In an earlier blog entry I made mention of the prohibitively high cost of renting a U-Haul to get our stuff to New Mexico this spring. Well, we came up with a two-pronged solution: 1. Get rid of most of our stuff and 2. Get an old trailer to transport the rest. The bonus is that we will have a place to sleep while we look for tipi poles.
We did some searching on Craig’s List and went to see a couple of trailers that were in our price range. What we found out was that our price range was not going to get us anything very glamorous. We learned that if you want to find out if a trailer leaks, go look at it in the middle of a rainstorm.
Coincidentally, while Jeff was on a job site one day he asked a neighbor about a couple of trailers he had parked in his yard. The neighbor, Jim, said he’d sell one of them. A little cash and a couple loads of firewood later, we were the proud owners of a 1977 Argosy 24′ by Airstream.
A 1977 Argosy 24′ by Airstream that had been infested by mice and a teenager with a penchant for Maddog 20/20, that had been sitting uncovered in the Oregon rain for quite a few years, that looked and smelled nothing like the old Airstream brochures that show a family enjoying their spacious, shiny, if questionably upholstered, trailer. Did I mention mice?
We towed the trailer (which, despite all its shortcomings, has great bones) to the place we’re working on it. The first day we spent discovering that the trailer should just be gutted, and by the end of that session we were pretty sure we should have been wearing face masks and protective clothing. The second session was demolition day, and the trip to the dump revealed that our trailer is now 780 pounds lighter. A little scrubbing, a little paint…
Well, we’ll let you know how the rest goes….