Say Aloha to my 1956 Aloha

I just sold the 15' 1956 Aloha we had owned and used for about 4-5 years. It was a fun little trailer with many many stories that go along with it. I'll spare you ALL the details, but here are the basics and a bunch of pictures.




I play drums in an instrumental surf band (The Verbtones). It's a bunch of fun and every couple of years we get to go to Southern California and play shows at the Huntington International Surf Museum, live on the UCSD radio station, and clubs such as the Doll Hut in Anaheim, Safari Sam's on Sunset in Hollywood, Bar Pink in San Diego and others. The first year my wife and I decided to save on hotel fees and airfare by buying a vintage trailer and driving down (our Airstream wasn't usable).
I found this baby close to my office and it already had a "For Sale" sign in the window. We bought it, hitched it up to our Chevy Silverado and headed south.
We made it about 50-60 miles before we had a blowout. ZOINKS!
Thanks to the super cool guys at Les Schwab, we were on our way with a new set of tires in a few hours.
We didn't make it too much farther, so we camped our first night on the side of the road at a rest stop because all the truckers had already taken up the parking spots. Here we are the next morning.
The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful and we enjoyed using it parked in front of a band-members parents house in the City of Orange. I was paranoid about driving on the Santa Ana freeway with a trailer, but discovered that with a small twitch of the steering wheel traffic would magically back off. (No, that's not Haley in the below pic!)
We used it several other times, once to Long Beach Washington where we discovered it leaked like crazy. We really liked how it stood out from all the new rigs.

In the summer of 2010 we spent a few nights at the RV park at Silverwood Amusement park just north of Coeur d'Alene Idaho and a few more nights at a friends cabin in the wilds of Idaho. That trip consisted of many miles on dusty, narrow gravel roads without guardrails. If you've seen The Long, Long Trailer think about the scene where Lucy is looking down the cliff out her window and that's close to our experience.
But the Aloha was always meant to be a temporary thing. A means for us to get acquainted with pulling a trailer before starting work in earnest on the trailer Haley calls our retirement house, our 1956 Airstream Safari.
I put an ad on Craigslist and within a few days, I had a buyer with cash in hand and eager for a project. The Aloha wasn't without it's faults (wooden-frame rot, unknown propane system, 1956 era electrical), but it was fun and we enjoyed our time with it.

Aloha.