Things I Want to Remember about Living in the Airstream

I’m sitting in my seat at the dinette very early this morning, looking around at the trailer while Tracy and Banjo sleep. I’m thinking about all the things I don’t want to forget in here, all the small aspects of daily life inside our home that I want to stay with me in my memories. Consider this list the flip side of the one of all the things I’m looking forward to in a sticks-and-bricks. 

I don’t want to forget:

When I resort to trying to sleep on the couch in the middle of the night, I can lie facing the back of the couch and wedge my phone upright in the crack between the cushions, and sometimes I fall asleep watching or reading without having to hold my phone. It’s the perfect setup. 

In Alaska we would close the blinds in the upper narrow windows at night to simulate darkness; it was one of the only times we messed with those blinds and we broke one. One night in early July while we were boondocking off the Top of the World Highway, I wanted to take a photo of the midnight sunset but I didn’t want to wake up Tracy and Banjo by going outside, so I stood on the sofa and took it through the one narrow window with the broken blind.

There’s a storage area under the microwave where we keep bottles of vinegars and other odd cooking liquids. If the glass ones, I keep each in its own beer koozie.  For some reason I’m gonna miss checking those beer koozies each time before we travel. 

I’ve broken a bunch of things during travel days, but I’ve never broken a special beer glass or a dish due to careless packing.  

We used to bring in the small metal table from outside and set it up beside the dinette so we could play a big board game all night and still have room for food and drinks.

The speakers for the stereo and TV go in and out randomly, but for a while you could make them do that by walking down the hallway. 

In Jasper we watched elk in the campsite as we stood with Banjo at the screen door, and in Montana we watched moose through that screen. Once in Canada, Banjo was inside while a bear walked through the campsite, and, once in Alaska, a porcupine ran under the trailer. 

We were on our way to the Airstream rally in Missouri and needed to put the big red numbers on the back of the trailer. We were at the last campground before we would arrive and needed those numbers up.  Tracy was up on the ladder and I was watching from below and we were being so careful, and we still got them on wrong. 

Sometimes we would have every single window open when we were camped on the beach. Like that, you can eat in your own kitchen and smell the sea, and you can sleep in your own bed and hear it. 

For three winters in Brownsville we’d keep the local radio station on all the time in the trailer, and I’d text Doug in Madison each time they played a the Bob Dylan deep cut, which was about once an hour, it seemed like. 

In the early days when we were stuck in the campground in Virginia, we still had a mobile of cardboard hummingbirds above the bed, and I loved lying there watching it turn and reflect off the ceiling. 

When I look at beautiful photos from us hiking in Yukon and Alaska, I want to remember the inside of the trailer on those days: muddy hiking boots on towels in front of the door, dripping outer raincoats hanging over the boots, more layers plus hats and gloves anywhere we could let them dry and warm up throughout the trailer. Worth it.  

In the middle of the night when I need to get up and cook something to give myself something to do, I open the pantry door to partially block the light so as not to wake up sleeping Tracy and Banjo. Then I use the flashlight on my phone to cook.  In the early days, I used my Spock lamp given to me by my former boss, which gave up the ghost long ago. I loved the comforting gaze of Mr. Spock in the middle of the night!

I have one drawer of odds and ends screwed to the underside of the far end of the dinette table. No matter how many times I go through it to weed out stuff I don’t need in there, it still ends up partially filled with coins from the wrong country.

When anything falls on the roof, rain, hail, acorns, Banjo wedges herself in the small space beside Tracy’s side of the bed. 

The plastic bins we keep under Tracy’s dinette seat with dog stuff in one and dried foodstuff in another still have red dirt from New Mexico on their lids, because I don’t want to say goodbye to that beautiful dirt.

When we moved into the trailer, we had the great idea to buy an ottoman with storage room inside and put our Tupperware and the Instapot pot in there. Immediately, we saw the fault: that Banjo’s hair gets in there every day. I divided the bowls and lids into two oversized bags and cut a square of cardboard to cover it all.  We still have to rinse every item we pull out of there. It’s our system them, and we stuck with it.

Banjo likes to rest her chin on the sofa armrest, when she’s asleep and awake.

If I drop something small while I’m in bed, like an earbud, between the mattress and the closet wall right beside me, I’ll invariably find it the next day in my rain boot. That’s because I store those boots wedged between the bed and the closet, under my ukulele case, which is under a pink pool noodle I keep wedged on top of it all in an attempt to stop small things from falling down in that crack. 

I’ve tried to decorate the stark white bathroom walls with peel-and-stick wallpaper so many times I can’t remember them all.

If I haven’t made the bed yet and Banjo is still sleeping by it, she’ll let the comforter completely cover her and stay hidden until we call her. 

A stained glass tree my mom gave me eons ago hangs behind the sofa just right so that it gives the illusion of privacy when we’re in campgrounds.

Before it broke, the camper glass ornament that Finn and Paul gave us hung perfectly on the rock guard when it was up over the same window. 

When Banjo is sleeping at the foot of our bed, with her ear under the large gap of the bathroom door (she does this a lot), you can go to the bathroom in the dark and close the door and see her ear still down there beside your foot. You pee and go wash your hands in the kitchen and climb back over her to get to the bed, and all the while she never moves. That ear has dual citizenship with the bathroom, and Banjo is not going to risk losing it. 

The super-cool window treatments that slide open and closed—they solved the problem of the shade there getting caught on the knife rack.

My thrill the day I discovered I could clean the dead bugs off the shades with bleach and a toothbrush. 

Early on Tracy bought me simple glass vases that hang on a hook that can be stuck on a wall. I didn’t keep them because they took up space when we traveled, but they sure were a lovely way to keep something fresh and alive inside the Airstream. 

I’ll add to this list as I think of things I don’t want to forget about living in this lovely Airstream.