Taking Your Camera on the Road

It is amazing the toll heat, sun, cold, and time can do on your trailer when it sits for five years. While we were in Israel, the trailer sat in a storage yard, cleaned out and protected but not shielded by the abuse of time. Over the new few weeks, I’ll be writing more about our Travel Tales and the tips and techniques we use to customize and repair our traveler for our life on the road. Some of these things are simple, and some complicated, but they are all part of the fun of life on the road in a trailer.

One of the things that should have been simple but turned out a little complicated was the cleaning of the stove and oven. Five years of dust, bugs, and grime had piled up, so a little elbow grease scrub was in order.

Everything cleaned off quick and easy, with a little effort on the tough spots, and the inside and top of the oven was looking great. I just needed to do a little spit polish on the front, the part that rarely gets dirty, save for a few spills. Five years empty, no one had been spilling, so this was a Windex wipe and clean. Right?

Wrong.

I sprayed the ammonia and water cleaner across the front and started at the bottom of the oven’s black enamel front to catch the drips coming down. I glanced up in time to see the white letters and numbers of the temperature control knobs drip away into nothing. I quickly drabbed them with my towel, but the letters and numbers wiped right off.

I had five black knobs on the front of my Magic Oven gas stove, and no temperature indicators.

I’d like to say it was the ammonia and water, but I’d cleaned with that for years. Time turned our plastic Tuperware containers into brittleware, snapping finger holes into them when I picked them up or shattering under the pressure of the kitchen faucet. Time and what little sunlight that managed to peek through the closed Venetian blinds had taken its toll all over the trailer, and this was just one more. Combined with the chemicals, it didn’t take much to make these disappear.

What to do?

I gave it some thought and decided just to replace them with new ones. A quick check on the Internet turned into hours of hunting. I finally found some replacement knobs and they wanted way too much money for two of them and I needed five. Now what?

Ingenuity under pressure is an amazing task master. I headed to the arts and crafts store, found a silver ink permanent marking pen and a white permanent marking pen and brought it back for a test drive. The white didn’t work, as it was too opaque, but the silver was perfect. I marked OFF at the top of one knob and then turned the knobs all the way to the end. This, I knew, was LITE. I marked it. Now, I lit the stove and turned the gas down until it looked like it was about to go out, and this became LOW. You can guess the rest from there.

I then matched the other three knobs for the stove with the first then moved onto the oven knob.

The oven temperature was more challenging, but I found that if I held the knob in the right light, I could just barely make out the little etchings where the numbers had been, so I was able to see enough to use that as a guide to mark WARM, 250, 300, and so on to Broil.

I was thrilled and pleased with myself. Then I realized that while the pen was permanent ink, this was written on plastic and it would wipe off next time I cleaned. ARGGGHH.

I dug around in the bathroom and found some old Sally Hansen Hard as Nails clear nail polish. This stuff is like a rock. I painted over the writing on the first knob, let it dry, and then did a test wipe. It stayed on. Bingo. I painted the rest of them.

Brent came in while I was fingernail painting the knobs and gave me one of those “My wife…I expect things like that from her” looks.

Hey! It works!

We’ve been driving for 8 hours, our butts are weary from the external throbbing of the road under our truck’s six wheels, the trailer dragging along behind us. We find a rest area, truck stop, WalMart, or anywhere we can pull in, weary beyond belief, to sleep for a few hours before we hit the road again, determined to haul our home on the road across the country to photograph birds, elk, fall colors, spring flowers, or whatever nature subject awaits us at our destination.

We fall into the trailer, crawling our way into bed, sleep grabbing us immediately. One, two, maybe three hours later, the inevitable happens. We all experience it, so there is no hiding it. It’s a normal function of life. You have to get up in the night to pee. There, it’s done. I’ve admitted it, now we can move on.

Yes, that inevitable pee in the night. I crawl off the end of the bed and take the two steps to my bathroom, illuminated by the street lights glowing in the windows, open the door and collapse onto the stool. Half asleep, I grab some toilet paper, do what we do with toilet paper, then press the handle to add the water to flush the remains – and there is no water.

Because we are in the middle of a parking lot and not hooked up to the necessary amenities of life on the road: water, sewer, electricity; I am standing there over the toilet, watching the liquid flow down but the heavier and sticker stuff remains because there is nothing to flush it down with.

SOME FORGOT TO TURN ON THE WATER PUMP!

I wish I could say this is an occasional problem, but it isn’t. Or should I say “wasn’t”. I’d go into the bathroom while traveling to wash the mud or gasoline off my hands and there would be no water. Brent would rush in to go to the bathroom during one of our many pull-off-the-side-of-the-road-to-take-a-picture stops, and there would be no water.

In our trailer, the water pump is turned on via a small switch in the kitchen, the full length of the trailer away from the bathroom. But where do we use the most water? In the bathroom.

Once again, this is another night of leaving the remains in the toilet and stomping through the trailer, over the bicycles carried inside for travel, around the other junk that shifted around as the trailer was moving, towards the sink. I manage to bang my shins twice and scrape my ankle to get to the kitchen sink, stretch across the wide counter and turn the water pump on, then make my way through the clutter of travel back to the toilet to press the handle and wait for the water to flush all the excess away.

And now I am wide awake.

Working on a Water Solution

This had to end. I have an engineer living with me. I told him that if he wanted the comfort of my bed, these late night droughts were going to have to come to an end. He’s an electrical engineer by education and a structural engineer by trade. A water switch in the bathroom would be a snap. Right? Of course, right.

When we settled in a place for a couple of weeks, he prowled around in the bathroom looking for a spot to put the switch. In such a tiny space, there aren’t a lot of places, and he really didn’t want to cut a hole in the wall and run wires through the wall, so he finally decided to hide the switch where it was actually most convenient.

When you walk into our tiny trailer bathroom, there is really room for one person. From the door, you face the sink and counter and overhead mirror cabinet. To the right is the shower and to the left is the toilet. Nothing else. Very simple and very small.

The counter is very narrow, and the sink is actually wider than the counter, so the counter actually curves around the protruding sink a little. A six inch fake wood covering hides the bottom curve of the sink and a cupboard sits underneath, a neat way of giving us a normal sized bathroom sink in a very narrow cabinet. Under the curve, above the cabinet, is where Brent decided the switch would sit.

This works out great because the sink is even with your upper chest when sitting on the toilet and the switch is right there, convenient to the left hand.

With a spot chosen, he went out looking for switches. Luckily, a Radio Shack was nearby and he found a simple toggle switch (single pole single throw switch) with a small mount.

Having re-done all the wiring for the trailer before we hit the road in 1996, Brent had a great deal of familiarity with the wiring. He took a 12 volt wire from the 12 volt supply in the generator compartment and ran it to one side of the switch in the bathroom. The other side of the switch splices into the 12 volt input of the pump. So when you throw the switch, it connects power to the pump and water comes out. This formed a second parallel circuit in conjunction with the power line from the kitchen.

The water pump is located under the floor of the stairs next to the bathroom, and the generator compartment is at the head of the stairs, so the wires didn’t have far to travel. In fact, the whole “basement” compartment with the water pump and heat ducts made it easy to run the wires from the generator through the basement up into the bathroom cabinet since the bathroom sits over the basement compartment.

With a couple hours work, mostly tracing power lines, I had a switch in the bathroom so I could turn on the electric water pump any time I needed water. YEAH!

Okay, there are some drawbacks to this. If you walk into a room with two light switches, either one will turn on or off the light, right? Well, this single system doesn’t work both ways. If you turn on the water in the kitchen, you have to turn it off in the kitchen. If you turn it on in the bathroom, you have to turn it off in the bathroom. If we were to have it set up so that we could turn it on in the bathroom and off in the kitchen, Brent would have to run a wire from the kitchen to the bathroom and back, and we decided that cutting holes in the watertight moisture barrier along the bottom of the trailer in order to string a couple of wires…we can live with walking the 10 feet from one end of the trailer to the other to turn off the water.

There is an added benefit to this, though. Some places where we stayed had little or no water pressure. Taking a shower is like spit bathing. To boost the pressure of the water during the shower, I don’t even have to leave the shower. I just open the shower door, reach down and flip the switch, and the water pump kicks in, adding water from the water tanks to the street water and I get a decent shower. Wonderful.

Now, if I could only figure out how to get the water tanks to automatically fill by themselves, we’d really have a good time on the road.

Jarring down Highway 10 through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, our backs were screaming from the rugged interstate. At the Louisiana border, we encountered a huge cavern that cross the entire two lane highway. There was no swerving to miss this one. As it approached, I could see the layers and layers of pavement coming at us, cut away by the huge hole, a pavement layer cake. When you can see 50 years of pavement on the back side of a hole in the highway, you know that you are about to lunge your truck and trailer off a cliff, smash down in the canyon and then slam into that second side.

Part of the joy of having a fifth wheel trailer and truck combination is that you get to feel the bumps more than one. You got the traditional front and back tires smashing into the pothole, but then the double axle wheels on the trailer slams down and jerks the truck back with it. It’s the kind of jarring experience few carnival rides every emulate because they would be slapped with lawsuits and personal injury claims.

That monster canyon was too much for us and Brent took the first exit off the highway. We stopped at a gas station and rolled out of the truck. Stepping, crawling, or even sliding out was impossible. Our backs were twisted up in agony.

I managed to make it into the trailer and cried when I saw that the kitchen cupboards at the back of the trailer had all sprung open and our Corelle plates and bowls were shattered on the sink, table, and floor of the trailer. We got gas and then pulled into a nearby WalMart to clean up the damage.

Corelle dishes are wonderful. They claim they don’t break, and, for the most part, they don’t. But drop them on stone or cement or Louisiana’s Interstate 10 and you have shattered Corelle.

Corelle doesn’t break. It splinters. Tiny little slivers of almost translucent white glass, spread across the sink, counter, stove, table, and buried into the carpet. We vacuumed as best as we could with the slideout pulled in, and then when we finally pulled of the highway that night, we opened it up and throughly vacuumed again, looking closely with flashlights for any sparkle.

For the rest of the long voyage across Interstate 10 to Florida, we used bungee cords to hold the cabinets closed. That helped. Not long after, we were bound again to cross the United States southern half and this time, we made a point of going on Interstate 20 to avoid the bone (and dish) breaking southern route.

We made it across Alabama, Mississippi, and laughed that we weren’t suffering as bad as the Louisiana border approached. This was much better. The river was before us and a narrow bridge, but we felt that the worst was over.

It wasn’t.

Just as we hit the entrance to the bridge that crossed the Mississippi River, the border between Louisiana and Mississippi, a huge crater lay between us and the bridge. Cars were coming at us, so there was no swerving. Once again, we slammed into another hole in the road with a major jolt.

As soon as we crossed the river, once again in Louisiana, we pulled off and inspected the damage inside the trailer. I was relieved to see at first that the bungee cords had held the cabinets closed. Then I opened them.

Almost every Corelle dish we had painstakingly replaced at Outlet Malls in Florida had been destroyed. They had compacted against each other and broken.

Want a new set of dishes? Taken them on a visit to Louisiana.

A few miles later, we encountered another canyon in the road and when we checked the trailer again, one bungee cord had actually snapped. It was time for radical action.

Replacing and Repairing

While I was out buying new dishes (again), Brent was at the hardware store looking for some good wood pieces. Let me tell you why.

We had some choices before us. First of all, the bungees were a temporary idea, and obviously not strong enough. We needed latches. Second, we could have said “screw it” with the glass plates and gone paper (ick) or plastic, but this was in 1997. The “old” days. Plastic plates were made of melamine which, when used in the microwave, releases a gas which poisons the food you are cooking. I looked everywhere and researched the limited resources on the Internet (these were the “old” days, remember) and couldn’t find any plastic dishes that looked nice and worked in the microwave. And we are nature photographers and writers. Do you really think we would clutter up the environment using paper plates full-time?

So I went out for more Corelle dishes and Brent went off to deal with creating new latches.

Yes, we could have bought some latches and installed them, but Brent is a perfectionist and wanted the latches to match the overall design of the cabinetry. Today, most motor homes and trailers come with built-in latches, but ours didn’t. It was time for Engineer Brent to design new latches for our trailer. Everything else is customized, so why not our latches.

He wanted to have the latch swing out and over the cupboard door. Unfortunately, the design of these cabinets features a door that is just under 1 inch thick. The latch would have to have a mount that would raise it up so the latch would easily swing out and over the edge of the door.

Using the strong red oak wood, he cut blocks that were 3 x 1 x 1 1/2 inch in size, the grain running longwise. With a jigsaw, he very carefully cut an L out of each piece about two inches in. The small piece would become the latch, and the bottom piece would be the mount.

Placement of these was also taken into consideration. These are big latches, designed to seriously hold the doors closed. They also stick out a bit. Having them on the bottom of the cabinet meant hitting them as we moved around the cupboards. Same with having them on the side. The best bet for the upper cabinets was to have them as close to the ceiling as possible, out of the way but accessible.

Against the ceiling, if the block was left with square edges, the latch wouldn’t swing clear of the ceiling nicely, so Brent decided to round all the corners to allow the latch to move freely as it turned and look more finished.

With a long screw and Teflon washers between the latch piece and the mount, the latch would be tight but move easily over the cabinet door.

We put six of these custom latches on six cabinets in our kitchen, and 8 years later, covering Interstate 20 and 10 several more times, and the frost heaves of Alaska, they have never once broken or popped open. We do have to remember to latch them before we move, but that’s one of the many things we have to remember when we prepare to move on down the road.

Padding the Dishes

Now that the latch was in place, we needed to deal with the issues of broken dishes. I went to a nearby fabric shop and found some heavy fabrics, and after some trial and error, ended up choosing fabric that is thick enough to pad, soft enough to not scratch and absorb shocks, and still do the job of protecting the dishes, pots and pans during travel.

Look for flannel, felt, wool, or synthetics like medium thickness microfleece. If it is too thick, it just adds to the bulk of your dishes and it is troublesome to store when you aren’t using them. If it is too thin, then it doesn’t do the job.

I cut the fabric into 8 inch squares. This worked fine for the bowls and smaller plates, and it actually worked well for the larger plates as it was just thick enough that the edges didn’t touch enough to crack against each other. I cut different sized pieces to go in the pots and pans to accommodate their various sizes.

Before we travel, I place the fabric between the plates and bowls and stack them flat (not on their sides) on top of each other in the cupboards. Oversized pans like cookie and pizza pans also get a layer of fabric between then and they are stored in the oven while we travel. Pots and pans have their own cabinet, and I just automatically put the fabric in between them as I stack them after every use.

When we’re done traveling for a week or more, I take out the fabric between the plates, bowls and pans and roll the smaller sizes up in the larger sizes, tie a ribbon around them and put them in a storage spot awaiting the next trip. The ones in the pots and pans I just leave alone.

Inside of the cabinets themselves, I’ve put padded, non-skid shelf liner, which adds another layer of protection.

We use heavy bar glasses and these have yet to break. We place them rim down on the padded shelf liner and do not stack them. They take the brunt force of the road very well and we haven’t had any problems with them banging together either. We keep only four of these large glasses and we have a set of large plastic cups for when we have guests over, and these stack easily and wedge into a corner of the cabinet until we need them.

We have heard about people taking their glassware on the road and setting them the rim with a larger plastic cup stacked on top of them so they don’t clang together. Others use special glassware racks with posts which hold the glassware in place while the vehicle is moving. We found these to take up space we didn’t have and so far, so lucky.

Other Latches

Our latch design isn’t the only one out there. Depending upon the width of your cabinets, there are many different kinds and ways of latching your trailer or motor home cabinet doors. You can even install extra strong catches, but these tend to wear your arms out pulling them open.

Children’s safety latches and locks are another way of adding a bit more safety to your cabinets while traveling. There is a type that goes on the inside of the cabinet so you can pull the cabinet door part way open and then you have to push in on the catch to release it so you can open the door all the way. This works if you will not be spending much time in your trailer and you want a safety latch that isn’t obviously visible.

Another form of children’s safety locks are C-clamp looking plastic locks. Once they are compressed and slid closed, they take some playing around with to release them so they will open up. This is perfect for cabinets featuring handles next to each other like closet doors. The handles proximity allows a single clamp to be looped around each handle and tightened up, holding both doors closed. We use this on our hall closet in the trailer, which rarely opens, but can over rough terrain. When we are done traveling for a while, we unhook it and put it in a drawer. It’s lightweight and takes up very little space and is very quick and easy to use.

There are many ways of latching and protecting your gear as you travel. We’ll have more tips in our Trailer Tales, but if you have any, add them below in our comments.