No one ever told me that RV life could be so terrifying, fun, expensive, or headache-inducing. (Although Lucille Ball did give me a hint in that 1960’s movie I watched as a child) Although we have only owned our motorhome less than three years, it feels like we have lived a lifetime of RV adventures (Good, bad, ugly and memory making). It doesn’t seem like 2 minutes ago that we were looking at articles like Outdoorsy vs RVShare and now we have our very own RV. I’m glad that we rented one to start with so that we could see if having one was worth the investment. Although it has its challenges, I love our RV. Our family is not at all those RVers who drive ten miles to camp at Havasu or San Clemente State Beach on our three day weekends. We like to take off for a month in July and explore this great country and if we almost hit a herd of sheep on a busy Idaho highway, well I guess mutton curry for dinner it is! It’s April now and here comes spring on a gust of warm air and it’s almost motorhome season again! As soon as we fix the busted, once frozen pipes (That happened on a three-degree night back in January) we are ready to hit the highways of ‘Merica once again!
When embracing this RV lifestyle you have to be ready at any moment for anything and everything to go wrong. Did your tow car go walkabout? Don’t be surprised when your tow vehicle comes loose from the back of your RV in an Arizona canyonland. It could happen. Brand new toilet leaking? What RVer likes to hear the words, leaky toilet? Not us. Well behaved pet destroys your tow car windows in a moment of anxiety? Sometimes even the most well-behaved dogs decide to literally be bitches when you are away from your rig or tow car for just an hour attempting to relax and ride horses and praying your thirty-eight-year-old knees can make it through an hour long horseback trail ride. And that’s not the end of it. Sometimes you can be in the middle of relaxing inside during a rainstorm when the skylight goes out, and then you’re making a hurried trip to a company like DaLyte to get a replacement put in ASAP before the place floods out. Anything can happen, good or bad, and in some ways that’s part of the charm.
Literally, our three years of this RV lifestyle have been like that one episode of Lucille Ball in the Long, Long Trailer where she rides in the back of the trailer and shit gets crazy. That episode always seemed crazy and made up to me as a child. And then we bought an RV.
Do you love a nice relaxing morning in the eastern Sierras, a good book and a cup of coffee in your hands to warm you up by the campfire? Well, there is really nothing like the RV batteries shocking the shit out of you to wake you up at six a.m. True story. Who needs coffee now, bro?
When you are trying desperately to save six hundred dollars worth of food because there is no electricity in the motorhome all of a sudden, you do what you have to do. Sometimes that involves salvaging the sweet potato latkes from the bottom of the ice chest even though they are soaked in mystery, probably, meat juice. It was day three of our month-long camping trip to the eastern Sierras and food supplies were running lower than expected. My reserves from Sprout’s, Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s were slowing depleting and after not having a working refrigerator for three days we had to throw away a lot of groceries. When vacationing in a remote mountain town three hundred miles from the nearest Whole Foods sometimes you have to take a chance and deep fry those latkes and hope no one gets sick (They were delicious by the way)
In the Long, Long Trailer Lucy and Desi had enough of RVing after just one short ninety-six-minute feature presentation. For our family of three and one goofy rescue mutt its now been three years of the RV lifestyle and yes, sometimes shit gets crazy and the pipes all freeze and we feel like we might want to tear our hair out but the adventures we have had in Yellowstone National Park and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon are totally worth a few motorhome shenanigans. We love the outdoors and exploring this amazing country of ours and our RV lifestyle gives us the freedom to do that.
The world is big, and I want to get a good look at it before it gets dark~John Muir
