[A/S] Introduction.

["mandoholic" <mandoholic2@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

I'm been lurking here on the list for about 8 months, have posted 
couple of things, and I'm very impressed by the helpfulness and quick 
response I got.  

My name is Clyde Clevenger, my wife is Nikki and we live in Salem, 
Oregon.  We are both school special programs school bus drivers in 
our real lives and Bluegrass musicians in the summer.  We have a '78 
25' Tradewind.  I'm still not savy as to what all the labels mean on 
the side, ours say Excella, International and Tradewind, must mean 
something.  Our tow rig is an F-250 Superduty PSD.

We had a very busy summer, traveled 8,262 miles, averaged 13.4 mpg, 
and passed a lot of Dodges and Chevy's going uphill and were passed 
by a lot of them going downhill.  The uni-volt went out in Minnesota 
and I replaced it with an Intellepower in Duluth.  The only one I 
could find was an open-box, no manual unit at a local RV dealer, for 
$300, way too much I know, but I did get it in and it is working fine.
I had to pull the front couch out to get to the uni-volt and was 
amazed at how much room this made in the trailer, so when we got back 
home, we pulled the couch out, pulled up the carpet and put in Pergo 
flooring.  Not a job I would recommend during the hottest week of the 
year in Oregon.  I'm still contemplating what to do with the front 
wall where the couch was.  Possibly build a cabinet/storage area.  I 
moved the table over by the front door, it was by the galley which 
when folded out had only on usable side, poor design I think.  Right 
now I'm supposed to be out back leveling the spot where we are going 
to pour a slab to store the trailer at home.  It has been vandalized 
twice at the storage unit, I still have to use a screw driver to open 
the door.  

This is our second Airstream, the first being a '68 Carovell (sp) 
that we found too small for our big bodies.  

On our big trip to Minnesota we were amazed at how few ASs we saw on 
the road, probably less than ten in 5,200 miles, we took the scenic 
route.  We stayed in 15 RV parks on the trip and saw no ASs at any of 
them.  On our way home we stopped at a little Bluegrass festival in 
Fossil, Oregon and were thrilled to find 2 other ASs there out of 
only 8 RVs in the park.  The next week we went to a big festival at 
Darrington, Washington and found 7 ASs there, out of about 1300 RVs.
We give a lot of tours of our rig and interest seems to be very high 
among the Bluegrass community, an odd lot no doubt.  I wish I had a 
dozen of them to sell.  When we sold the Carovell for $6,000 we got 
trashed pretty badly by email for selling it too cheap.  That seemed 
a fair price to me, considering what we had in it although it did 
sell 15 minutes after posting it on the net, maybe we did sell it too 
cheap. 

Sorry for the long post, I guess I'm trying to avoid the pick and 
shovel out in the back yard.

Clyde in Salem, Oregon