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Click HERE to go to Judie Fein's Nunnery piece.
Deborah Clark drove 600 miles into the desert to check out our very first
accommodation: the Shady Dell RV Park in Bisbee, Arizona.
by Deborah Clark
Hello! I hear you saying. All that way for a trailer park? No, not just
any trailer park. This one has vintage airstream trailers -- you know, the
ones that look like lunar equipment, or giant silver bullets. At least,
that was what I thought...
Rita: "In our whole line-up, there's only one Airstream, and when we first
became interested in trailers...
"...we thought any aluminum trailer was an airstream. And then after quite
a bit of research and really getting into it, we found that there were
hundreds of trailer manufacturers that have come and gone."
That's Rita Personette. As you can probably tell, she's a stickler for
detail. She and partner Rick smith started renting their collection of
vintage trailers a couple of years back. Now they've got 7. The most
expensive runs about 45 bucks a night. Airstreams of course are the best
known but Spartan Air Ray, Airofloat, all those companies churned out
trailers. Inside our 1951 Spartonette I see the length Ed and Rita have
gone to maintain the feel of a forgotten era. down to the reproduction
radios complete with hissy recordings (music) We munched cookies from the
1950s cookie jar. The cookies by the way were from the 90s. And mixed
Bloody Marys in the vintage cocktail shaker. A couple of life magazines
sit neatly on the table both from1950 back when the glossy was just 20
cents a pop. A blond babe adorns the cover of one New York's first lady the
other. In the kitchen the beautiful shiny Kenmore toaster works, so does
the Frigidaire GM superfreezer and to the morning I wake up to a rather
loud percolator.
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