I started camping in Army surplus pup tents when a Boy Scout growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania. I was taught to enjoy the outdoors from my hiker and amateur botanist father, but when I moved west in my twenties I didn’t camp much again until I was married, had a couple of kids, and bought a bare bones delivery van for getting out into the outdoors.
We didn’t need much in the way of amenities, just a mattress that covered the entire floor area – which all four of us slept on in sleeping bags – a Coleman portable gas stove, ice chest, and a toilet seat chair with a plastic bag slung below it for our restroom, though we mostly used campground facilities when available. You could describe our camping abode as a rectangular hard-sided tent on wheels – not a real recreation vehicle.
But I didn’t bite the hook of serious RVing until I entered the RV business with a Northern California RV rental and sales company. The decider was sampling the rental fleet – from the 21-foot Dolphin Class C motorhome built on a four-cylinder Toyota chassis up through 21 to 28-foot Class C motorhomes and all the various floor plan configurations, to Class A coaches up to 37 feet, the largest in our rental fleet.
After nine years in the RV business, the casual idea of full-timing had germinated into a full blown dream, and Lynn, my wife, and I decided to purchase our very own RV, our first actual recreation vehicle – not a bare bones van. We settled on a 28-foot Fleetwood Bounder (after all, I was a Fleetwood dealer) since it fell below the 30-foot length restriction of some national parks that we planned to visit. As soon as the last of our kids was off to college, I retired from my job, we sold our home, and on a chilly Saturday morning in late November of 1993, we hit the road towing our bright red Mazda dinghy behind us.
And as many new full-timers do, we brought all our toys – including free weights and weight bench, mountain bikes, and double sea kayak – with us. The “basement” model motorhome, a relatively new concept in the early 1990s, with its ample under-floor storage lockers, enabled us to load too much stuff, which in our heady excitement to get going was crammed randomly into cabinets and lockers (which we had to eventually unload and repack after more thought and organization).
An entirely new and exhilarating euphoria overcame us as we drove off, different from the many rentals we had camped in, because this one was ours. Our very own motorhome, and we were free to go and do whatever we wanted. Before long the RV Lifestyle had enveloped us completely, more than we had ever imagined.
Mornings we woke in beautiful campsites, birds chirping and sun streaming through our many windows welcoming us to each new adventure. We couldn’t wait to finish our morning coffee and head out for a walk or bike ride to explore our new temporary neighborhood and see what wildlife we could find. We devoured maps and guidebooks to see what lay ahead – or to the sides – on our loosely planned routes.
The days, months, and years flew by.
Now, after 17 years of full-timing, do we have any regrets? What do you think?