I joined a hunt club in middle Georgia 3 years ago. When I went to get an orientation from the president of the club we got in his truck and drove behind his house into the camp. Sitting there was an old Airstream. I told my son ( who was 8 at the time) wow look at that! I wonder how old that one is. We drove on past and through the rest of the camp, which contains the craziest collection of old campers, shacks and other buildings you have ever seen. We toured the rest of the club and came back to the camp to get our vehicle all the time talking to the president about how the club was run. As we came into the camp he mentioned that I needed to get a camper so we would have somewhere to stay rather than motels in the area. Because of turnover in the clubs members every year he said that there were several trailers that would be coming up for sale in the future. I told him to find out which ones and how much they would be. We then drove back to Atlanta . For the next few weeks I talked to him frequently about several different trailers for us that were in total disrepair and needed lots of work. They were priced anywhere from 800 to 1500 dollars. Most of these were old Shastas, Scottys, and some I really don't know what kind they were. The main thing was, they were all junk! I finally asked him about the airstream and he told me that the owner didn't want to sell it but he hadn't paid his dues that year and he really needed to move it off of the property because the president was sick of seeing it. Well this went on for about a year and I never bought a trailer due to the fact they were all too much work for what they wanted for them and after working on them I was going to have something that was only good for staying at the club. Every now and then I would ask him about the airstream until one day he told me he had finally talked to the owner and he said he wanted 1500 bucks. He gave me his number and I called him and he just wouldn' t come off the price. I continued to go hunting off and on during the next year until and each time I would come through the camp there sat the airstream. Finally in Feb 08 we had our annual club meeting and after the president told me the airstream owner had not paid his dues again and according to the bylaws he had given him an ultimatum. Either pay your dues for the last three years, move the trailer, sell the trailer or he was going to hook it up to the tractor on the property and drag it down in the woods out of sight. If it got damaged in the process, SORRY! He also told the airstream owner that I would buy it and he wouldn't have to deal with it! Wow, maybe me waiting was a good thing! I called the owner that night and we agreed on a price. YES!!! $500 Wow can't beat that. We agreed to met the next weekend at the club so I could take ownership of it. The next weekend my wife and I arrived to find the AS owner cleaning out the inside. In the past week I had gotten online and found vintage airstream so I had seen some of the different models from all the years they were made. That's the point, there were so many different ones I didn't know which one was at the camp. As we got there they were already cleaning it out and there several bags of trash outside the door. The first thing I did was get out my tape measure and check it out, 22 feet. So lets see, which one of those were 22 feet and which ones had all these panels on the front and which ones had this widening panel over the rear window. I couldn't remember! After three hours of them getting all of there stuff out (two pickup loads) we started trying to work on the hitch. The club president came over and started helping me unfreeze it he told me his dad and he had talked and as near as they could figure the trailer had been in the same spot for at least 20 years! Once we got the hitch freed up we backed the Z71 up to it and pulled it carefully out of its former home. We pulled it out of the woods and up to a small field at the end of the camp, got it chocked and took some pictures so I could identify it once we got back to Atlanta. The pictures are taken in the small field where we left it . If you look closely you can see the mold and mildew covering it from sitting under the trees for all those years.
