Day 22: Airstream Open House and Roller Coaster Rides.

On day 4 of Alumafandango, the awesomeness continued. Today, the local PBS station came by in the morning to do a piece on vintage trailers and interviewed our neighbor Diane who is the proud owner of 4 vintage Airstreams and a Spartan. They even came by our trailer for just a minute to video us working on our computers as some b-roll that will probably never see the light of day.

Today is also the day of Airstream open houses. If you leave your door open, it means you are welcoming visitors. We were just hanging out for most of the day so we left the door open if anyone was interested in paying us a little visit.

We were glad to finally have met Anna Sullivan of glamperanairstreamdiary.com. We have been reading each others blogs and since she lives right here in Denver, she was able to attend Alumafandango as a day visitor. She came by and found us lounging around.

We also did a little bit of visiting ourselves to some other trailers. Timeless Travel Trailers brought by a few of their trailers that are for sale. This one is in a rustic log cabin theme with a really cool hanging loft bed that would be perfect for one of our little ones. While some have been completely revamped, a couple of others can be bought as either a project trailer or they would throw in the trailer for free if you paid them to build it out.

Before you get too excited about the free trailer, let me give you some ideas of what Timeless charges for their work. This is the price sheet they had inside one of the trailers. The log cabin trailer is listed at $190,000.

I wandered off to the other side of the rally field and visited a few other bloggers during the open house. This trailer named Diva is owned by Frank and Debbie of StreamingTogether. We met them the other day but they weren’t there so I took a photo of the outside of 28 ft 2008 Safari.

I had been wanting to check out Kyle’s (whereiskylenow.com) work set up since he is also a web developer working full time in his 23 ft Airstream International. He had a desk installed where the gaucho seat once was and he showed me his awesome new Pepwave router mounted behind the TV. My Cradlepoint that I use to broadcast the 3G internet connection to WiFi is getting pretty old and I think it is time to jump on that Pepwave wagon.

Besides the open house, today is also a day Ava has been waiting for a long time. We got these tokens on the first day when we checked into the event and today, we get to redeem them for all-you-can-ride bracelets.

Ava and Jack have now become best friends. They started the afternoon of free-for-all with a few rides in the kiddie area.

First they took it slow in the little boats with Mila in the back. This is the only ride Mila was into doing. She was too scared to get on any of the other rides, even in the kiddie section.

That didn’t stop Ava and Jack. They jumped right on the small roller coaster and sat right at the front car. They must have have ridden this thing 3 or 4 times before we had to cut them off.

As the afternoon went on, more and more rides started to open. Like this skateboard ride that goes side to side as if on a half pipe and spins along the way.

And Mila, nah, she is not interested. She just sat next to old man Luka while sucking on her night-night fingers.

As the sun was setting, the rest of the amusement park finally began to open up. This is what we have been waiting for all week. We will finally get to see all the great neon signs and go on the rides.

We spend the night walking around with Jack and his parents Josh and Jessa from 1337Stream.com. Josh is also a web developer working full time from his Airstream. They stayed just a couple of miles from us at one of our favorite SoCal camping spots, Rincon Parkway, a couple of years ago during their California tour. We didn’t get to meet them then but we are glad to have finally met them now. We wish we could spend more time with them on the road after this is over but they are headed back to Kansas to get ready for a 2-week overseas trip without the Airstream. We hope to see them again once they return and be able to caravan on some legs of our trips.

Lakeside Amusement Park is like a time warp and to see the lights come on and all of the rides running is quite amazing.

Not too many of the original rides from 1908 are still operational and have mostly be replaced or upgraded. But you can definitely still feel the nostalgia that is impossible to recreate elsewhere.

One of the few rides I went on was the Matterhorn. Riding carnival rides for me is an inverse mathematical formula. The lower budget the ride, the more you feel like puking afterwards.

Just looking at this photo again is making me want to hurl.

The Cyclone is the quintessential wooden roller coaster any amusement park like this should have. It is squeaky, loud and probably unsafe. We didn’t have it in us to risk our lives riding it. I am sure our insurance premium we double if they thought we did.

The Satellite is a ride exactly like the Dumbo ride at Disneyland. You sit in a 2 person pod with a lever to control your elevation while it spins you in a circle. The differece is that it goes about 3 times faster than Dumbo. When you go up in the air, the person closer to the inside is pretty much pinned right against the outside person with all the G-force that it generates.

We took turns going on rides with Ava since Mila just wanted to watch. Here is a rare photo of me donning the Ergobaby in front of the Tilt-a-Whirl ride. The wide-awake Luka is wondering why I am wearing him and not his mamma.

That is because Marlene is in there suffering the torture of yet another low budget carnival ride. Even Ava didn’t want to go back on this another time.

But apparently none was worse than the infamous Wild Chipmunk. We watched after Jack so Josh and Jessa can partake in this medieval torture device. There is a ride like this in California Adventures in California’s Disneyland. It is a little 2 person cart and it makes sharp and abrupt turns on tracks 50 feet up in the air over looking the lake. One part of this ride makes the rider believe that they are going to fall into the water before giving them whiplash in the last moment to save them from certain death.

All joking aside, we had an amazing time at the amusement park. It was Ava’s first time on these kinds of rides. The last time she was in a park like this was our Disney World trip in 2010. She was only 3 years old then and didn’t go on anything that went fast. She could not get enough of this and was sad when we finally had to call it a night.

That sadness of having to go to bed is nothing a little cotton candy couldn’t fix. Don’t tell our dentists we gave them candy before bed. We don’t need that premium to go up, too.

Our last ride of the night was the ferris wheel that overlooks the rally field of Alumafandango. It was a real amazing sight to be up there at that time of the night see all of the lights and people in the park.

We are really going to miss this place and all of the people when this event is all over.

over and out
dan