Survived Another Airventure

Not a very thrilling title for a post about traveling to the worlds greatest aviation gathering, but as I sit here writing this I am still in recovery mode after returning to a busy work week for the past couple of days. This trip was a challenging one on many different fronts. The journey getting there always holds some interesting challenges, and this year was no exception. Not posting any pics on this post as I spent most of my time taking video. Will try to capture that and put some clips on at a later time.

Everything kind of broke down as follows:

1. Did not get underway until 10:00am due to the usual "must work till midnight the night before to save the world" syndrome, which did not leave me enough time to finish packing up the night before. Then, through no fault of his, after simoly following my instructions, my son opened up the water fill port to fill the water tanks in the trailer, but he opened up the wrong one - the one with absolutely nothing hooked to the other side. Why my trailer is configured like this I will never know - it came that way when I bought it. So that flooded the trailer from front to back before I finally saw what was happening. So not the best start I have ever had.

2. Rolled into Omaha at about 7;00PM after a 10 hour drive - stayed in a nice Motel 6 this time due the extreme heat and humidity in that region right now. It was 104 with an index at 109 degrees when we pulled up, only to find that the entire business side of the street that we were on had experienced a power outage only 15 minutes before I arrived. After a mad scramble to find a gas station that still had power, the other side of the street lit up again, and so we checked into the hotel with no further problems.

3. On I-80 the next day about 20 miles west of the I-380 North interchange, my left rear trailer tire completely blew out. In the process it severed all of my trailer brake wires leading to one side of the trailer (See my post from 2009 for a similar experience), and it also completely ripped out the handle of one of my dump valves for one of the water tanks. I have to say I was in fear for my life while changing that tire on the side of the higway while countless numbers of semi trucks moving at 80 mph just a few feet away. The tire had completely blown apart, and the tread had wrapped itself around the axle about 5 times while it proceeded to do the rest of the damage I have already described.

So I got the spare tire on and off we went again, but I was very nervous that we might experience another blowout, so I was a bit on edge for the rest of the trip. As a side note, after I arrived at Oshkosh, I learned how to determine when my tires were manufactured. When I found the DOT date stamp, it indicated that they were all made in June of 1995! IN other words, my trailer tires were about 7 years overdue for a change based on normal operation, and 4 of those 7 years had been spent traveling to Oshkosh and back. They also determined that the other 3 tires were starting to separate, indeed about ready to give way, so I consider myself a bit lucky there. Should have replaced the tires long ago...... live and learn I guess. I always check the tread before I depart but did not pay attention to too much else, like the conidtion of the tire skin in between the treads, etc. Normal life span is about 8-10 years.

4. Oshkosh was also HOT when we arrived, and it was also very humid. I had a real hard time with the weather this year. A couple of days were nice, but the remainder were either rainy, windy, or extremely hot. One storm that came through on Thursday last week had me personally fearing for my life for about 15 minutes, resulted in damage to at least 2 aircraft that I witnessed, and flooded out just about all tents in the homebuilt camping area. Luckily the strong part of the storm was over the Airventure grounds and not so much in the campground area, so the trailer survived that with no problems.

5. Had an episode where a cabinet door gave way and swung out so hard that it broke one of my windows. I had to get creative with Gorilla tape and carboard box and a plastic trash bag to board it all up for the trip home, since I was not successful finding a place that could fix my window up there in Oshkosh. I am still in the process of getting that repaired.

6. If you ever haul an RV up to Oshkosh, remember a company called Quent's Service Center. THis was the place that the EAA Check in folks referred me to when I walked up to them the day after my arrivial with no idea who to contact to try to get some things fixed while I was there. These guys were fantastic, and were able to get me 4 new tires and even came out on site to my location in Camp Scholler to fix the trailer break wires. Yeah I left there with a little less cash in my pcoket than I had originally planned, but they really helped me out quite a bit.

So, as far as the journey was concerned, were there some challenges with getting up there this year - you bet there were. Will that deter me from doing it all over again next year - probably not. There were so many really cool things going on at AV this year that I can hardly wait to see what is in store for next year. I'll recap some of the highlights in another post.