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| Welcome. Come into my kitchen/living room/study/guest bedroom/trunk. |
I’ve always had an active fantasy life. If you’re a longtime reader, you know I used to dream of living in a ridiculously neat, clean and color coordinated ranch house on Westview in Hubbard, where I would make my own curtains and plant marigolds on the back patio. I didn’t fantasize about being super rich or living in mansions (except during my I-want-to-be-First-Lady phase, but I don’t think the White House counts as a mansion, since it’s not like you get the Lincoln Bedroom all to yourself). I basically just wanted my things to be organized and nicely arranged.
So it should be no surprise that I’ve fantasized about living in an RV.
RVs are awesome. They’re like yachts for the middle class. Every surface has two purposes (kitchen table/bed, stove top/nightstand) and there are little cabinets everywhere you turn. If you can turn. RVs can be a little tight on space. Efficiency on wheels. You can literally live in your car and not be a pitiful homeless person if you have an RV.
My fantasy involved the decor and placement of key things inside the RV. It did not involve what was happening outside the RV. My husband and I were once actually pretty close to buying some type of camping vehicle, when we opened up a brochure and realized that when you pull your RV off the road at the end of the day, you have to park it in an RV campground or motor home park. These places are not so neat, clean, organized and color coordinated. The brochure showed a picture of a row of RVs with folding chairs sitting outside, a fat guy in a tank top with his hand on a pack of Pall Malls on a folding table, and a boy about 10-years-old with no shirt and bare feet.
“Are you starting to think what I’m thinking” my husband asked me, after we both looked at the picture for about a full minute. We had spent an entire day at an RV & Camping Expo, where we paid admission to have people try to sell us stuff.Those shows are so huge and overwhelming, that you get caught up in the whole RV lifestyle and you forget that you have the option to not buy anything and never, ever go camping or traveling again. You forget that there’s a world outside the armory doors where people don’t own RVs, don’t know a thing about them, and are spending the day doing yard work or baking cookies. Whole ancestries will live and die, generation after generation, without ever having stepped foot in an RV and they’ll be perfectly happy. But we had forgotten that. It wasn’t a matter of whether we’d buy one, it was a matter of which one we’d buy.
“Yes,” I said. I felt like I was emerging from a hypnotic trance where I almost spent all of our vacation money on a giant camping device, convinced that this one capital purchase would provide us with a lifetime of family vacations. Until I saw that brochure, it hadn’t occurred to me that all of our vacations would be to RV parks.
If you want to power that TV/microwave/stereo, you have to occasionally plug in your RV in a designated plug-in station. And if you want to refill your water tank so you can make some coffee in your TV/microwave/stereo, you’re going to have to hook up to a designated water station.
We both snapped out of it, simultaneously, and booked a week at a condo at Kiawah Island. I figured one beach vacation would be better for my children than a whole lifetime of playing video games and stick ball with that shirtless kid.
But I haven’t forgotten how cool it would be to live on the road, be a vagabond, heat up some Hot Pockets in a moving vehicle, stock some little cupboards with some matching Melmac dishes.
Even now, when my kids do things that make me wonder if they’ll ever find jobs that will get them weaned off my iTunes gift cards, I tell them that they should not count on inheriting anything from us. “We’re going to sell everything and live in a motor home and blow through all the money,” I tell them. “You’ll be lucky if you only have to pay for our nursing home. We could easily run out of funds on a run through Nevada, so you may even have to give us some spending money to support our nomadic lifestyle before we get too old.”
We can have them draw straws to see who gets the RV. It’ll be very well organized.Labels: camping, family vacation, motor homes, RVs
