Starling Travel

I love this old Shasta trailer that I found in the KSL Classifieds the other day.

It’s the 13 foot design, so you can tow it with a small SUV. The kitchen isn’t all retro because it has a microwave as well as a fridge, self-contained water, and even an air conditioner. (Continue Reading…)

I am seriously disturbed by Carnival’s track record lately. In 2010, an engine room fire stranded the Carnival Splendor off the west coast.

• ABC News: ‘It’s Disgusting’: Stranded Carnival Passengers Take to Cell Phones

Then in 2012, the Costa Concordia hit rocks and sank, killing thirty-two people.

• Starling Travel – Costa Concordia: The First Cruise Ship To Sink in 100 Years
• Starling Travel – Costa Concordia: Still A Wreck After Almost A Year

Now, yet ANOTHER engine room stranded the Carnival Triumph for five miserable days of heat and stench.

• ABC News: Nightmare at Sea: Carnival Cruise Liner Nears Port

Here is a video from one of the passengers, Lance Winder.

It sounds as if the crew did their best to keep things as clean as they could on the boat, but sewage had backed up on the lower decks, so passengers had no choice but to live on the decks under sheets tied up to protect them from the sun. At night, however, it got too cold outside and they retreated inside, where there was hardly any room for them.

Is a free cruise and $500 enough of a compensation? I believe it is, but I would prefer to not have that experience in the first place. At least when my car breaks down on a road trip, it’s my own fault, not something completely out of my control.

I’ve been on a few cruises, the first of which was on a Carnival cruise on a ship with broken stabilizers. I have enjoyed being able to visit many different islands and beaches on one trip without worrying about doing the driving, but in the end, I prefer to be behind the wheel of my vacation. Now that Carnival has a documented history of problems with their ships, I think I’ll avoid them altogether.

Sci Show featured Göreme National Park in Turkey. Known for its strangely shaped rock formations, it is one of those truly weird places to visit in this wide world.

Rock formations have been sculpted in a wide variety of shapes by weather and wind, as shown here in a screen shot from Sci Show.

For more information:

• Göreme on Wikipedia
• Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia
• Images of Göreme National Park

Last January, on the way to Quartzsite, we stayed a night or two in Las Vegas. The typical temperature at that time of the year is about fifty degrees during the day and 35 degrees at night. We knew it was going to be a little cold, so we were prepared with a couple of electric heaters.

We had NO idea that we would be staying there on the coldest nights Las Vegas has seen for YEARS. It was a HARD freeze at 28 degrees, taking everyone in that city by surprise. Every one of the huge motorcoaches, in the RV resort where we stayed, had frozen water hoses with no water. And this fountain stayed frozen solid all day and night.

Fortunately, our two little electric heaters kept us warm in our little tent trailer, but it was substantially colder on the bunk ends than it was in the middle of the camper. Whenever I was awoken by the cold that night, I tried to think of ways our bunk ends could be warmer.

Try as I might, in my cold-addled and sleepy stupor, I didn’t think of this ingenious origami solution to the problem. Here is the Apache Hard-Sided Popup Camper and how its bunk ends are put together.

The roof folds down and the lifts up like this:

Then the sides pop in (rather awkwardly):

If I were to turn my popup camper into a hard-sided camper like an Apache, would it be warmer? What is the insulation difference between plywood and tent canvas. I would think it would be warmer, but it also would be a lot heavier. The Apache seems to have plastic or maybe thin aluminum sides. Are they any warmer than tent material? I have no idea.

In the end, we were able to stay warm enough that night in our trailer, despite the hard freeze. I might fantasize about modifying my popup camper, but it was warm enough to camp in winter temperatures, so I guess it’s not necessary to hack apart my beloved little Jayco just to be a couple of degrees warmer.

While I was looking around the web, I found some auto tents manufactured by Upal Outdoors. They make a clamshell design.

They also make a square lift design.

If you were to put one of these on a Ford Flex, it might be perfect. It has that lovely flat roof that makes it perfect for permanently mounting an auto tent to the top.

I first saw the Ford Flex at CES 2012 and I really liked its design. I love how large the back hatch is. It would be perfect place to put a camp kitchen, like a teardrop trailer.

In fact the back hatch is so large and tall that I wouldn’t even need a tent to get a little shade or escape from the rain.

If you were able to permanently attach the Auto Tent to the top of the car and cut a hole in it, you’d be able to access the tent from the Sun Roof instead of having to use the ladder. It would be much more efficient that way.

I did a horrible Photoshop job on some images of the Ford Flex to show you what it would look like permanently attached to the car.

I really liked how the clamshell design looks.

As much as I’d like to take a Ford Flex and convert it into the ultimate camping car, I can’t see a way to purchase these auto tents in lots less than twenty. It looks like this idea is going to have to be for someone with a lot more capital at their disposal.

Until then, I can dream about a perfect camping car.

Photos used for photoshopped images:

• Gray Ford Flex: 2013 Ford Flex Limited AWD EcoBoost photo
• Red Ford Flex: feeler o9 flex se. cin red, char cloth, 65k denver co $21k : Ford Flex Forum

A while back, I wrote about the DualCraft Chalet. It was the first A-Frame trailer manufactured in the Seventies.

• Starling Travel: The DualCraft Chalet – The First A-Frame Trailer

I was under the impression that they did not fold up, but one of our readers, Al Massey, corrected me in the comments:

i borrowed one of these trailers and they do fold down , we liked the style so much sourced same style out in alberta ,we located one built in edmonton that folds up it is insulated ,has a propane grity furnace and propane fridge i installed , we have taken across canada and into bc many times ,we’ve had it for about 12 years. best unit ever! it’s our “swiss chalet” (wife is swiss)

I was so excited to learn more and he graced me with a couple of photos and some of his memories.

Hi Laura,

there are two bars on the inside that hold up the walls ,we use them for coat hangers as well as shelf supports,after you remove them the left wall comes down and rests on a fold out leg then the right wall comes down then the rear roof folds down then finally the front roof folds down and gets buckled for travel,

sleeps 4 comfortably, I’va made cabinets inside that stack when up thus giving tons of storage for long trips , my twin 10 year old girls are quite attached and have fond memories growing up with this trailer ,

i park it inside my garage now so the snow and ice wont kill it so it should live a long time yet ,always a conversation piece at camp grounds , it makes an awesome ice breaker to meet people from all across the world.

I cant find my photos of the inside or it folding up right now, but I’ll keep looking. It was mftd in Edmonton by “national trailer” in the early sixtys ,cant find anymore info about it and only seen 1 the same make a long time ago.

Thanks, Al

Thanks, Al, for the lovely photos. I especially like the Canadian flag flying. It looks so good in contrast to the trailer. Thanks again for sending the photos and may you have many more happy years in your DualCraft Chalet.

A few days ago, when I was feverishly searching the Internet for information about The CarBak Cartop Tent Camper, I found a TON of pictures of VW Beetles with cartop tent campers.

As a former Bug owner, I fell in love with each and every photo, wishing I could find a Beetle of my own to camp in.

They all look so good that I thought I’d share them with you. (Continue Reading…)

John Green visited London and posted this brilliant video about it.

John had an interesting experience at the “British Museum of Old Things And Other Miscellany.”

And then I found this thing, which for some reason I found really fascinating, so I looked at it for a long time from many different angles and I still couldn’t figure out quite what was going on. So, I read the wall label where I learned that the guy was apparently about to stab himself in the penis, but, more importantly, I noticed that the thing that I was looking at was currently on loan to the Royal Museum of Ontario, and, while I was reasonably jet-lagged, I was pretty sure that I was NOT in Toronto.

So, in fact, I was not looking at a thing at all. I was looking at an incredibly well-made photograph of a thing installed so perfectly that I’m not sure that you can tell that you are looking at a video of a photograph of a thing rather than a video of an actual thing. Which calls into question the whole relevance of looking at actual things when virtual experiences are so compelling, but more on that in a second.

He had a busy day, trying to walk off his jet lag and at the end, he viewed the beautiful London Bridge in the dark.

I found myself wondering how different it was from a photograph. I didn’t need to be here to see this, after all. Of course, the reason for our trip was [to speak to his fans], but after thirty hours awake and the optical illusion at the British Museum, I couldn’t decide if sites really need seeing or if virtual experience has become enough. And I still can’t decide, so I made this virtual experience for you. Let me know how real it feels.

What do you think? Is the virtual experience enough? I haven’t found that to be true. I’ll never forget my visit to the Legion of Honor Art Museum in San Francisco. They had one of Monet’s water lilly paintings at the end of the gallery.

If you could see an even higher resolution version of it, you would still not be able to fully understand the magnitude of this painting. I had seen this painting hundreds of times in books before that fateful day in San Francisco, but I was never able to grasp its grandeur.

The painting was at the end of a huge hall and took up the entire wall at the end of said hall. When I stood at the furthest point, the water lilies were clear as day and the water looked almost transparent. I felt as if I could reach into the water and snatch out a fish with my bare hand. My viewing point was at least twenty yards from the actual painting.

When I walked up to it, I felt dwarfed by its size. I suddenly understood why this Impressionist had been rejected when he had his first show. Such a behemoth of a painting would have been impossible to see in the cloistered art galleries of France. Up close, Water Lilies looks like a globular mess of thick paint in huge patches of color.

To give you an idea of its size, here is a photo of paintings conservator, Tricia O’Regan, removing the synthetic varnish off it in 2011.

So, was my virtual experience of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (seeing it in books) as good as seeing it in person? NO! NO! A thousand times, no! And the saddest part of all is that I didn’t KNOW that I had been missing the whole story until that moment when I walked so close to the painting that it transformed from a beautiful pond of lilies into a clumpy mess of paint.

THAT is why travel is so important to me. You can’t smell the River Thames in John’s video. You can’t feel the cobblestones under your feet while you see what remains of Winchester Palace. And you certainly can’t fully view the magnitude of Monet’s Water Lilies in a book. As detailed as they are, virtual experiences are not nearly as engaging as seeing everything first hand. Until they are, we will need to travel to enjoy them fully.

It all started with this photo:

I found it on the Classic VW Beetle page and with a simple description:

Here is a VW Camper Bug

It was obviously an oddity because the picture shows a plaque next to the vehicle. How I wished I could read that plaque. What does it say and what the heck IS that thing?!

I found another photo of the same tent camper from a different angle on The Samba:

The person on that forum said:

Does anyone know if these roof top tents are worth anything.

I have never seen one and I think they are cool.

No one had an answer for him, though.

It took a lot of searching, but I found out what they are and found a bunch of other pictures of them. (Continue Reading…)

Every time I plan a huge road trip, all our friends question me, “Why don’t you just fly?” It’s an easy question to answer when the airline designers at Aviointeriors are creating saddle-seats that shave even MORE of my personal space in an airplane.

• Huffington Post: New Airplane Seat Fitted As A Saddle, Offers Less Room

This man, who is 6’2″ doesn’t seem to fit at all.

I sincerely couldn’t believe the hubris of Fredrick Meloni, the man showcasing those seats.

If he really wanted to convince me of why these are better, he would have sat in the SECOND row, showing me how comfortable and roomy they are. Instead, he sat on the front row, throwing about his hands and showing me just how unpleasant a flight on a plane with those seats would be.

THIS is why I drive our trailer all over the country instead of “saving” time flying. They don’t care about me. They don’t care about my comfort. All they care about is cramming me into a tighter and tighter space to maximize their profits.

No, thank you.