Full-time wheel-person?

It's one thing to dream about RVing and rent a couple of times, I took much of the summer of 2014 to take some concrete steps.

I gave six months' notice at work. I searched the web and visited RV dealers to get a sense of what's available.  I gave up on the elegant little "Class B" RVs (van conversions) as too small to live in.  I agonized over selling my Redlands house, gardens and fruit trees. I decided that a "Class A" -- large, and built on a bus chassis -- was too big; many state parks have length restrictions.  I weighed Ford gasoline power versus the more efficient (and expensive!) Mercedes Sprinter platforms.  I decided against the standard "Class C" style that we had been renting because the over-cab bed is not suitable for 70-year-olds who have to stumble to the bathroom more than once a night.

While this was a good learning experience, it generated conflicts: a small nimble RV versus one that's big enough to live in year-round.  Keeping the house and garden, but leaving it unoccupied for months at a time?  Getting a new, sleek RV or trying a couple years in a (much cheaper!) used Road Bear unit.  It's really hard to walk away from fresh oranges six months of the year and bumper crops of peaches and apricots.

In August I joined the "Escapees" ("SKPs") RV club and started reading about it.  SKP helped start 11 Coop RV parks across the country. You buy a membership that entitles you to use a lot until you die or sell it back to the Coop. You work a few hours a week on maintenance or committees.  I found the most appealing SKP Coop was just 50 miles south of Redlands in Aguanga -- just east of Temecula.

Karin flew out in October and we toured the Jojoba Hills RV Resort (http://www.jojobahills.com/) and I immediately put down a deposit to become #17 on the waiting list.  Later that week we met in Chicago and toured Phoenix Cruiser in Elkhart Indiana. I put down a deposit on a small RV, not the larger one I had been contemplating.

http://www.phoenixusarv.com/2351.html

Mine is a 2351 model, corner bed, dinette, Ford gas truck chassis. Ready winter 2015.

It's less that 25 feet long.  Lots of insulation, heated tanks for winter camping, solar battery charger, etc etc.  Not quite as many "swoosh" graphics as the one pictured here.

Why such a small RV?  Signing up for Jojoba Hills was an epiphany: Each 50 X 70 foot lot has a small storage shed, so I don't have to take all my belongings with me on the road. I can plant oranges and peaches on my lot, or harvest from the community orchard.

Jojoba Hills also has a storage area for travel RVs.  Huh, storage areas?  Looking at Google Earth, it dawned on me that at least 100 of the 280 Jojoba members had a second -- larger -- RV on their lot to provide elbow room and save wear and tear on the road unit.  This seemed extravagant until I checked prices of "Travel Trailers", the category of RVs you tow with a regular pickup truck.  Quite affordable. More on this later!

So after a trip to Elkhart's RV Hall of Fame and Museum we drove back to Chicago for a nice weekend with classmate Tex Hull and his wife Susan.  Visits to the Art Institute and the Field Museum barely scratched the surface of the city's attractions; we'll be back!

Fun Museum. 85% of the RVs in the country are built in Elkhart County. Phoenix Cruiser is a boutique manufacturer; we met the gentleman who has wired every rig they've built since they were founded in the mid-90s.

Second RV Trial

Okay, we had a fine time in Utah, but we were constantly on the move from one spectacular site to another.  Would we go crazy just staying in the same place for a week?

As an experiment we met in Orlando and rented another Road Bear and drove south for a week at Periwinkle park on Sanibel Island, which we know well.

Periwinkle has a large duck (+ others!) pond and unusual critters in cages and in the wild: Lemurs and Anole Lizards.

We didn't want to move the RV and didn't have a "Toad" (wheel-people term for a "towed vehicle"), so we rented from Billy's Bikes:

Though it was too hot to ride as much as we might have otherwise, Karin did get enough bars on her iPhone to check AAPL out in the middle of Tarpon Bay

Lovely beaches as always.

Lessons:  we can survive a week cooped up together. The (very necessary) air conditioner is quite loud all night even when set on low. And one can cook broccoli in a Mr. Coffee carafe.

RV Factory Tour

Flush from our great SoUt trip, the following month we visited Coach House, a small high-end RV manufacturer in Nokomis, Florida known for building virtually leak-proof rigs starting with a one-piece fiberglass shell.  A fascinating tour, leaving an overwhelming impression of just how complex a small RV can be:

We also saw an exceedingly rare example of a swoop-free RV paintjob:

Beautiful coaches to be sure but oh.... the cost!

And always great to see Jim and Irene:

Twice burned, thrice foolish

Two years after our fiery short-lived RV adventure, we rented an RV for a week from Road Bear, an excellent small Swiss company with facilities in Las Vegas. Karin flew out; I drove up from Redlands.  I pretended not to notice a burning bus that had been heading south on I-15 just beyond Barstow.....

I picked up the rig at Road Bear and drove to McCarran to get Karin.

Another learning experience: lots of 7' clearances at the airport -- with escape routes (whew!) -- plus you have to pick people up at Departures, rather than Arrivals. Baptism by fire calling Karin while navigating around the airport.

We ate supper in St George, leaving the RV in a bank parking lot, then out first real RV overnight at the KOA at Quail Creek State Park.

The next day was up I-15, with a stop at Walmart in Cedar City to get RV toilet paper and black-tank deodorizer pellets, thence east on I-70 to Green River.  Great Southern Utah views all the way.

I guess "SoUt" doesn't have the same ring as "SoCal", where I live.

Karin in "SoUt"

 I-70 Scenery

We had planned this trip anticipating the Federal Government shutdown, and stayed mostly in Utah State Parks.  The shutdown lifted in time to visit Arches, Natural Bridges, Bryce and Zion.

Next day was the Fiery Furnace tour in Arches, which we had scheduled for our ill-fated 2011 trip and abandoned, The arches are splendid and form an interesting counterpoint to the quite different "natural bridges" we saw later. 

Landscape Arch

Fiery Furnace walk

A long, remote drive the next day: down to Blanding on 191 and west on 95 for a quick stop at Natural Bridges. We drove 30 minutes plus at a time not seeing another vehicle travelling either way.  No cell phone bars of course.  But it's nice to know you can live in the RV for days if anything happened.

Along the way we started to appreciate the stop-anywhere-for-lunch feature of RV life

We crossed the dried-up Colorado then continuing north on 95 to Hankville and a quick jog NE on 24 to Goblin State Park.  

Goblin is great (thanks for the tip, Kevin Sato!)

We got to try out the leveling ramps at our campsite,...

and walk among the goblins the next morning:

That's another Road Bear RV in the distance, rented by a Swiss couple. We were the only Americans we saw renting from RB. (I had heard just too many horror stories about El Monte and CruiseAmerica.....)

After Goblin we drove back west on 24 with a stop to see the petroglyphs in Fruita

then south on the spectacular and sometimes rather exposed (dropoffs on both sides)  Route 12 for lunch in Escalante and on to Kodachrome State Park.

 Our first $100+ fuel bill.

Overnight at Ruby's Inn with warnings not to leave our "city water" connected overnight -- temps going down to 20, then spectacular walks in one of the Bryce amphitheaters

Bryce Hoodoos

A peek at Zion....

and back to an RV park at a casino in Las Vegas near Road Bear:

Yes they have drinks with umbrellas in LV

Postscript:  You probably noticed lots of pictures of rocks.  Karin immediately ordered an excellent DVD-based Geology course from the Teaching Company which we've gone through.  I took geology in college, but that was 50 years ago and a lot has changed.

1300 miles on our SoUt loop -- a great trip in one of my favorite places in the world.  Well, along with Molokai, the Maine coast, Bonaire, Florence.... and others.

First RV experience

I've always liked the idea of an Airstream Trailer, but got my first RV experience when an Esri friend was moving from Natick to Redlands. Natick is right next to Wellesley where Karin lives, so why shouldn't we offer to drive Dan's RV from Massachusetts to California, blitzing to western Colorado, then dawdling through southern Utah?

We made campground reservations across the country starting with a day at the Lime Rock Vintage Car Festival. I flew to Boston on a one-way ticket, picked up the rig at Dan's house and we charged the battery, filled the water, and turned on the gas 'fridge, which we quickly turned off when flames came out of the vent.  Oh, well, bring a cooler.

We stayed in a motel in Great Barrington, Mass and headed out the next morning for a day of races:

We left Lime Rock early. planning a daytime arrival just into Pennsylvania, and after a slog up a long hill on I-84, stopped at a rest area almost within sight of the Delaware River. Karin said she smelled smoke. Smartypants me said it wasn't a problem -- it was wood smoke, not electrical or fuel.  "So why is there smoke coming out of the engine?" asked Karin.  It was a squirrel nest, ignited by engine heat from the long uphill run.  We got the fire out with the help of a trucker hauling broccoli from Maine, who had a real extinguisher, not the dumb little plastic one in the RV.  When the engine cooled down we finished putting the fire out using the RV water supply, then took about a half-hour to remove the huge nest:

So instead of our first night in the RV we endured a lengthy learning experience;  Normal AAA coverage doesn't help with RVs.  Hotels are hard to find in an area just deluged by Hurricane Irene, and State Police are ultimately helpful lining up a tow (now at 11PM), as enough wiring was damaged by the fire so the RV engine wouldn't start.

We left the RV at a repair shop, cancelled reservations all across the country, rented a car big enough for all our gear, and retraced our heroic first RV adventure back to Wellesley in four hours.  

Two fires in three days, and the RV was deemed a total loss after another $1000+ tow. One more one-way ticket, and I was back to Redlands for work,

"Pneu à Terre" Introduction

I work at Esri, a GIS software firm in Redlands California.  I plan to retire in early 2015, sell my house, and take a shot at the full-time RV (Recreational Vehicle) life.  Or perhaps life-style.  We'll see.

Events are falling into place rapidly, so some background.

But first:  "Pneu à Terre"?  

I was talking with a friend a while back about my plans and he asked, "You're selling your house?  Won't you have a pied à terre somewhere? -- evoking the french phrase for "a small living unit usually located in a large city some distance away from an individual's primary residence" literally: a "foot on the ground".  

I replied that the RV would be my primary residence, but having just signed up for Jojoba Hills, I would have a "Pneu à Terre" ("tire on the ground") for when I wasn't on the road in my coach.

But that's getting 'way ahead of the story.....