In the beginning there was a big grey elephant.....

Hi! Thanks for visiting our blog!

Firstly let me introduce us - my name is Lisa and my husband is Bloater (better know as Big Boy Bloater to anyone that knows him in his professional guise as a blues musician). We have no children, one blind cat (named Lemon after Blind Lemon Jefferson!) and we both have an unhealthy obsession with Americana, we both love Blues, R&B, Rock & Roll, Soul and Gospel and this love of music has dictated everything in our lives!

Please note this is not a technical blog - this is just how we did it, based on trial and error, research, some smartness and some stupidity! We cannot be held responsible for anyone copying anything we did or using our advice for their own trailer!

So our Airstream journey all started in August 2007. I had been on sabbatical from work for some time and was having a long hard think about what I wanted to do with my future. Bloater and I had always lusted after an Airstream and this particular morning I had a couple of Airstream books with me in the garden whilst I had my morning coffee in the August sunshine. It came to me like a bolt from the blue - why not buy an Airstream, import it to the UK, restore/refurb it and sell it on, then repeat the process and if we do well maybe make a small business out of it? As I start writing this blog these plans have changed for many reasons (which no doubt will be mentioned later) but we have bought and sold a 1969 Caravel in the meantime and are now getting close to completing the refurb of our Globetrotter so it seems a good time to start with the Blog reportage! My reason for doing a Blog is because we have used the internet so much for help and inspiration and I hope we can do the same for others! There are big gaps in the timeframe, mainly because life and work got in the way (oh yeah, and the '69 Caravel!) but I will try and be as complete as possible and hope my memory holds up!

August 2007

I started straight away looking on the internet/Airstream forums etc for the perfect Airstream. Rather stupidly in retrospect we decided we wanted to do one pretty much from the ground up to get our learning curve in full swing! We knew we wanted something that needed gutting inside (we wanted to do it to our own spec), but hopefully one that had a solid chassis and a good skin. We also knew we needed a single axle (research showed us this kept costs down) and a trailer under 21' to be able to use it in the UK and Europe without problems. After very little searching (maybe 2 weeks - boy we were lucky!) we found this little gem in Maine.

We contacted the owner and he was more than happy to sell to a UK buyer (which basically meant the poor guy had to hold on to the trailer for an unspecified amount of time while we sorted out shipping) so we transferred the $$'s and we owned our first Airstream! Shipping was a pain - we had no idea where to begin so we just had to make phone call after phone call to try and find out how to get it to Port - at one point we were even considering flying to the US and taking it to port ourselves, it was seriously getting that complicated. I won't go into the problems we had with shipping the Globetrotter because the company we used in the UK claimed to be experts and ended up costing us lots more than they should have thanks to their incompetence and the idiots they sub-contracted in the USA. (Suffice to say we did NOT use them for the Caravel which needed to be brought from California to Atlanta for shipping, we used DAS shipping for this and they were fantastic - cannot recommend them enough if you find yourself needing to ship anything from the US to the UK. They may quote a little more initially but believe me they saved us lots of time and in the end lots of cash because they did what they said they would and when they said they would. Enough said). We bought the Globetrotter in August and it was finally delivered a couple of days before Christmas (I told you they were incompetent!).

December 2007

Here it is - just arrived and parked outside our house! This is Bloater and our friend Tony figuring out how to get the dolly wheel on!

Because it arrived only a couple of days before Christmas we didn't get stuck in until January 08. During shipping it lost a couple of components, the skylight at the front and one of the back panels. The fully comprehensive insurance we thought we had taken out with our cruddy shipping Co basically didn't quite cover this.....but they could get the bits for us at a cost of almost £500 ($750-$800) - now there's a surprise! Here are some pics of the trailer as it arrived with us - inside and out!



From now I will post for parts - i.e. removing the floor....polishing etc....