Terry and Hardy Evans gave us a tour of the Wayzless. A beautiful sibling of the Wayzalot (http://www.wayzalot.com/about%202.html). They incorporated all of the best features of the Wayzalot and took it to a whole other level of style, comfort, art, and craftsmanship. You can check it out in person at the Annual Gathering of the Tin Can Tourists.
See images of the construction…
http://www.wayzalot.com/wayzless.html
Within the week of loosing the Wayzalot, in our big crash, Hardy, limping with a cast on his broken ankle, decided we needed to go look at trailer frames…..because Hardy said he wanted to rebuild!!!! In 1997, it took us two years to build the Wayzalot and I didn’t want to wait two years to travel again so we bought a 1949 Glider to travel for the next year or until the new one was built. We were then not in any hurry to build a new camper and could ponder what to do with this fifth wheel frame and still participate in the Tin Can Tourist activities. We joined the Tin Canners in 2002 and have enjoyed all the activities of this club and didn’t want to miss any meets.
I must tell you about how great the Tin Canners were, after the accident. We were to attend the TCT Spring Meet in Milford, Michigan the week after the accident. We called and told them we were planning to attend but we would stay in a hotel, since we had no camper. Terry and Michelle Bone offered us their Avion trailer to stay in and Ken and Lana Hindley offered an electric cart for Hardy to use since he had a broken ankle. So we went to the meet and explained all the accident details, brought a Wayzalot book which people signed condolences and we posted an obituary for the Wayzalot on the bulletin board. There, we explained to everyone what happened and now that chapter was closed… or so we thought…… On Saturday night after the dinner, we went to the Avion and were getting ready for bed about 10pm and Diane Flis knocked on our door and said “don’t get undressed, come on outside for a minute“. We walked over to the empty campsite where the Wayzalot always had been parked, and most of the Tin Can Tourists members were standing there with lit candles and a Blue Grass band was playing music. People spoke about the Wayzalot and Forrest Bone said he would hold the camp space until the new Wayzalot could appear. We sang songs and had a candle light service for the our dead Wayzalot. It was a very nice gesture from our club. We even had new postcards describing the Wayzalot (we were to use them on a caravan later that month) which we passed out like “mass cards”. As the band was leaving, I asked them if they would like a card about the Wayzalot? They all wanted one and the band leader asked for two. I asked him “ Have you ever played for a dead camper funeral before?” and he said “No, this was a first“. It was a very nice gesture from a great group of people. (The Tin Can Tourists now have different branches on the east and west coast, in addition to the Midwest, so if you are a vintage camper or have a new camper and just like the old campers, make an effort to go to a TCT meet, you will not meet a nicer group of people anywhere.)
We went to Elkhart, Indiana and learned that many frame companies were now out of business, since the economy was and still is in the toilet, so we went to Trail Air and met with the owner, Dale Fenton, . He had installed our AirRide hitch on the Wayzalot. He said he could customize a frame for us and he took a forty two foot display frame and cut it down to twenty one feet. That made the new Wayzless almost eight feet shorter than the Wayzalot. Out thinking was that since we aren’t getting any younger, maybe the next one we build should be a little smaller and easier to pull with a one ton truck instead of a tractor. We brought the frame home in the fall 2010, and started planning how to build again. At Christmas, 2010, we received from our daughter, two new signs, titled “The Wayzless”, done by John Rich Signs, who did the original Wayzalot signs.
Basically, the new Wayzless is similar to the Wayzalot. It’s a fifth wheel with a three foot back porch instead of a five foot porch, and a much smaller space inside. Hardy build a trolley top roof with a green metal roof and added a bay window in front. It is unique and will be the “Wayzless“………not a remake of the Wayzalot. It has a garage space in front and has a basement under the floor which will hold all our camping equipment and tools that we carried in the tractor. The only windows which didn’t break on the Wayzalot were the stained glass windows my sister had reinforced…so those windows are now in the new Wayzless. We also saved the back door which is already hanging.
We will have the outside done this spring and the Wayzless will have its first outing at the Tin Can Tourist May Meet 2012 in Milford. We probably wont have the inside all done but it has a bed, toilet and sink so we will be on the road again in a Hardy Home, the WAYZLESS.