Day 2: Saturday 26-jun-1999
From: Penn Wood Airstream Park, Limestone, PA
To: Dayton, Ohio
Distance: 330mi (500km)
Time: 5 h
We all slept like babies. We had the air conditioning on and and then warm covers over us on the beds. The express caravan from Penn Wood out to Dayton was to start at 7am, but, we could not dump our black water where got parked because the black water drain was "above" our outlet. We were also told, in advance, that we had to come with tanks empty to Dayton as we would have to wait several days before we would get pumped. This made it even more important to dump now. We ended up changing spot in the morning just to be able to dump.
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| Penn Wood Airstream Park, Limestone, Pennsylvania |
At about 7:45am the 5 Airstream trailers and 2 Airstream motor homes were ready to roll out from Penn Wood. Mike and Sandy Sasuta took the lead. This was our first caravan of any sort.
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| Caravanners gathering at Penn Wood |
We had a few trailers in front of us so we got to enjoy the view. We went through many rolling hills, all somewhat straining for the truck. The temp climbed to 240F on the transmission, but cooled down as we were heading on down-hill.
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| A few of the Airstreams ahead of us en-route to Dayton Ohio |
We saw considerable amounts of road kill along the way and were surprised that very little of it appeared to be cleaned up by nature. We got a chance to work on our GPS navigation system (Garmin GPS II-plus), which we hooked up to the laptop (thanks to Ric Werme for lending us the cable), running Street Atlas USA V6. It offered us live moving maps with a dot indicating where we were on the map. A lot more cost effective than those multi thousand dollar systems they sell through places like Camping world.
We took a longer lunch break (45 minutes) along a rest stop some 100 miles (160km) before Dayton. We were lucky to get all Airstreams lined up in one place. Most of the time these rest stops are really full. After that we started the last leg of the trip to Dayton. It worked really fine.
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| Taking a lunch break about 100 miles from Dayton, Ohio |
As we approached Dayton, Mike called Wally Bayam Control over channel 14 on the radio. Remarkably (to us) they answered. We could all hear the conversation Mike was having with them as all units in our little caravan were tuned to channel 14. Mike asked them for instructions to find the camp area for us. They were very helpful.
This is our first International WBCCI rally ever. WBCCI is the Airstream owner's club. Each year they organize about 1,500 events in North America most of which area quite regional, such as up where we live or down in Texas, etc. One, however, is the so called international rally. It is held each year, in some larger city in North America, and members from all over North America drive their Airstreams to this event. This event lasts for about one week and ends on the 4th of July, the birthday of Airstream's inventor: Wally Bayam.
Parking was very spread out this time, unlike most International events. There must be at least 7 or so distinct parking areas around Wright State University in Dayton. About 1,900+ Airstreams have registered to attend the event. It is quite a spectacular sight. Our small caravan got parked along with approximately 600 other units on the grass in front of the Museum of Wright Patterson Air Force Base. We are basically living in a village of Airstreams. Not far from our trailers are various real airplanes, such as a Mig, a C130 cargo plane and a B1 bomber. We are also parked along the takeoff and landing trajectory of some of the real planes coming and goes to the Air Force Base. Some incredibly large C5 cargo planes (bigger than 747s) fly low over our trailers every now and then for touch and go landings at the Air Force Base. There are also other assorted Air Force jets passing over. The planes pass over rarely enough that it is not bothersome.
Soon after we were parked, we went over to register. Wayne and Sue Rutty organized a dinner for the evening and big group of us went to the Longhorn steak house nearby. In the evening it was rather warm and muggy. Somewhat uncomfortable since we cannot use the Air conditioner here due to limited electricity.