I’ve met a few RVers who were doing this.
Sell the house, move into a small house on wheels, and do a Grand Tour of the grandkids. They’d spend a month or so parked at the home of one of their children, then move on to the next kid. (They would visit parks and such during their transit time.)
Seems great to me. The grandkids know that they’ll see Gramma and Grampa in June and Spetember (or whatever).
Most of the stuff I’ve seen about the lifestyle touts meeting other RVers. You live in one park for a couple of months, then move to a new neighborhood.
That said, FAR more common in my experience is a nice upscale home with an RV parked next to the driveway that sits there for 50+ weeks a year.
I understand the appeal of owning your own, because a rented RV has had god-knows-who sleeping in it, but … there is no way that makes economic sense.
I seem to recall a similar boom in mobile retired folks happened a few decades back, when railroads stopped using cabooses and one could be had for fairly cheap. Folks were fitting them out as RVs, and some areas had sidings with hook-ups for utilities and sewer. I recall one person saying that when you started to get tired of a town, you could just “call the railroad and ask them to hitch you onto the next train out”.
The good thing about motorhomes is that if you hate your yard you can pack up, turn on your engine, and do doughnuts and burnouts on it until there’s nothing left but a big mud crater. Mudwrestling!
We rented one on our last trip to New Zealand - it was (IIRC) 10.6 m…slept 6.
One thing that bugged me - with luggage for 5, in the middle of winter, it didn’t have enough storage. So bags had to be moved into the driving cabin during the night.
This is an easily solved problem, and relatively minor.
Other than that, we loved it as a holidaying option.
Some of the things I liked -
I did all of the driving, while the family drank coffee, watched TV, did homework in the back - much much more comfortable and less hassle than a car.
Having even a small fridge and hotplate, we could cook a bit, keep drinks cold, condiments, whatever while travelling - this is great
Having a small living area to eat or stop for a break, change clothes etc - especially in the middle of winter this was great. Even if we got takeout there was a table there to to eat, could wash hands etc etc.
We had a diesel - and got somewhere around 11km to the litre, which is better than my car gets (and diesel is cheaper to buy) so fuel cost wasn’t a concern.
I don’t think you’d save much - but in terms of comfort while travelling, they can’t be beat.
I’ve seen some RV’s that are designed to be driven offroad. These are not the fancy Prevost or Bluebird types but have bunk beds for lots of people and are designed to be hosed out after a day of kayaking or mountain biking.
They have a blast. One Christmas my dad didn’t come home. He was working at a Hickory Farms kiosk in a Las Vegas Mall. He has a bit of a beard and he wore his Santa hat. One day he’s eating at the food court and this little girl comes up and asks if he’s Santa Clause.
In Montana they dress up in cowboy gear and my dad has a lot of gorgeous turquoise jewelry. He is a born salesman and flirts with the lady tourists, who think it’s great to meet a Real Montana Cowboy (except he’s from Florida.) My step-mom thinks is hilarious.
Gaffa, that rig sounds really cool, and diesel powering everything makes a lot of sense. I so want one of the Espar coolant heaters!
I have a buddy that works the airshow circuit, and he keeps talking about setting up a sprinter to live in. He has to pull trailers with his airplanes, so it has to be motorized, and I sold him on Diesels a few years ago for all the driving he does.
I find that VERY hard to believe. What kind of motorhome was it? Do you have photos? 11 km/L = 26 mpg(US) or 31 mpg(UK). And you say it was 10.6 m long, which is 34.8 ft. Even for a diesel, that is nothing short of astounding. The average 35-foot motorhome here in the USA gets about 7 mpg if it runs on gasoline (3 km/L) or 9.5 if it runs on diesel (4.1 km/L). And yet you’re telling us that you got almost TRIPLE those numbers? Incredible.
I have searched far and wide for fuel-efficient motorhomes and found that 90% of them get less than 10 mpg(US), even if they run on diesel. The ones who get better economy tend to be Class B (just a van with a lifted roof) and they aren’t anywhere near 35 ft long-- more like 20 ft. Even the Winnebago LeSharo (20 ft long), which was built in the 1980s and claimed to be the most fuel-efficient motorhome ever built, bragged that it could get 22-24 mpg if you got the diesel version. But that was a 2068cc 4-cylinder engine, which many people complained was not nearly powerful enough, even for a 20 ft motorhome. Its successor, the Rialta, had a bigger engine (most of them gasoline, but with a diesel option) was a little longer, just 22 ft. Rialtas tend to get about 14 mpg on gasoline or 19 mpg if you have one of the rare diesel versions. Then there’s the Vixen, which is a basically looks like a stretch limo diesel VW Vanagon with a pop-top. When the top was down, the RV was only 6’4" tall. It was only 21 ft long, and some people claimed they could get up to 26 mpg with the diesel engine but I think they might be exaggerating.
I would LOVE to see the year, make, and model of a 35 ft motorhome which sleeps 6 people and gets 26 mpg. I think it’s much more likely that you made a mistake in your math when calculating the km/L.
I’ve seen pop-up RV parks at a number of the festivals that I go to. Especially when there are no nearby hotels & long drives to get in parking onsite & being able to roll out of bed & across the field at 6am is quite nice as compared to getting up an hour or two earlier.
It’s also a friendship/lifestyle thing as the same people hang out together year after year. Just like any other large group, there are cliques - at the last festival I was at, there was one corner that was just Airstreams all lined up in a row.
The European versions of the tall long delivery vans like the Transit or the van that’s sold in the US as the Sprinter often get well over 30 MPG because they’re equipped with tiny diesel engines that are more like something you’d find in a hatchback. Sprinter-based RV’s sold here get in the low 20’s but they only sell the Sprinter here with the bigger optional engine. It wouldn’t surprise me at all that an RV based on one of those vans with the small diesel engine would get close to 30.
The big difference is that in the US RV’s are expected to keep up with cars on the Interstate and so they have to come with huge engines. In Europe (and most of the rest of the world) they’re just expected to hang in the slow lane on multi-lane highways and the speeds on secondary highways are much lower, so they can get by just fine with tiny little engines built for fuel economy.
Yes, a diesel Sprinter van with a small engine could get up to 30 mpg at slower speeds. But it wouldn’t be 35 ft long; it would be 20 ft long. And it wouldn’t sleep six people; it would only sleep two-- four at the most. So what you’re describing can’t be the same thing that bengangmo is talking about.
I’ll have to get some pictures of the complete rig.
I did the electrical and electronics, all the insulation and some of the carpentry. Jano did the plumbing, counter-tops (all Corian) and most of the carpentry and layout. The Espar is a pain because he bought on on eBay, and it was military surplus and ran on 24 volts rather than 12. We had some issues integrating it into the system. The most ambitious move on the whole build was draining every single drop of water from the engine and filling it with Evans coolant. Expensive as hell at $45 a gallon, it will never break down and never need to be replaced.
If we were going to do it again, we’d put in heat exchangers between the engine coolant system and the water heater water and cabin radiator system, rather than plumbing the whole thing as one, and put in valves to zone the system. No need to waste energy warming the engine block when all you need is a hot shower and vis versa.
Not being a prisoner of the RV dealerships was a high priority. He only uses biodegradable soaps, so the grey water tank can be emptied when he visits a self-service car wash - there is a switch to dump automatically. Black water into a toilet, and he can fill the water tank from anyone’s hose. With that and diesel fuel, he’s set.
One wonderful aspect of the Espar is that it is sold and serviced by commercial truck suppliers, and truckers need support 24/7/365, so it is always available.
The folks on the Sprinter Source Forum were wonderfully helpful. Half of the advanced technology ideas used in this build were from Australians and Europeans, where smaller RVs are much more popular than the US. That’s where he found the Webasto cooktop.
There is a whole electronics closet that I’d like to photograph. There is a laptop that runs folded up in a sliding drawer, with Bluetooth accessories, a 23" monitor/TV with a full-motion mounting bracket mounted to a plate on a pair of heavy-duty drawer slides in a 4" wide slot. You pull it out of it’s slot, and it can face the sleeping area, the dining area or lie flat against the wall. There is a TV antenna on the roof, a Plex system on the laptop and a 2 terabyte hard drive filled with movies.
The hardest and most expensive part was trying to ensure that he’d always been able to get data on surf conditions, which is a life or death matter to an ocean kayaker. I’d imagine it’s the same with weather conditions for a pilot. No sat phone is a good deal. If were were starting now, we’d probably build it around a Google Fi Android Nexus phone working as a hot spot. There is a WiFi antenna on the roof, running to a repeater inside the van, so he can visit nearly any Starbucks or McDonald’s and join their WiFi from the parking lot to get updated before heading out of cell phone range.
Well, I’m guessing the 35 foot probably wasn’t right, but the Sprinter-based RV’s are mostly 25 footers which certainly aren’t tiny. A freakin’ Vanagon will sleep four people, so sleeping six in a sprinter-sized vehicle doesn’t seem unlikely at all.
I didnt realize but their is a difference between “campers” and “motorhomes”.
The big difference is the price where you have these million dollar Prevosts and others like Winnebego offer top of the line units.
Down in Arizona and other southern states they have these BIG RV parks where hundreds if not thousands of RV’ers spend their winters. They are surrounded by golf courses and are very popular.
My grandparents bought an airstream trailer (the old time luxury trailers that looked like a silver bullet) when they retired. They bought it used from another retired couple who had done the same thing with it that they intended to - travel the American continents as far north and south as possible. They could have done the trip by car alone and stayed in hotels, but they teamed up with a group of fellow aristreamers making the same trek, so there was both safety and companionship for everyone. They spent several years doing the trek, and when it was over, they sold the trailer to yet another newly-retired couple with the same dream. I always it was a charming continuity.
