A month later, while lamenting our loss, friends from church confided that they too had a seventies-era tent trailer that they had used on many an adventure, particularly while their boys were in scouts. With their offspring having grown and left home, their 1974 Bonair 850 was languishing in a storage lot, their Subaru not even having a hitch to tow it out. They were unwilling to part ways with both the memories and the heritage of a conveyance that had passed from grandfather to uncle to them.
And now, sold with mutual gratitude, to us.
We towed Bride of Frankentrailer back from Villeneuve in late October, and wheeled it into the garage. Some ne'er do well had seen fit to punch a hole in the thin aluminum roof, but we were able to patch it up with some silicon compound. The tongue of this trailer also has a wheel on it, which meant I didn't have to hold up half the weight of it while we schlepped it onto the patio for winter storage. Once in place, we tarped it up, and waited for the spring.
Spring was inconvenient and untrusted, as most Edmonton springs are, so we only got around to unwrapping the Bride this past weekend (but summer doesn't officially start until next week, so we are counting it as a win!). I jacked it up pretty much by myself, such is the quality of the mechanism - I needed to raise and lower it a few times until I had a semblance of what I was doing, and Glory came out at one point to marvel at how both sides went up at the same time.
Wayne had opened up the trailer for us on the lot before we agreed to purchase it, and I knew it was in good shape and very clean for something that had sat dormant for around a decade, but once we had everything in place, I was astonished as to just how good its condition was. No lie, there are places in my house that aren't as fastidiously clean as the corners of this trailer. There were pinches of dust here and there (possibly from the gravel roads on the way to our home).
We pulled everything out and opened all the windows to let it air out, and the next day took to cleaning it in earnest: vacuuming the floors, storage areas, cushions and drapes, washing down most of the surfaces with Pine-Sol, and taking some vinegar in a spray bottle to a musty area of the canvas roof where some moisture must have snuck in.
Neither ArrKan RV, Woody's RV, nor Camper's Village had canvas cleaner for sale, but I did find some waterproofing agent at Canadian Tire. While I was out looking for it through, Audrey took it upon herself to pull out the propane stove (since we keep camp in bear country sometimes and that means keeping food out of the trailer), and I jigsawed up a piece of hardboard to cover the hole. Fenya and I also patched up the screen windows where needed.
Today, Fenya and I fixed two tiny holes we found and I applied the waterproofing to all the canvas, taking care not to get any on the vinyl windows, lest they end up looking like the foggy cockpits of so many plastic airplane kits of my youth.
And speaking of my youth, my second-favourite thing about the trailer interior (after its immaculate condition) is the nostalgia of the orange and brown floral print that covers both the cushions and curtains inside the Bride.
The original Frankentrailer had originally come with, of all things, carpet on the floor, which Audrey's mother was so disgusted by, she tore it all out and burned it before we came down to pick it up. As a result, the floor never really looked or felt clean, despite the many hours we spent cleaning and disinfecting it. Bride of Frankentrailer has been a delightful step up in this regard.
We also uncovered a few intriguing artifacts from the late-20th-century over the weekend:
A set of McDonalds cups promoting the 1994 Flintstones movie.
A travel mug featuring some vintage NHL logos, including the Quebec Nordiques, Winnipeg Jets, and the best use of negative space in all sports imaging, the Harford Whalers.
And most intriguingly, a stack of branded, brown paper grocery bags.
Man, it is so odd that something so mundane can trigger such a vibrant sense of time and place! I've been fighting the urge to buy more groceries this week just so I could re-pack them in vintage brown paper, then haul them out of the Flex and into the house like I used to with Mom and the old Town & Country station wagon.
Ah, it probably wouldn't be the same without the bagged milk.
Nostalgia notwithstanding, everyone in the household is thrilled at the prospect of camping in the Bride of Frankentrailer!
I miss bagged milk too!!
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