, with the agreeable mix of familiar and new faces that we like so much. All but one of the trailers were new European models. Glynis and Pete were flying the flag for vintage in their 1964 Bambi II. Come on you vintage Airstreamers! We are looking forward to seeing more of you in September. We love the new models, we bought one after all, but the oldies have such individual character and heaps of history.




We pitched ourselves in a circle, nose to tail and enjoyed being a little Airstream village for a few days. The sun shone every day and the weekend was very relaxed with lots of chatting, a bit of sunbathing and some sharing of shady awnings. We caught up with old friends and made new ones. The cameras were out, niggles, annoyances and modifications were compared. Some Airstreamers whose trailers were not ready for the trip came without for the day on Saturday, and we all mucked in with the barbecue in the evening.

Thanks again for turning up, for sharing stories, experience, tools, barbecues, fire pits, and most importantly, camaraderie and laughs.

T

Ready to Rally

Lots of Airstreaming news this week...

There is less than a week to go before the Spring Rally in Cheddar. Click here for details if you haven't booked yet, or to confirm your booking and let us know when you are arriving.

Having been in our bolthole in Somerset for almost six months we are gradually gearing ourselves up to moving on to the rally site. This has been the longest we have stayed in one place since starting our travels just over two years ago. Until now, the longest we spent in one place was three weeks. Most of the time we would book in for five nights initially, and if we liked the place, or needed more time to explore the area, we would extend our stay for another few days.

I'm sure our old routines for hitching up and pitching up will soon come flooding back. It's like riding a bike, right? At least this week we will only be moving within the county of Somerset, gently easing ourselves back into the nomadic life.

When you're moving regularly you are vigilant about not accumulating excess baggage. Now we are finding that we need to have a bit of a clear out. The discipline or ruthlessness has to be re-awoken so that we can ditch clothes we don't wear, guidebooks for places we won't be returning to anytime soon, crockery that doesn't get used enough. We've got to make allowance for our new fire pit anyway, getting its first trial by fire at the rally.


Last week we made the short trip to Taunton to see American Retro Caravans. Tucked away at the end of an uninspiring road in an industrial estate sits the little ARC workshop. And it was staggering to see what was going on there. They had four vintage trailers in various stages of restoration and a team of skilled tradesmen and craftsmen beavering away on each of them. Plumbers and electricians, carpenters and metal workers, carpet layers and polishers were all industriously working, occasionally on the same trailer at the same time.

Darren and Kathy, the owners of ARC, very kindly tore themselves away from looming deadlines to show us around. They specialise in high quality restorations, as you can tell from their (very attractive) website. They oversee every aspect, from the custom-built furniture (Darren is a carpenter by trade) to the hand-crafted upholstery. Beautiful.


The same day, this very blog received it's 15,000th hit. Staggering! When we started it, shortly after deciding to buy the Airstream, we thought it might get looked at a couple of times a month by our mums. We had no idea what it would grow into, or that we'd still be writing about Airstreaming two and a half years later. Thank you to everyone who has looked in on our journey.

Finally, we saw Airstreams on the tellybox last night. Tracey sums it up (much better than I could) in her blog.

See you at the Gathering (even if it rains!).



T & P

Tea And Empathy

It's been an Airstreamy few days. Andrew was on his way to a work thing in Dorset so made a detour to our bolthole here in Somerset. We have a lovely rural view here, which is probably one of the reasons we have stayed for a while, but an Airstream in the mix was OK too.

When we met up in the Hebrides last summer we managed a perfect afternoon tea one day. We persuaded a young lass to reopen her shop to sell us some scones. Then we found our way into a supermarket whose entrance was cunningly disguised as a bus shelter (probably to keep the wild wind out), and there, against our expectations we found clotted cream. We already had the best strawberry jam money can buy, Tiptree Little Scarlet. I don't know why it is so good exactly. It must be the Little Scarlet strawberries themselves. Or maybe it is also the rarity with which we find it on our travels.

Well these individual, intrepidly sought ingredients married succulently into a tea orchestrated with involuntary groans of appreciation.

Here in Somerset we are much closer to the more traditionally conceived source of the cream tea. I recently read that the Cornish put cream first on their scones, then the jam, Devonians the other way round. Now we know. I go Cornish, Pete favours the Devonian way. Anyway, the scones couldn't have been fresher. For the first time since my inadequate school cookery lessons I made scones. And pretty darned good they were too. Warm, light, big. What more can I say?



You know when you try to recreate an experience and it doesn't rise to your expectations? That didn't happen.

Simon, Emma and Tilly popped round to say Hello on their way to visit family. They recently had to let their Airstream go but are still honorary Airstreamers. We have high hopes for them rejoining the clan. So there has been a lot of Airstreamy chat; new versus vintage, standard European versus wide-bodied, layout etc, etc.

And of course there's the approaching rally. So it was like a warm-up.


T