ExcaVacation

WE have our Airstream perched across the street from our house so we have a bird's eye view of the construction we are doing to replace a crumbling foundation. It's comforting and disconcerting at the same time for both us and our 3 labradors. It's exciting and nervewracking because it's late fall in Canada and we are racing against the official start of Winter which has at times arrived with a cold freeze and a 15 centimeter dump of snow!
YA!!! consider this an edit...this week winter arrived with a 15 cm dump of snow, then another 5, then 3, last night 2 and of course it was on a weekend so for four days I was afraid to call my contractor (who I still LOVE) and ask "Now what happens?"

As it turns out, he was just waiting on the guy who sprays the rubberizing first layer of waterproofing before back filling our driveway back!!! HURRAY!!!! does not express anything close to the elation we are now feeling as we watch out the window of the Airstream as the path back into our home is created.
To add to the tenderhooks we hang from, my best friend is coming for Christmas and I could never in a million years say no to seeing him. We MAY be 4 labradors and 3 adults in our 174 sq feet of inefficently insulated and bare bones showering aluminum paradise (withdrawing tongue from cheek) but he and I have lived in worse conditions during our darker years in New York City and always came out with our good humour intact and relationship unscathed. Still it would be fun to have our house back, at least to camp in and especially to drink wine in front of our fireplace if only in my dreams!

  So far we have been lucky and we are very grateful for our Airstream, for our patient and generous neighbours and for being in a financial position to remedy the situation.
   I had been visualizing us living in it fulltime and I'm a firm believer that you manifest your own reality.
Sooooooo................... now I am also visualizing a changing view!!!

 

Isn't she beautiful in the snow and sunshine?!...PS hubbie built the plywood box you see behind the tires to encapsulate the grey and black water pipes to stop the freezing but we have to add a small spaceheater to it every once in awhile too. Talk about your hot shit!

     

Bricks & Mortar comes UNDONE

A few years ago we decided to buy and Airstream (Heirs'Dream...hubbie heir to half the price, me heir to the love of airplanes, airstreams, trailers, travel and livin' like a Gypsy)Airstream Song by Miranda Lambert
   I even got my guitar out recently and learned to play and sing this song in preparation for "hittin' the road" in our new Silver Bullet. My hubbie retired from police work and started to renovate our basement to put in a rental unit to a) finance our big adventure Full Timing in the Heirs'Dream and b) to have someone living in our little house to take in mail, water grass and comply with insurance requirements to not leave a house vacant.

We tore down some of the siding to start preparing to replace the bar with a kitchen and smelled dampness, dug deeper and found DIRT...sand....instead of concrete walls. To make a long sickening part of the story short, after the opinions of several engineers, many more contractors and a building inspector, we found our house to be close to condemnable...poured concrete foundation was done with contaminated sand and the organic materials had broken down and the walls were now doing the same!

It took us over a year to find the right engineer and contractor but they are now on the job, the little house I love has been shored from below, jacked up to level and tomorrow excavation begins! 

We are over the resistance in believing it's happening to us (and that we had to go back to work to pay for it instead of retiring and going touring in our Airstream) and are positive and excited to watch the process. AND we are actually living in our Airstream, just parked across the street :-) gratefully enjoying a bird's eye view from our generous neighbour's driveway.

....and tonight is Hallowe'en night so this is how it looks from the front. A video from ScAirstream Central!

....but Hallowe'en was nowhere near as scary as the next day when we found out AFTER the construction guys removed the gas meter that the gas had not been shut off, and when they came TO shut it off, that the main valve was NEXT to our beloved Airstream. We were almost a gas explosion Wizard of Ozstream sequel.

Gratefully not and we are off to our lot on the Bay for a couple of days of peaceful by Nature.

Sittin on the Lot on the Bay

     This weekend is Duck Hunting Season and I stayed away from my little lot on the Bay last week afraid of what I might face there.
I have to say, I've seen very few ducks there lately, so even though I was  trepidatious about going, I clung to this notion on the way down and how I'd enjoy nothing better than to watch the idiot neighbours sit behind their duck blind with absolutely no ducks to shoot. Well, actually, I thought it would be better if it rained too, but then that would spoil our time as well and so far it hasn't, nor have any ducks been shot.

This is my peaceful neighbour who likes to fish. We like him best.

These guys like to run into the water splashing around to find a stick I've tossed, which also serves as a warning to geese and ducks, Do NOT come around these parts, our neighbours may shoot you!

It's a little slice of heaven I tells ya

what?!?!? shoot? who's shooting whaaaaat?





NOM, NOM, NOM!
 

AIRSTREAM Safari SS interior tour

A couple weekends ago was the Girl Camp Canada Waupoos Round-up.  I had looked forward to going for months, gathered my wardrobe...bought this cool necklace: 

I shined my cowgirl boots (brown AND black) packed the pink ones from Vegas:

and glamped up my trailer a bit, (Well, OUR trailer and I even bought another trailer to leave behind for hubbie to live in since we were supposed to be moved out of our house for the big basement renovation by now, NOT, thank you permit department) And then, I couldn't go.  Life overwhelmed us and we got grounded in the City, but since I had glamped... and once we do move into the Heirs'Dream to do the reno, it's not going to be this tidy again for awhile so.....

We have her plugged in,  in my father's driveway at his Trailer Park right now.... his rosehips are magnificent in the Autumn light,
I think, and the orange/tangerine accents I have going on inside the trailer at the moment are totally working!

She is a Safari, so I can not resist any thing animal print, especially animal print and of the cougar persuasion!

<- My favourite photo      
      subjects!!!  

 

This under-the-dinette dog-bed does double duty. When there's a dog on it, you can put your feet on, or under the dog and it's soooo toasty on the feet...and scrumptious for your soul as well. They seem to like it also :-)

So, my kitchen is super messy, but see how your  eye just goes to the orange accents and it's all pleasant and good?

    And then, don't look at the sign in the cupboard too closely if you're easily offended by my purtydirty mouth, or my lack of staging, but what I like about my Airstream cupboard is the necessity nature of it....you got your mini-bar, your vintage canisters with coffee and tea, your vintage pyrex teapot with ISAGENIX(click here to read how fabulous THEY are!) protein shakes in it and garlic powder, honey and carnation evaporated milk (case you're boondockin' hard and serious and can't get to the half and half store!)

I really like our little retro jukebox radio, that we found in a thrift store on our trip through California. It plays cassette tapes which are the new 8track tape! and that crystal hanging from the light is my nod to a chandelier. :-)

And see, look! there's a dog there, under the dinette, just waiting to warm up my feet and support me with his love.

Truth be told, he's probably eyeballin' Hubby into makin' his dinner but I takes mah luv how I can git it

Vintage Trailer Hoarding

     Going with the flow is something that I've tried to get better and better at as I've aged (read matured, it's not necessarily the same thing!)
     I helped my father build the Mobile Home Park he built from scratch (I was forced to) and because of that I rejected it all my life. I was never ashamed of growing up in a Trailer Park; proud really, when many would say Trailer Trash; like it's a bad thing?  Before age 12, my childhood was idyllic, at least to me, and I remember the trailer park and the land it was on with fondness.
     I think my sister suggested we run it with my father at one point when he became sick but the idea was repulsive to me and even after he'd passed and I was peaceful with the place, feeling no pressure from him to take it over, nor from my own guilt, it did not seem like a good idea.
     My new husband thought we should run it from the very beginning and we had several discussions about it over the three years my sister and I tried to sell it, all ending in my cool flat NO.
     I think it was the waterfront property that caused the idea of living in my hometown area again to seep into my consciousness. As we cleaned it up, it became sweeter and sweeter to be there. Since I was right there, I began to right wrongs and take responsibility for things in the trailer park at the same time that we received a very low offer. Since my offer only had to be half of that for the business, an attraction to the idea began to swell.
     I also had had for the previous three years developed an obsession for all things vintage and vintage trailers especially. Hubby and I had met quite a community of other Airstream enthusiasts when we bought our SafariSS to get married in Nova Scotia and I started the hunt for a small trailer I could hitch and travel in for "Girls weekends" Therein I discovered the GlamperGirl society and a whole bevy of wonderful, like-minded women on Facebook who were collecting antiques, retro, vintage and CAMPERS and Glamping them up!!
     These two groundswells merged and became my new Dream, the goals came quick and fast and kept me up at night entering ideas into the NOTES section of my Iphone.
    After just a month of trying on the hat of Trailer Park owner/manager and after an exhausting, frustrating battle with a tenant who got a building permit to put on a roof....which was really a second story...8 foot into the air ROOF?! I realized the folly of someone who knew my father's struggles to take back his land, an emotional nature and the fight in her of a junkyard dog....to run THIS PARTICULAR trailer park.
   I did, however, keep the lot on the Bay and we have cleared, fenced and delivered our 31 foot 1974 Excella there to test the waters, as it were, with the neighbours.
 

Soon, we hope the '04 Safari and the '64 Glendale Li'l Vintage Trailer will join her as my personal nod to my father and his trailer park...without the angst!

There's no place like home

    For the two years after my father died, I dreaded coming back to deal with his estate. Everyone in the town seemed downtrodden and depressed. (of course we were spending a lot of time in Walmart :-) Once, on a drive down in the Fall, I did notice and photograph the brightly coloured maple trees and of course, the swans, but in this past year the whole area has seemed different to me. I guess, that now, the grief has lifted and I am seeing it through the eyes of an adult that loved it as a child.
     Another added bonus: the entire County next door has developed and gentrified into a wine producing, chef attracting, antique selling, tourist destination. I always loved to go around to Prince Edward County when I was young because we went to the beautiful Sandbanks Provincial Park and would spend long days at the beach in the white sand and surf. Never in my wildest dreams though could I have imagined such a perfect haven for my adult passions of Eat, Drink and Buy dead people's stuff! check out the Taste Trail?!?!? Ohhhhhhhh yaaaaaaaaaa!

Outlet Beach at the Sandbanks, circa 1964

                          Dune Beach, July, 2013                                                           

Clearing the Land

     The best laugh is that hubby and I thought we'd do this ourselves! After 4 days, 2 experienced "bushmen" with a backhoe, a 3/4 ton and a 20 foot long trailer, we are still not THERE yet!

Here's Hubs doin' manly things....with his mini-chainsaw, brand spanking new, that was intermittently starting and intermittently quitting and the chain popped off. I thought he looked great in the wife beater I bought him for the event, though. :-)

I'm determined to keep and maintain the shoreline native plants and hope to reduce the Zebra Mussel infestation in future but in the meantime I also had to plant SOMEthing. Seemed funny to plant in the middle of this construction(destruction?) site but I couldn't wait to get my Hercules vines into the ground.

 

This is the current shore line. I think these are Morning Glory? I'll figure it out. I'm constantly asking anyone I meet down there: "What's this called?"



....But this? this is what I call our "Stairway to Heaven"

Great Grampa Cecil's Forest

     Just up the hill from my Dad's little lot on the Bay is just under 40 acres of forest land I played in when I was a child. With a gang of other children who lived near, we ran wild and free up there.  We rode horses, stole apples from the orchards, and damned the underground spring fed stream that cut through the rocks to form a waterfall. It pooled at the bottom where beavers built dams. Our dogs ran free, (once a small one of mine fell through the clear thin ice and floated downstream under it while I frantically crashed through after him until I freed him and ran him home under my jacket!) We skated in winter, built wood rafts and sailed them and now swans build nests there. It was a paradise to me growing up and even while estranged from my father I dreamed of the day I could go back and negotiate with him for ownership. When he passed away, my sister and I became stewards of this property, part of which is now Environmentally Protected land. YAY! For at least the present I have the opportunity to share the joys of this land, brimming with nature and wonder that is eastern Ontario, Canada with my grandson, my cousin, my husband and friends and YOU dear reader.

 We went up there recently to site the monuments and survey markers.
     I found an old fort we had built and this important "get back on your horse when you've ridden up bareback rock"
     I actually remembered the tree that this stump was the base of more than 40 years ago!!! FOURTY!!!!
     I guess we ate all the apples....but I don't remember what we did with the trees. :-)

My boys just

We found a robin's nest! with robin's eggs in it!!!

had the BEST time, shopping for sticks, upgrading them, shopping for more and eventually lying down in the cold spring fed MUD!!!

a                       

We found the WATERFALL! It was a lot smaller than I remember
but look a frog! on the rock below it.
I call this La Frog Regardez le Fall de Aqua

My sister called this poignant....excellent word for it. My grandson never got to meet my father but he was  larger than life and to my grandson he is the owner of Great Grandpa's Forest and will always be just that Larger than Life. I'm glad

  And then after, we became Walmart people.    

My little boy just got Nature's best tour....robin's egg blue robin's eggs! a caterpillar, the waterfall in full flow, with a frog and hundreds and hundreds of river rocks tossed into a creek.


Still to come, there's a swan a laying, geese with goslings already and every wonderful wonderful thing I remember.
We had such a great day!!!! and I am so grateful.

Li'l Vintage Trailer-Diamond in the Rough

     I wanted a little vintage trailer but I wasn't ACTUALLY  looking. I'd shop the odd time on Kijiji and Craigslist but I never looked that closely. My covert fantasy was that my husband and I continued to enjoy our 25 ft Airstream (I aDORE it, love it, even think of it as a big silver living whale we keep in the driveway) but I wanted to get my own girlie trailer to pimp out, or as we Glamper Girls call it, Glamp Up by restoring it to as close to it's original state only more stylish, with lotsa vintage decor which we shop, swap and endlessly long for on Facebook, Pinterest and Etsy. (Like these three that I found on the LittleVintageTrailer.com website)

     

So, I was visualizing myself having one, I guess and then oops, there it manifested onto one of the Facebook Vintage Trailer Groups I belong to: someone posted my Lil as something she was considering, a discussion began around the Kijiji ad that had been posted, the price and condition were critiqued....it was double the price it should be...and I relaxed. I had been looking much closer than before, it seemed.
 Aaaaaaaargh! Then, Kijiji sent me a notification it had been reduced in price....almost by half? Why did Kijiji want me to buy this trailer?!?!
I looked verrrrrrry close! In truth, I could not look away. 
* It appeared to be the level of project I wanted,
* it was towable immediately and structurally sound, 
*had coloured original appliances and 
*the people who owned it were salt of the earth and as trustworthy as could be.

We set out on the 2 and a half hour drive with cash in hand and hitch and hitch balls in the Jeep. Rush hour traffic stretched our projected eta by half an hour more; I texted her; a torrential downpour had us with visibility enough to only crawl down the highway; I texted again that we'd be an additional 40 minutes  late, I knew someone was coming from the other direction too and began to worry I'd lose the right to buy it,  then traffic stalled the
driving completely...the highway was rerouted (closed!) I texted, mapped and gps'ed us throug the back roads worried too that she had little ones and we'd disrupt their bedtime....finally, five hours later we arrived at an idyllic farm with two tow headed girls and their mom and dad, handsome tween brother in a scrumptious old farmhouse in various stages of being restored to it's former glory. There were beautiful vintage pieces and upcycling all about, a luscious vegetable garden and a herd of stunning, healthy work horses.  I hugged her upon arrival I already felt as if I'd known her for years! The trailer's owner shared her hopes of glamping the trailer herself. She showed me her upcycling projects and plugged a couple of friends' thrift stores in the area. We had so much in common. Her wonderful farmer husband helped mine load in the yellow fridge and stove with oven and all the other parts she had collected to improve my little Glendale.

 Her little goat jumped into it and we lovingly removed her. We left promising to post photos of the restorations as we do them and to come back for a visit and maybe a sleigh ride in winter. As we drove out and back through the picturesque countryside, we crested a hill to a sunset so beautiful we both gasped. I captured this with my iphone, but the moment before was literally breathtaking!

And so this could be the only time in my life I actually have the poetic license to say: "And then we drove off into the sunset. " :-))))))

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