Gordon Groene - Living Aboard Your RV

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Page iii: top photo courtesy Nexus RV; bottom photo courtesy Keystone RV Company; map courtesy www.nationalatlas.gov.

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Appendix 1
Useful Contacts and Addresses

Appendix 2
Whats Available in RVs

The RV revolution is truly one of the wonders of our time. It grew out of the dream of traveling without leaving home and into the reality of todays fine-quality, fully equipped, and eminently roadable recreational vehicles.

People choose to travel in many ways and to live in many kinds of domiciles. However, it has always been difficult to combine nonstop travel with a real home. In the past, people who wanted to do both could hitch a prairie schooner to a team and shout, Westward, ho! For the wealthy there were private rail cars complete with kitchen and bath. No longer practical today, they have been replaced by the modern RV.

To those people who decry RVs as a desecration of the camping spirit, we suggest that RV fulltiming is not a replacement for tenting or backpacking. It is a replacement for house and garage, garden and grass, toolshed and cellar. The RV is a home as well as a base from which all other careers and activitiesincluding primitive campingcan proceed.

RV travel, once perceived as a retiree lifestyle, is available to all, from those seeking a family vacation to those wanting a portable office. Thanks to the electronics revolution, thousands of young and middle-aged RVers have their own magic carpets, making a living anywhere they choose to park. Todays RV mobile workers are never out of touch with the office, the Internet, their loved ones, their clients, and their suppliers.

The RV lifestyle allows us to capture the latest news and newest movies out of thin air, no matter where we are. Convenient new foods allow us to cook bigger meals in smaller spaces using new technologies such as induction stoves. The humble light bulb has been replaced by LEDs that give us daylight at any hour, using very little battery power. We have never had more creature comforts nor better entertainment media.

Spacious, versatile new RV designs make room for almost any life or livelihood. In addition to the endless variations on Internet business, the modern RV may also have room for a woodworking shop, artist studio, or dog grooming business. Toy haulers allow RV-ers to have a complete, rolling home plus a garage for an ATV or personal watercraft. One new RV model has living quarters for people plus stalls for up to four horses.

The revolution continues as RVs become more fuel efficient. An all-electric model was introduced for 2012 and spacious, yet featherweight trailers can be pulled by medium-size autos. We may see diesel and gasoline replaced by energies not yet imagined.

As you consider fulltiming as a way of life, we wish you safe miles, a soft bunk, and a chance to brighten the many corners youll encounter along the way.

There has never been a better time to hit the road!

We woke up to a thin, cold dawn and the pounding of a patrolmans fist on our camper door.

Move along, he said, not unkindly. Ive let you sleep since two oclock this morning, but its six now and time you hit the road.

No, we werent homeless alcoholics sleeping off a cheap drunk under a tent of yesterdays newspapers. We were young, able, self-sufficient adventurers who had stopped late the night before in a highway rest plaza, and we had overslept the two-hour limit.

Our visit from that policeman was just another in a long series of reminders that in shedding our old style of life and adopting a new role as full-time wanderers we had shed a lifelong mantle of respectability. Our new life baffled some people, amused others, and enraged more than a few.

What had we gotten ourselves into?

Close your eyes and picture the free, roving life on wheels. Immediately you imagine a cozy, self-contained camper beside a rushing, trout-packed brook. You have no deadlines, no lawn to mow, no leaves to rake, no committees, no neighbors to be stuck with year after year. You fantasize about a life with no ties, no traps, no taxes. The full-time RV life is all you hope for and much, much more. But it also means a break with treasured possessions, with status, with symbols, with Your Place In Life.