This isn't fair! In
The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, writers Jane and Michael Stern put Airstreams on the same page as motor homes.
Their opinion of motor homes wasn't exactly rosey. Matter of fact, it was downright thorny, i.e.....
There is no getting around the fact that motor homes are ugly. Wherever you see one, on the road or in campgrounds, the beige slab-on-wheels is so iimmense, and often so coverd with bumper stickers (We're Spending Our Grandchildren's Inheritance") and decals (from the Good Sam Club or Six Flags Over Texas), that it seems to actually drain color from the surrounding scenery the way a black hole in space sucks in light. Because they usually have a spare tire hung on the back, spare-tire-covers have become personalized billboards that drivers stuck behind them on a two-lane road are forced to look at for miles: 'Here Come the Kapinskys" or "Chasin' a Ranbow" or "Kenny Rogers is Our Man" and so on and so forth.
Their 'pinion of Airstreamers is not as caustic. Bless them (I think).
After establishing Airstream as the Rolls-Royce of travel trailers, Wally Byam spent the fifties leading expedtions of Airstreams around the world. Like invading armies, hundreds of caravaners hauled their silver trailers en masse to Mexico and Canada, parking each night like wagon trains, meeting local mayors and tribal chiefs by day. In 1956, they shipped their trailers, and V-8 Cadillacs to pull them, to Cuba and to Europe; and in 1959-60, they spent eighteen months caravaning through Europe into Africa, where they were greeted by Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia and witch doctors in Uganda. Thnis was the zenith of trailering, when pulling a trailer meant excitement and discovery.
Still....making the "cut" along with velvet paintings, Cool Whip, aerosol cheese, fish sticks, Spam and Hamburger Helper leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth, would you not agree?