Vintage Aloha Christmas

Happy Holidays from the Aloha Travel Trailer Blog. May your roofs not leak and your tires always be filled with air in the new year.

souvenir pennants

I've been collecting vintage souvenir pennants for the interior of the Aloha like this 1965 one from the Grand Coulee Dam.

I also found a small leak the other day, a good reminder to check your travel trailer in the winter and repair leaks ASAP.

Fall Camping

The weather is getting colder, but we have still been enjoying camping in our Aloha. It's looking a little scrappy and I probably won't get around to cleaning it until the weather gets warm again, but its actually kind of nice sleeping in a travel trailer in the rain.

Tilt Shift Travel Trailer

Toy Trailer?

Smallest Aloha Ever!

Spotted over on ScaleMotorCars.com, 'Old Busted Hotness' has created this tiny vintage Aloha Travel Trailer complete with an amazing amount of details including tiny empty beer cans, fly swatter, toilet plunger etc. It's kind of amazing and worth a look. I can't figure out a good way to link to this, but you can find photos of it in this discussion board.

vintage photo filter

this is just a photo from earlier in the summer, but I've been playing with vintage photo filters and I liked how this one turned out. I will be playing with this a lot in the near future so watch for more photos.

New Aloha Blog

Spotted over in the Aloha Travel Trailer flickr group, T-Ruxx is restoring a 1966 Aloha that it looks like he dug out from deep in the Amazon jungle. He deserves an award and you should check out his new blog.

Street Sign Score!

I found this at Seattle City Surplus, complete with graffiti. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I will include it on the trailer somehow.

Aloha's on Flickr

Have you been over to our flickr group? There have been some really cool vintage trailers popping up over there and it's worth taking a look at. Please share if you have some photos. You can find it here.

Aloha Summer!

Enjoying our Aloha Summer on the Beach. Photos by D. Kitty.

An Aloha Travel Trailer on Puget Sound

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We are enjoying having our vintage Aloha travel trailer in Kitsap. Located in the tiny community of Fragaria we are only steps from Puget Sound and have been enjoying time on the deck and falling asleep at night to the sound of waves.

Newly Noticed, Aloha's on the web

Someone is making some Aloha drawings that can be ordered on stickers/t shirts etc. I also noticed someone new restoring an 1964 Aloha Travel Trailer has a blog.

Time to Roll

Truth be told, I'm nervous about hauling the trailer around. It's great on the open road, but in town with stop lights and tight turns in the rain made me nervous. Add to that that there was a 'low tide warning' on the ferry system meaning that it was a steep ramp to get on and off the ferry. Of course it all turned out okay.

A New Direction

Although I originally bought the Aloha with plans of taking it out to Montana, we suddenly have a new plan. Opportunity has given us a new ocean front location on Puget Sound in the amazing community of Fragaria. Located on Colvos Passage across from Vashon Island, what could be better than an Aloha Travel Trailer on a beach? You can read more about Fragaria here.

More photos and info coming soon!

Aloha History- an interview with Glen Gordon

On March 1st and 2nd 2010 I interviewed Glen Gordon who owned the company from 1959 -1970. He is a really cool guy and had lots of interesting stories but here are some of the historical highlights. Thanks to Ted Timmons via Wikipedia for tracking him down and getting contact info.

The company was originally started in Aloha Oregon in 1954 (hence the name), Glen Gordon bought the company on July 6, 1959 when he was still in his 20's with a business partner and they expanded the business and moved it to Beaverton near 142nd Ave. They sold the company in 1969 to a company called Woodtech for 'several million dollars' because of changes in automobiles and the economy travel trailers were falling out of favor.

Although they were most well known for their travel trailers they also manufactured a variety of truck campers, and made a few custom motor homes by attaching their trailers to Chevy frames and even a few house barges by attaching their trailer frames onto barges (how cool would that be?)

The smallest trailer they made was 11' and the largest they manufactured was 28', at the height of their production in the 1960's they were making 17-19 trailers a day, had several hundred employees, owned their buildings and even had a night shift to keep up with production. The main areas where they sold and marketed their trailers were OR, WA, ID and BC and at one point held 13% of the regional market which was 'a remarkable amount' for a small company. Their most popular trailer was the 15' Beaver.

Because they were making their trailers for the NW market they had a few unique characteristics including a larger than normal drip rail and thicker plywood around the wheel wells to help deal with moisture. Their biggest technological innovation however was wrapping the framing stringers around the frame so there wasn't just a box built onto a frame, this resulted in much higher stability than other travel trailers at the time.

They also made several custom trailers for nature writers such as Francis Ames. They were also significant to the 1964 Seattle Worlds fair because there was a shortage of housing for all of the tourists they sold hundreds to enterprising Seattleites whom rented them out as vacation rentals.

Some More Photos

These are some old photos from my friend Leslie, but I just thought that I would put them out there.

Aloha Baby!

What could be cooler than having your vintage travel trailer featured In Cruisin' News Magazine? Thanks Paul Lacitinola for the write up and thanks Leslie Howells for the photos!

Aloha Travel Trailers on Wikipedia

Have you ever tried to add an entry to Wikipedia? It is a huge pain in the butt. I had this article deleted twice by other users because I didn't use reference materials correctly. Ugh...if this link does not work that means that they deleted it again. Let me know what you think.

*editors note* I just checked my entry again a couple hours after entering it, I was half way expecting it to be deleted but instead several people have already improved the article, added links, cleaned it up etc. You have to love Wikipedia.

*note* and then it got deleted AGAIN. So now I've tweaked it little so it's an entry for Aloha Trailer Company. Let see if this will stick. Oh wait...the same guy is trying to delete it again. Maybe this will never happen. why is this so hard?

**note** still learning to swim with the big fishes on Wikipedia. Still a ray of hope. Makes my brain hurt.

New Painting

aloha_02_WIP, originally uploaded by leahgiberson.

Leah Giberson is working on another painting of my trailer! Check it out!

Aloha on Flickr

Have you checked out my group on Flickr? I'm always greatful for all of the cool trailer photos that people put in the group. You can check it out here.

PDX Portable Food Revolution

First off, don't worry...I'm not going to cut my trailer in half, paint it pink and sell food out the back. But I'm always facinated and impressed when people do stuff like this. I was recently in Portland and fell in love with all of their food trailers. I've decided that we need more of this in Seattle and I wrote about it for my neighborhood blog.

Also featured on Crosscut!