I always enjoy talking to new RVers or wannabes about the fulltime lifestyle, and hopefully, I can help them avoid some of the mistakes we made as greenhorns by sharing our experiences with them. But sometimes I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall, and I want to ask them “Do you want me to tell you what I know, or do you want me to tell you what you want to hear?”

A couple of weeks ago, at a fuel island, I had a conversation with the fellow next to us, who was driving a fancy new diesel pusher. He told me that he and his wife have been fulltiming for several months now, and that they are about to throw in the towel because it’s just too expensive. “How can anybody afford to pay $1,000 to $1,500 a month on campgrounds and still put fuel in the tank?” he asked me.

I told him that I don’t know anybody who spends even half that much on campgrounds, and he asked me how we do it. I told him about all of the ways we save money on camping fees, from free campgrounds, to discount programs like Passport America, camping at Elks and Moose lodges, fairgrounds camping, and boondocking.

“My wife would never do any of that,” he said. “We joined Passport America, but we pulled into one campground and she said “No way” and we drove right back out. We have never boondocked, she wouldn’t stand for it. We only stay at four star rated RV parks, because she doesn’t like the looks of the people at other places. It’s costing us a fortune, but what else can we do?”

I felt like telling him that his wife needed a lesson in reality, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. It was obvious that she wanted nothing to do with the RV lifestyle, and that she fully intended to have a miserable time of it until she finally made him miserable enough to give in and go do whatever she wanted to do instead.

This can be a very affordable lifestyle, if one takes the time to learn about the many ways you can keep camping costs low. But, one has to be willing to settle for less than upscale RV “resorts” (and there are a lot of excellent campgrounds that don’t get a four star rating), and flexibility is also a major asset to have. But some people, like this lady, just will not be happy living the gypsy lifestyle, and that’s fine too. It leaves more opportunities for the rest of us.

I also had an interesting conversation with a couple while I was doing some genealogy research at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City a while back, but I really had to bite my tongue to keep from bursting their bubble. They noticed my Gypsy Journal t-shirt, struck up a conversation, and told me they had just purchased a new diesel pusher, and would be taking delivery in three days.

I congratulated them, and the husband told me that they looked at a lot of RVs, both new and used, and decided to go with a new motorhome because, while they don’t plan to become fulltime RVers, they will be traveling six to eight months a year. “We just don’t want to mess with repairs and stuff,” he told me. “With a new motorhome, all we’ll have to do is turn the key and go the day we pick it up, and not have to worry about anything being broken.”

I told him that he might want to be prepared to spend some time going back to the dealer once they take delivery, because every new RV that hits the street seems to need a certain amount of time to get the bugs worked out of it. I told him that many experienced RVers seem to feel that once you buy a new rig, it takes at least six months just to get all of the stuff fixed that should have been handled before it left the factory.

“No way,” he told me, “That’s why we bought a new diesel pusher. With the money we’re spending, I guarantee you that it will be ready to roll the day we take delivery.”

What could I do, except nod, wish them well, and also secretly wish I that could be a fly on the wall of that new motorhome about a month or two down the road, to see how their thinking would have changed.

Thought For The Day – A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be.

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After reading yesterday’s blog, RVing’s Top 10, my friend Connie Bradish suggested maybe we needed a Bottom 10 list, and suggested, in no particular order:

1. A major dumping event, like the hose comes off and it’s all over.
2. A tire blowout, especially if it’s the right front tire.
3. Being sunk up to your rear axles in a designated camping spot.
4. Being sunk up to your axles in a non-camping spot.
5. Dragging the tow car behind the RV because it’s still in gear.
6. Driving a back road, and coming up to a bridge with a 10 foot maximum clearance, you need 13 feet and you have to stop, unhitch and turn the coach around, all while blocking traffic.
7. Driving a road you shouldn’t be on, like the southwest road around Lake Tahoe in you big RV and tow car.
8. Having a husband and wife disagreement while backing into a site, accompanied by funny hand signals from one partner to another.
9. Having a pet get out, and you can’t find them.
10. Hitting a low rock, post or cone, or an overhang of a building or a tree, damaging your coach.

Connie admitted that she and her husband Pete have scored 10 out of 10 on this list. I think we’ve missed just one, which is having a pet slip out the door, never to be found. When Miss Terry’s cat, Sasquatch was still with us, he was quite the escape artist, but he never went far.

But 9 out of 10 on the Rock Bottom list isn’t a bad (or in this case, good) record. Less than a week into our fulltming life, we were camped in a fairgrounds in Torrington, Wyoming, on our way to Life on Wheels in Moscow, Idaho. We had the place to ourselves, so I had nobody but myself to blame when I pulled out of our site and turned too soon, swinging the back end of our shiny new Pace Arrow motorhome into the concrete pedestal that held the water and electric hookups.   

I was just sick, and to Miss Terry’s credit, she didn’t shoot me, or even thump me with a rolling pin. Believe me, there was nothing she could have said to me that was worse than I was calling myself. I was still kicking myself three days later when we got to Moscow, where I met Dick Reed, founder of the RV Driving School. When I told him my sad tale of woe, Dick took my by the hand and led me to the back of the row where the instructors’ RVs were parked.

“Do you see the ding in that one,” Dick asked. “That belongs to Bill Farlow. Bill did that on a tree stump last year. This one here is Charlie Minshall’s rig. See that ding? Lord know what Charlie hit. And this one here, with the dented bumper belongs to…” By the time our tour was finished, I felt a lot better about my own mishap, and I had made a friend for life.

We’ve been stuck and we’ve been really stuck, and it’s never fun. This picture was taken at an RV park in Ohio a few years back. It had been raining for days, and we were nervous about pulling onto grass, but when we arrived, the park owner told us another bus had just left the same site. It must have been a Volkswagen bus, because our MCI promptly sunk up to its rear axle!

But anybody can get stuck in soft ground. In Bremerton, Washington, I proved that it is possible to drive a bus up a hill so steep that your front tires are on the pavement, and your rear bumper is digging into the pavement, but your drive tires are three inches in the air!

I also proved that while you can drive into that situation, you cannot drive back out of it! Getting out requires a very large tow truck, the police department to stop traffic, the fire department’s haz-mat crew to clean up the 36 gallons of radiator coolant that spills when the the tow truck cable snags a hose, and the local news crew. Did I mention I was going the wrong way up a one way street at the time?

When all was said and done, I asked the police officer in charge of the scene how big a ticket I was getting, and he replied “What with the tow bill, the radiator coolant you need to buy, the hose you need to replace, and the roses you’ll need to buy your wife to make up for this, I couldn’t in good faith give you a ticket. I’m a married man too!”

I also remember driving out of one of our first RV parks, and how everybody waved at us as we drove past. I commented to Terry about how nice everybody was, and wave right back. It wasn’t until I got to the street and glanced in my rear view mirrors that I noticed that I had left all of our window awnings out. Of course, at that point there was no way I was going to stop and get out, so I just drove away, while poor MIs Terry hung out the windows unhooking the awnings as we went!

So yeah, I could easily do a Rock Bottom 10 – been there, done that, and a few more. How about you? What were some of your worst RVing goofs?

Thought For The Day – Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.

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