Here's Where We Are. And Have Been....
Our summer travels have kept us away from home and providing precious little time to stay healthy riding the bikes and trikes, We left home first in our Subaru for a hit 'n run to Utah for our niece Talauna's graduation. Home for a weekend and then saddled up the RV for our summer round-the-USA grandkid tour starting on June 8. We have a house sitter keeping the house occupied. Tonight we are one last leg from home, in Walnut RV Park in the big city of Vega, Texas, just west of Amarillo. We should be home by early afternoon tomorrow, Wednesday.
I like to blog about our bike and trike rides because they interest me the most, but our RV trips hither and yon have not been very boring. I decided to at least try doing a daily RV log just for grins and giggles since it has occupied our time the last 6 weeks.
This trip, our first night out, was a fairly short jog since we left home about 5 PM in the evening. I had spent the last 2 weeks installing vinyl flooring in the RV to replace the nasty worn carpet and, in the midst of that project, we got a call from Jacque's Uncle offering to sell us his little-used 1997 Ford Explorer with the all-too-rare freewheel towing option, including towbar and accessories: PERFECT for towing behind the RV to use for running around once we parked the cumbersome RV anywhere. For you non-RV'ers, such vehicles are normally called "Toads" - slang for Towed Vehicle. None of our existing vehicles were towable and we were reluctant to haul a toad car on our flatbed trailer. The Bounder RV is almost 35 feet long by itself and another 16 feet of trailer to worry about navigating corners, construction zones, and narrow streets... too buggy. So we got the '97 Exploder home and hooked it up for a test pull and dang, the tail lights did not work with the existing interface cable supplied. After several tests it turned out it wasn't the lights or the wiring, it was the adaptor box that was supposed to provide lights and turn signals from the towing vehicle while isolating and protecting the existing lights and electronics inside the Exploder. Forty bucks later and a few hours laying in the dirt under the Ford, I had it going. This had cut into our earlier departure schedule, and by 8 July we were so disgusted with being delayed that we took off at 5 PM - after a short test tow to make sure everything worked - and vowed to get at least a couple hundred miles from home before we gave up for the night. Jacque HATES RV-ing after dark and prefers to stop with a couple hours of sunlight left to get parked and set up but made allowance this night since we started so late. Of course it got dark and we were just across the state line into TX when we started to get desperate for a place to park for the night and, of course, none showed up along the highway at that hour and the ever-unreliable GPS couldn't find any in the neighborhood either.
We pulled into a rest area maybe 40 miles into TX for a short break and, after walking around looking for "NO CAMPING!" or "NO OVERNIGHT PARKING!" signs and finding none, I convinced Jacque to just stay where we were for the night. We've done this before and were well aware that big-rig trucks come and go all night long, and keep their noisy engines running all night long when THEY decide to stay the night. I slept pretty well but of course Jacque didn't, but it got us a welcome break and it wasn't so hot we had to run OUR noisy generator after going to bed to keep the A/C running.
Next day we got going and upon arrival in Amarillo we stopped at a state tourist welcome center and picked up some maps, something Jacque insists on doing every time we enter a new state. While poking around in there, we spotted a poster about a big "RV Museum" just around the corner, so we took a detour to go see that. It was a personal collection of the owner of the huge RV dealership at which the museum was located, included all sorts of early attempts of RV'ing along with as many vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycles on display. The Gornicke Bus used by the "Gornicke Family" in the Robin Williams movie "RV" was on display and was a real treat to tour, even though it's not an operational bus and was used evidently only for staged scenes in the movie and the videos of it in motion were photoshopped.
Hitting the road again, we got another 67 miles before spotting an off-the-map RV park and pulled off at the Alanreed, TX intersection of I-40. There turned out to be two competing RV parks, both small, and we chose the one farthest from the freeway to reduce the noise all night. It was a real mom & pop operation, with full hookups and not much else except for some gag things like a "pool" that turned out to be a small metal stock tank and a "game room" that was a storage shed with a pool table inside that barely allowed players to move around the table. It was priced right, though, at 20 bucks or less as I recall.
One thing that ALL RV'ers learn quickly is that it costs MORE to camp in an RV than it does to live at home or even in hotels and motels. About the only time you might save money is when camping at a friend's house rent free. It is VERY difficult to find free or even reasonable camping spots. Sometimes you can stay in Walmart lots or other store lots but they are difficult to find, and most municipalities seem to want to make it as difficult as possible so you will patronize their tax-paying commercial RV parks.
For Instance: Dayton, Ohio. This is a dying city with literally hundreds of huge vacant storefront centers and associated bare parking lots. I tried staying in one and was, within only a couple hours, rousted awake by a city cop who insisted it was illegal and not tolerated for RV's to park in vacant lots. Sigh.
Even if you can find a spot for twenty bucks, a rare feat indeed, that equals SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS a month just for the parking. Normally that includes water and electricity and usually a sewer hookup but still - Cheap, it ain't.
So why go to the trouble of RV'ing in the first place? My reasons:
-You can take a great deal of your "STUFF" with you
-You sleep in your OWN known bed and associated bedding, no worries about someone else's bedbugs or cooties
-For me, it's kinda like a treehouse on wheels, a throwback to my inner child. Of course I could never afford this until I turned into an old fart with savings and Sociable Security. As a working stiff it is very difficult to afford the upkeep whether driving down the road or parked beside the house deteriorating on its own.
-If you own an RV, in spite of the expense and bother, you are never technically "homeless".
TBC (To Be Continued)
