the happy camper
17 Feb 2007A few years back we thought, maybe we should buy an RV.
Contrary to what you are thinking we have neither taken leave of our senses nor have we suddenly aged 40 years. We have no intentions of retiring early, selling the house, and spending the rest of our lives driving between the Koa Kampgrounds.
But we are the sort of people for whom there is no better vacation than to just point the car in some random direction and go out and explore for a couple weeks. A big stack of AAA maps and a full tank of gas: all we really need for big fun. An RV would mean we could go farther out without having to think, OK, time to go look for a motel room. We would be carrying our motel room with us.
We’re also the sort of people who occasionally load up the truck with bicycles or motorcycles and drive out to events or gatherings where typically there is camping. We can camp, sort of, in our current car, if you fold the seats down and don’t mind getting jabbed in the back by a tie-down. But it’s kind of tight. Not in the good kind of way. More in the ow you’re on my arm kind of way. There’s not a lot of room for both people and stuff in the car, and definitely not people and stuff and bicycles, or people and stuff and motorcycles and friends.
So we thought, hey, an RV.
But there are problems with RVs and other travel-type vehicles. Trailers of all sorts are difficult to maneuver and you have to go tediously slow on the highway when you drive them. Campers are top-heavy and hard to get on and off the truck. Full RVs are usable and comfortable but they’re expensive and…well, full RVs are just ugly. Insanely ugly. Good lord, are they ugly.
RV designers seem to be trapped in this strange time warp, a sort of Eisenhower-meets-Nixon design sensibility. Not the midcentury design that is cool and retro these days; it’s more the decor and panelling and textures you find in the suburban homes of old people who die alone and who are eaten by their cat. RV design gives me the willies.
And then there are the exteriors. In addition to a barge-like shape, RVs all seem to be decorated on the outside with some kind of inexplicable ocean theme, with blues and aquas and waves and names with “wind” and “foam” and “surf” in them. I’m not quite sure of the intention here. When I think of driving an RV I imagine other marine themes, for example, “I am driving a humpback whale,” or “the tide comes in faster than this vehicle climbs this hill.”
They do make a sort of RV called a Fun Mover which is not so bad, and happens to be an appropriate RV for our chosen lifestyle. With the Fun Mover, instead of the normal RV back full of bathroom or bed or widescreen TV they have an empty space and a big panel door that folds down into a ramp. They make them that way so that you can load up your ATVs or your motorcycles and go out with your RV into the unspoiled wilderness and, um, spoil it. And the RV manufacturers are, indeed, much better at designing the interiors of Fun Movers for people not on social security, or at least designing them for people like us — solvent and spoiled GenXers who seem to believe we have fun we need to move. They are less mobile suburban ranch homes than they are mobile garages. “Look,” said Eric, once, thrusting an RV magazine at me. In the magazine there was a picture of a Fun Mover, open in the back. “They’ve covered the ENTIRE INTERIOR WITH DIAMOND PLATE.” Now that was one cool RV.
Alas, Fun Mover exteriors still bear a strong resemblance to large oceangoing mammals.
At this point you will brightly point out the Airstream. Airstreams do have the significant advantage of being wholly not ugly. I actually know a few people who own Airstreams enough that it almost qualifies as an Airstream community. My sister Sharon has an airstream she actually lives in and drives back and forth to school. It is fabulous. She bought it for like $150, it is totally original, and for that we hate her. Jacob{.broken_link} has an airstream he is restoring. Dori{.broken_link} and Kathy have Airstreams they use as offices. I will point out however that airstreams are trailers and thus crossed off the list, and it would be tough to stuff a motorcycle through the door of an airstream.
After dithering about it for a while we were eventually dissuaded from the RV idea by a few significant issues besides the ugly part. First of all, we own way too many vehicles already. We have kind of a vehicle problem. There’s this thing? Where you have a big garage and a barn? Suddenly you find this really great deal on, well, anything, on craigslist? Cars, trucks, motorcycles, farm equipment, former soviet weaponry, submarines, space stations, it’s all just too cool and it’s cheap so you have to have it? We have this problem. Junk fills up the available space. It just happens. I can’t explain it.
Secondly, although we drive a whole lot, we don’t actually camp very much. Not much at all. Maybe once or sometimes twice a year. Most of the time we just find a motel at the end of the day. For a while we had this theory that if we bought a camper, we would go camping more often. This is the same sort of magical thinking that leads one to believe that if you sign up for a gym membership, you will go to the gym. Or that if you own a space station, you will of course instantly become an astronaut.
Then there is the RV gallons-per-mile problem which needs no further explanation.
But then in the last year so things changed. Eric has been doing more bicycle racing, and we’ve been traveling a lot more to farther away places. And we’ve been thinking in general of downsizing our vehicle collection, trading down the big vehicles from the cheap-gas-large-car-dotcom-exuberance era and getting smaller cars and fewer of them. So the thought of some kind of vehicle we could travel and camp in was becoming more appealing. Maybe not an RV. Maybe something smaller, maybe a camper or a trailer or…or…
Maybe a bus. A VW bus.
(see Part 2)
Posted on 17 Feb 2007 • in blog-archive •