A Sad Farewell to Our Airstream Home

I know I’ve been obnoxiously alluding to something big in our lives that I couldn’t tell you about, but the time has come to spill the beans. Our Airstream has been declared a total loss by our insurance company. Which means they’re taking possession of it, as in, towing it away from us.

This trailer has occasionally been a pain in the butt, but what it’s given us is impossible to value: extraordinarily rich adventures across the U.S. and Canada that were possible only by taking our home with us.   

This is really a big deal to us, a monumental hunk of weirdness that we’re having to deal with in complex ways. So, here’s a very long post with lots of details. Pretty photos at the end.

When the Hail it Happened

We had just begun our June tooling around Colorado and were in Grand Junction when this particular hailstorm hit the trailer.  We weren’t even in it at the time; we’d left it parked in a campground while we went to Palasade to hear some bands. 

(Poor Banjo, she was in it at the time, all alone, too.)

When it happened, I didn’t make a big deal out of it, partly because we really couldn’t see much damage. We knew the storm had been big, though.

And we could see some pings and dings here and there, so we filed a claim just to see what would happen.

I kept thinking, “There is a tiny chance the trailer will be totaled, like 1%.” Airstreams are known for being easy prey to hail.

The next couple of weeks we were boondocking, which meant it took a while for an insurance inspector to even come see the trailer. There was some angst leading up to that visit because we had no idea what to expect. Would she be familiar with Airstreams? Would she try to get up on the roof? (Danger Danger!) Would she see a few pings and say, “You brought me out here for this?” Would she look inside? We had no experience to draw on at all. And we had no idea what was at stake. A claim that wouldn’t amount to much but a rise in our rates? The loss of our home? Something weird in between we’d have to figure out how to navigate?

To prepare, we washed the trailer minimally to try to diminish the camouflage effect of red dirt from three months of boondocking in New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. Which wasn’t easy: near Durango we lugged water using collapsible buckets from a stream

And near Fairplay we lugged from a really ornery hand pump.

Plus, I straightened up inside, because, who the heck knew. 

Our inspector turned out to be both thorough and knowledgeable. She spent at least two hours (maybe it was three?) methodically looking everywhere, up on her own ladder, with a large mirror, with a measuring tape, with her notebook, and on her phone.  At least that’s what I could tell from the inside of the trailer; I holed up inside and distracted myself by texting with my Airstream friend Amy because someone was on our roof. Amy kept texting, “What is she doing now?” Tracy sat outside, entirely silent, as she worked. 

Not only did she see the hail dings we were worried she’d miss, but she did what she calls the Hail Dance where she rocked back and forth in front of each area of the trailer (to avoid the glare of the sun and to see each angle of the curves) to find all the dings. 

Finally, as she was sitting on our steps and gathering her notes to go, she said for us to be thinking about the possibility of the trailer being totaled. Wow.  It kind of felt like an invisible tree had fallen on our house. Just, instantly totaled.

How the Trailer Could Be Totaled

Before this, my only experience with something being totaled is when you wreck your car so bad you can’t drive it away. I may not have even realized that “totaled” is short for the insurance company declaring it a “total loss.” Now I know.

Airstreams are more easily totaled from hail storms than other campers or vehicles for a bunch of reasons. (Here I go like I know what I’m talking about when I could have this stuff wrong. This is my understanding.)

1. With Airstreams you can’t pop out small dents like you can with cars because they’re made out of aluminum, for one thing, which is pretty danged delicate. Plus, the aluminum for the multiple panels that make up the front and rear ends (the curved parts have been stretched and molded to shape). So, you have to replace each panel. 
2. Those panels are parts the shop has to order and are expensive (tariffs on aluminum may not be helping right now).
3. The labor to replace them is even more.  Each exterior panel is riveted to each interior panel, so to replace the exterior, you have to take out the aligning interior stuff (walls, cabinets, bed, whatever) so you can reach the interior panels and rivet them to the exterior ones.  Something like that.  The bottom line is that it takes a lot of time, and those Airstream technicians don’t come cheap. 
4. When you combine the cost of the panels and the labor to replace them, it turns out to be more than $800 per panel.  We have three on up top on the front, six up top in the back, and the rest depends on how you count them and which sustained damage, but there’s the roof ones, the side ones, the very front and the very back ones.  That’s a lot of panels.
5. Additional damage: the two skylights and the AC unit.  Maybe a few other things, but what the heck we’re not even counting by now. I’m sure it’s all on the paperwork.

Even with these known factors, the equation the insurance company uses to determine totaling is complex.  It involves how much it would cost to fix the trailer, yes, plus what our policy is, and—here’s the kicker—what they could sell it for at auction, which I think is a big number.  They told us what a trailer like ours could be sold for by an RV dealer who bought it at auction, and it’s astoundingly high.  So, add some stuff, subtract some stuff, put in 44% in there somewhere (even Tracy couldn’t figure out what that was for), and, even though our trailer is still very valuable, it’s a total loss. Maybe because it is still very valuable.

Timing of My Decision to Leave the Road

That’s all the black and white: when, how, etc. The personal weirdness starts with the timing of this declaration by the insurance company and my declaration of being done with the road. 

I’d been wrestling with my desire to leave the road for ages, and I mean ages. But this summer I’d decided this had to be our last year.  Maybe we’d spend the winter in South Texas and the next summer picking a place to live. But then the hail happened, and I started thinking, “What if the trailer is totaled?” I thought there was like a 1% chance, but I couldn’t let go of the idea. If it were, then I’d be off the hook having to make this absurdly hard choice because it would be made for me. We’d have to at least pause to regroup, right? 

As the weeks went by between the hail storm and the insurance inspector coming out, I kept thinking about what it would mean to get off the road (as a real possibility now). I thought about it so much that I realized I would be not devastated, exactly, if the trailer weren’t totaled, but worse. That, no matter what insurance said, I needed to get off the road.  I felt like Frodo yelling at the other Hobbits when the first Black Rider was approaching.  “Get off the road! Get off the road!” 

The exact timing went: 

• Monday: Tell Tracy we have to get off the road this year.
• * Tuesday: Tell Tracy we have to get off the road right this minute.
• Wednesday: Pick Madison, Wisconsin
• * Thursday:  Insurance adjuster tells us the trailer might be totaled
• Friday: We make a ton of calls
• Saturday: We head straight to Madison

Now, if I had waited just two days to make my declaration, then insurance would have made the decision for me. But, whatever, the world is a strange place and you have to roll with it.  

A Jumble of Consequences

This post is getting absurdly long so I’ll summarize from here.  We canceled the rest of our plans for the summer and made straight for Madison because we didn’t know what the procedure was with insurance. Would they send us paperwork and say we’d have a week to get out of the trailer?  Probably not, but we didn’t know, and we did have a lot of work to prepare for when that did happen. So we drove for four days to the campground I found in Madison, got a storage unit so we could empty the truck into it, which would free the truck up for when we had to move our stuff from the trailer into … wherever that would go.

So far, we have been given enough time by insurance to manage some personal stuff before we need to vacate.  I gotta say though, this in-limbo time has been weird for me. Friends ask if my mental health is improved now that I’m “off the road.” It has not. And that’s because I may be off the road, but I’m still feeling that insecurity of place that I’ve always had. How long will we have the trailer to live in? Where will we go if we don’t find a house to buy right away? Yadda yadda with the anxious mind. If you’re feeling insecure about where you’re gonna live, it doesn’t help that you idiotically gasp every time a big tow truck drives by the campground.

This is the short version of our to-do list since we’ve arrived in Madison. 

1. Find a place to live short-term.
2. Find a house long-term.
3. Find healthcare (Madison is renowned for quality care, but it’s hard to get in as a new patient).
4. Say goodbye to our way of life and our home for the past five years. 

As Pepe Lepew says, Le Sob! 

What strong emotions we’ve had. Incredulity at the trailer being totaled. Relief we’ll get money for it and won’t have to fix it up to sell it. Grief at losing our tiny shiny home that’s taken us across the country so many times and that, frankly, is more lovely than most of the houses we’ve been touring. Excitement (on my part) at moving into a stable place. Dismay at not owning any of the expensive house stuff we used to have (and now want back) or even a stick of furniture.  

We do now have a timeline to hand over the Airstream, and we’re working on a lease for an apartment. We’re boxing up the travel-related stuff and stacking that in the storage unit, we’re thinking about what we’ll need to live in an apartment (um, a mattress to sleep on?), and we’re touring possible houses to buy. And every move I make in the trailer involves saying goodbye to this tiny home, that I dreamed about living in and am going to miss, never mind any of the stuff I’m looking forward to.

Here are some shots I’ve just now collected of the inside of our home (and what it’s enabled for us) as I’ve been drafting this post. Sure will miss this place.

Will We Camp Again?

Now, I’ll say this only because I’ve been asked a lot. Maybe one day we’ll get a small trailer to go camping. But that’s not a simple thing: we have to get the apartment, buy a house, sell the truck (it’s too big for city living), buy a car, buy furniture, and fix up whatever house we do buy. If we were to buy a small trailer, we’d have to buy another vehicle to tow it, and we’d have to pay to store them both because we’ll be in the city. That’s a lot of big-ticket items, and we’re not made out of money. Plus, we’re still processing this giant life change. Give us some time to grieve the loss of a lifestyle and our tiny shiny home, and I’ll get back to you on the idea of camping in the future.

So, that’s the thing I haven’t been able to post about, that’s been underneath everything in our lives the last two months. Time to move forward, now. (She says as she keeps looking at old photos).

If you missed these and are interested, here are favorite photos from the past five years that are of the actual outside of the trailer. 😁

Photos to Frame, Pt 1

and here:

Photos to Frame, Pt 2