Scotty rally in Acadia, 2011

Our first Scotty Rally was last weekend, on home turf – at Smuggler’s Den in (well, adjacent to) Acadia, a campground we know and love.

Here are some of our favorite photos:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Many thanks to Nancy of the NSSO who organized the rally and held a really nice event! The trailer open house and potluck were great. What a fabulous first rally experience for us!

I’m also noticing that we never quite finished our Canada Travelogue – partly because we went totally off-grid. We’ll pick up soon.

Days 6 – 8

We went to Amherst Shore Provincial Park (NS) on Friday as soon as we blew out of Halifax. A lovely, quiet change – great Park where the sites are unserviced but facilities were fabulous, and sites were the size of medium house lots!

A fun first stop - the Gypsy Bazaar! Great roadside shopping throughout the trip.

Wonderful site at Amherst Shore Provincial Park

KJ finds a fossil tree at Joggins.

We went to Joggins Fossil Cliffs (A UNESCO world Heritage Site) on Saturday and then drove out of NS to New Brunswick, where we’re spending a few days at Fundy National Park – the campground here is awesome and the sights are really fantastic. Highlights:

Great lighthouse at Cape Enrage, a very cool side trip.

Hopewell rocks.

Days 3 and 4

Day three was uneventful – I was at meetings all day, and it was rainy and cool. A nice break after the heat wave, though. It really poured during the night, and the Scotty did wonderfully. After a few panicky moments (duh, the vent was open and that’s what the drip was!), we were high and dry. Tenters across the street packed it up in the middle of the night and disappeared – it really got wet, so we’re very happy we bought all that super heavy duty sealant recommended by Nancy at NSSO.

Today (Day 4), meetings got out at midday so we went all around the city and had a blast. A favorite was walking around the Halifax Public Gardens:

Pretty stream into the duck pond

Almost gone by and still beautiful - Dogwood are a favorite.

We had a light lunch (I had an extremely tasty samosa at Paperchase, a great coffee/lunch shop), then did some shopping followed by a pint and a snack.

Then back to the campground – I had to head to the laundromat to put my towel – left out on the clothesline in the downpour – in the dryer, and get ready for tomorrow’s meetings. A great day overall.

Days 1 & 2 – Beauty and the Behemoths

On day 1, we set off down a favorite Maine road of ours, Route  9. K stopped for a photo at one of his favorite overlooks – the whalesback, an esker. Great glacial feature of Maine!

Scotty on the esker

A mere 90 miles from home, we were in Canada! At one point as we sat on the bridge crossing the border, the truck was in Canada and the Scotty was in the US. Scotty’s safely in Canada now.

Days 2 and beyond, we’re at Shubie Park, a nice campground within the Halifax Metro area, making it very convenient to the work meeting I’m attending all week. The campground is a bit more family oriented/typical than we usually like, but we’re here for the location and it’s really quite nice. It’s a bit more like tailgating than boondocking all around us! All the other trailers are giant buses – except a couple small vans/VWs and a few tenters. The Scotty barely takes up an eighth of the site! It’s doing great, though – even in its first real rainstorm (fingers are crossed as I type that it stays dry all night).

Our tiny Scotty

2 people, 15 days, 60 square feet

Get ready – it’s time for our long-awaited road trip with the Scotty.

We’re heading north – which sounds just perfect with the heat wave we’ve been having. If and when we have Wifi, we’ll be blogging about our trip here.

Road Trip

Stove – trimmed up

When we replaced the original stove, the new one didn’t quite cover the missing section of countertop. We left this job for this summer – and the trip to Lamoine reminded us of all these final punch list jobs we still needed to do. So, we worked on this one during this week.

Before - a round stove in a square hole. Unsightly corners with countertop missing.

We used a piece of 1″ door threshold moulding (aluminum) from the hardware store – about $10 for 6′. Mitered the corners, made a couple of cutouts for the stove attachment, and spent quite a while getting it to fit perfectly.

Trim in progress - fitted and just needing fastening

And here’s the final product – just needing to re-polish the countertop where we dirtied it up during installation. Much nicer!

Stove all trimmed out

Corner - covered

First trip out – 2011

We took our first trip out just before Memorial Day weekend at Lamoine State Park in Maine, about 30 miles from home. We hadn’t been there in years, and it was a great, nearby spot to try everything back out. The campground is fantastic – all boondocking, but there’s drinking water and really nice bathroom & shower facilities. Here was our spot:

Great wooded site!

It was a bit of a working vacation; we wanted to test out an idea for an awning using a shade sail thing (triangle shaped). We need to modify it and put real attachments, but the idea still seems good.

Trying out an awning idea

There are short trails and a lovely beach – that was the vacation part.

Steps from the campsite - ocean beach

Back to work: after a run to the local hardware store for a few last minute parts, we plumbed the sink for both city water and the hand pump, plus the drain. We didn’t try it though – there wasn’t city water and we were waiting for some silicone to try. But theoretically, we have indoor plumbing!

Bucket o' tools - for plumbing the sink

And a classic camping dinner one night (the other night was more gourmet, but you just have to have something campy on the first trip!)

Classic camping dinner

Finally – finished hubcaps

The re-chroming of the hubcaps was enough to make us swoon, but I finally got up the nerve to paint in the Serro Scotty lettering this past weekend in preparation for camping season. Actually, I come from a family of model-builders and detailed craftsmen, plus I’ve had some art training, so it wasn’t that big of a worrisome task – though I was prepared with plenty of clean rags in case I clumsily smeared enamel paint all over. There are now decals for the letters, but I’m actually so much worse with stickers than paint that this was a safer option.

The inset letters really made painting pretty simple, and the hubcaps are now, officially, done!

Avert your eyes! These are so blindingly shiny they are hard to photograph!

They look so smooth and shiny with some adjustments to the flash.

Though we are really nervous about putting them on – if we lose one on the road, I think we’d cry. We’ve talked about leaving them off for travel – but since our philosophy is to use and enjoy the trailer, we may risk leaving them on. Who could resist showing off that chrome, anyways?

Winter camp-in 2011

Saturday was the annual winter camp-in for the NSSO. Last year at this time, our trailer was in pieces in the garage. So, it was our first winter camp-in.

The weather was decent – 20 degrees – and we found this awesome chili mix also called “Six Gun” – so we decided to participate in the camp-in by having dinner and a movie out there.

A perfect winter meal.

We zipped open the side of the trailer cover and fired up our new little heater, which got the temperature up to 50 degrees in under an hour.

The little heater worked well.

Then, dinner!

Dinner is served - Six Gun chili in the Six-Gun Scotty.

The trailer stayed nice and cozy the whole time, and it was great to spend time out there in the middle of winter.

Looking forward to camping season…

Gleaming hubcaps

We saved our pennies and sent out two (of the three) hubcaps to be repaired and re-chromed. We sent them to Courtesy Metal Polishing, on recommendation of other Scotty folks and after finding good reviews online.

Today I got home from a meeting to find a delivery notice taped to our door – so we scrambled around and got the package held at the carrier’s warehouse, then just braved a windy storm to go pick them up.

And wow – was it all worth it! They look like the messed up, old, dinged, painted things we sent in were secretly replaced with perfect brand new hubcaps. Seriously – an amazing transformation. The third one (on the right, in case it’s not obvious!) is too far gone for chroming this time around – and we’re out of cash – but perhaps someday we’ll get sophisticated enough to figure out what to do with it. I mean, does a spare tire really need a fabulous hubcap?

One of these things is not like the other...

Two shiny hubcaps. Hard to get a photo that does them justice.

Next up: we need to paint the Scotty lettering – time for more research.

Just so happened, we were packing up the hubcaps to send them in right after I had spent a serious amount of time trying to scrub the bejeesus out of the original sink strainer basket – we actually gave up on it, but after seeing how chintzy new replacements were, I just tossed it in with the hubcaps with a note. Could it be chromed too? And it came back all shiny and clean enough for the kitchen.

Sink strainer - also sparkly!

Which reminds me – we still have to hook up the sink. Once the snow melts…