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Engelhardt |
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 "Darling, I don't mind you forcing me to take a vacation in that old RV and making me cook on this camp stove every night, but will you please make that strange kid and his awful dog go away and leave us alone!" |
Imprisoned in an 'RV':
You call this 'vacation'?
of TheColumnists.com
If there’s one thing I’m sure of it’s that men and women see things very differently.
Take the television remote, for instance. It never occurs to my husband that I could possibly change a channel myself, nor that I might even want to do so. Our remote is forever imbedded in his right hand, trigger-finger at the ready for switching to some sports broadcast of underwater hockey or sumo wrestling every time the channel we’re watching goes to commercial.
It’s no surprise, then, that we have vastly different views about RVs. RVs….you know. Those elongated box cars you’re supposed to take on vacation trips so you can just RV all over the place and have loads of RVing (it’s a real verb….I looked it up) fun with other RVers…all doing the RV thing.
I once thought RVing would
be an adventure (actually, it is, but not in the exciting, pleasurable
way I anticipated). So when hubby, a high school drama teacher,
suggested we lease an RV for a few months and “experience”
the Western States on six wheels while he visited about 25 high
school drama departments on his sabbatical,
I was gung ho, kinda.
Then we started researching them. What I recognized very quickly is that what we wanted to “live” in for a few months and what we could afford were separated by a good 10-12 feet. Our choice, a 26-footer, was decidedly cozy (not in a good way either). It had minuscule storage space, a minuscule shower, and….worse of all….a bed that was slapped right against one of the walls. Naturally that was the side on which I got to sleep.
For a good 3 ½ months we traversed California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington and Oregon before ending up back where we started in Northern California. In all that time we didn’t stay one night in a motel, though we did crawl out of the RV for four blissful nights in my sister’s home in Walla Walla. After being in our crackerbox for so long, I literally wept when I looked at her spacious guestroom--with a walkway between the bed on both sides! I was delirious.
Now, I’m not saying RVing doesn’t have its particular pleasures. On most mornings I’d awaken before my husband, throw on my jogging clothes and sneak out the creaky door. Being an inveterate jogger for more than two decades, I needed to escape the confines of that little toy house, work out the kinks of the tortured night and take a look at the local flora, fauna or highway.
First I’d go through my usual stretching routine, then head off in some direction, hoping like crazy I’d be able to remember how to get back to our RV camp. Sometimes we were far out of town, so I’d just head off down a road for a mile or two, then double back. Usually there wasn’t a lot to look at, but I’d frequently pick up recyclables, stick them in the elastic waistband of my jogging pants and drop them into a recycling bin wherever I found one. (That may sound like a weird thing to do, but…sorry! I’m serious about recycling and have a hard time passing by an aluminum can or plastic bottle without picking it up.)
Sometimes I’d jog through a downtown area. I especially enjoyed what I called the Kachinka dolls of New Mexico: Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos. Beginning with Albuquerque (the largest of the three), we found that each has a plaza at its center, with the city expanding around it. What fun it was to discover that, to an outsider at least, the three cities shared commonality in architecture, style and physical structure.
The good news is that I never got lost in New Mexico. Those plazas always helped point me back to our resting spot. Usually I’d complete my jog, stop at a newsstand, pull out a quarter or more, buy the local newspaper, then jog back to the RV, paper firmly under arm.
By the time I returned, hubby was usually up, had coffee brewed and was sitting outside enjoying the vista (if there was one) and awaiting my return. Not that he was so anxious to see me, you understand, but he had to have his morning sports fix, which was the main reason I bought a paper. (Actually, being a former newspaper reporter, I liked to check out each city’s local rag.)
Our RV was the type that was car and “home” in one. That means we always had to travel, like a turtle, with our house on our backs. That also meant that once we found a campsite for the night, we couldn’t set up camp and then go to dinner somewhere. No, that would mean unplugging everything, driving off….perhaps finding our site taken by another RV by the time we returned.
That’s why I cooked more meals than I care to remember on a tiny two-burner stove with an equally tiny oven. Oh, sure….it was a kick for awhile. Kind of like playing house. But it got old….really old.
After our return home, I happily waved goodbye to our temporary abode and decided pretty emphatically that RV life was not for me. That was 1992. Why, then, did I agree when my Washington sister invited us to join them last year for an RV trip on the Oregon Coast?
It had to be that the passage of time makes one forget some experiences. But, as the saying goes, if you don’t learn from the past, you are doomed to make the same mistakes over again. How true.
We only had 10 days, so we decided to drive our car to Portland and pick up an RV there. This seemed like a reasonable compromise between hubby (who was actually thrilled at the idea of RVing again) and me. We could stay in motels on the other parts of our trip and just use the RV at the campgrounds where sis and her husband pulled their 33-foot expandable luxury liner!
Alas…by the time we made our arrangements, the only RV the dealer had was a 21-footer--much smaller than our last one. Since it was just for a week, we figured we’d survive. HA! Did we factor into the equation that we were now more than a decade older and crankier? And it was not nearly as easy to climb into a low-ceilinged top bunk. (Ten guesses who got the top bunk? That’s right: Good sport Joanne.)
Our week was doomed anyway because the “RV Pack” that came with the RV was missing a lot of necessary stuff (like a can opener, pots, forks, etc.). Needless to say, we spent most of our waking hours--eating, drinking, watching TV, socializing--in my sister’s manse (it seemed like a mansion to me compared to our tin can!). Luckily we also spent time outdoors claming, crabbing, walking on the beach and wading in the still-chilly water.
So, has this confirmed my opinion that I’m not really an RV person? You bet. Maybe even hubby will come around to that way of thinking before he suggests another RV trip with me--in a decade or so.
©2004 by Joanne Engelhardt. The cartoon illustration is modified from one found in IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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