Did that silver-sided trailer in a Grover Beach, California RV resort once travel the land of Haile Selassie, the late Ethiopian emperor? That’s what current owners Doug and Suzy Carr want to know.

Five years ago the Carrs bought the resort, and along with it came one of Wally Byam’s pride-and-joy trailers. After Byam founded Airstream, he set off on adventures with other Airstream owners–once of those treks included a trip along the Nile River, running from South Africa’s Capetown clear to Cairo, Egypt.

“A neighbor told us one day that our Airstream might be famous,” Suzy Carr told the San Luis Obispo Tribune. “So we started researching it ourselves, but that only took us so far, so we e-mailed the ‘History Detectives.’ ” The Carrs—who live most of the time in Long Beach, where they run a business restoring wood-bodied cars — are fans of the PBS program. Each episode explores questions about historical artifacts.

When the Public Broadcast show got the Carr’s e-mail, they jumped at the chance to investigate the trailer’s history, using the Airstream-assigned serial number. What did they find? Was the Carr’s silver bullet breathed on by one of the King of Beasts? Ah, well, we’ll all have to wait until a one-hour episode of History Detectives airs during the summer season. While you wait, read the full story here.

Photo: San Luis Obispo Tribune

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Airstream, History Detectives, general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.