Day 4: Monday 28-jun-1999

At WBCCI International

Wright Patterson Air Force Base

Dayton, Ohio

First thing today was to wash clothes (due to all the sick people in the family!). Yesterday, one of the other trailer friends told us about a good laundry-mat, just around the corner. Lillemor went there and it turned out to be a nice place, lots of machines, a lady that took care of jammed machines and you got free coffee.

Back at the trailer it was time to get to the opening ceremony for the International rally. We were late and had to park quite far away. We got seated about 10 minutes into the show. At that point the clubs and regions had started their flag parade. This parade lasted for a while. We listened to a short speech by a Swiss caravanner, invited over to the US. Through the grape wine we heard that Airstream had offered them to sleep in a new trailer that had just come off the assembly line. Only problem was that whoever was shipping it down the 50 miles or so from the factory to Dayton managed to roll it and the Suburban they used to pull it with.

We returned back to the trailer and had lunch. Lillemor was still feeling a bit bad. We cleaned up around the trailer and then dropped the kids off at a planned youth activity (T-shirt painting) and then moved on to a presentation from Larry Huttle, President of Airstream. A few points worth noting from his presentation were:

• The B van is gradually being phased out
• A new class C motor home family will start being assembled sometime this fall, which will include several length versions. The new class C motor home will be fiberglass clad, similar to the class A motor homes.
• A very large percentage of Airstreams are repeat sales
• Some 90% of all Safari trailers are new sales (as in owners who've never owned an Airstream before)
• Airstream logo changed slightly on trailers (see my pictures elsewhere)
• New 34ft limited slideout to be shown for the first time (includes a fireplace)
• A new 39ft motor home to be shown for the first time at this rally in the next couple of days

	Versaille on 6 wheels. Where is Louis XIV when you need him? For more pictures of new Airstreams, click here.

Lillemor went to pick up the kids from the T-shirt painting, while Per went to the work-trailer were they had E-mail access. When Lillemor came back to pick up Per it had stared to rain very heavily. The rain eventually stopped. Later, we slowly started a small cocktail with our next door neighbors, where we uncorked a bottle of chilled Veuve Cliqot Champagne. Ahh .. life is tough. The cocktail lasted for some time and then turned into a dinner party, with several people attending. As it was getting darker Per took a bike with Gregg Cocco over to the airplanes parked nearby. Gregg had worked on the C130s in Vietnam and wanted to take a look again. He showed Per many small technical details about the plane. Interesting indeed. They then walked over to take a peek at the B1 bomber. It is very big. By the time they returned to our trailers the small dinner party had turned into a big ice cream party, with some 30 people hanging around. It lasted past 10pm in the evening.

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