Thinking about it a bit more, I can see where ‘pickup camper’ and ‘camper trailer’ could have been shorthanded in the industry and among those who own them in order to negate confusion. Of all the people who came in looking for a ‘camper’, nobody ever expressed surprise when I showed them units that attached to a pickup. Could have been a local term, as well, much like ‘snowmachine’ is Alaska local speak for ‘snow mobile’, and ‘coke’ is a generic term for ‘soda’ in parts of the US.
I now return you all to your thread, feeling a little sheepish.
I’m with the OP on this one. All of my friends have RVs and keep bugging me to get them so I can join them on their camping trips. Much to their dismay, I still do. I just drive along in my car and then stay in a cheap motel nearby with a real bed. Even with a dog, I think you will find most places are pet-friendly these days. I assume this is because people just throw a vest on their dog, claim it is a service animal, and then the hotel is forced to take them anyway, so why bother trying to stop normal people from bringing them too? Someone’s baby with a leaky diaper is just as likely to crap on the carpet as a dog is.
In my experience, the people who get the most mileage out of their RV are the folks who love camping but hate the inconvenience of it. That is, they want to be in the outdoors to hike and cook, but want the safety and comfort of the RV along with movies the kids can watch at night on the TV, or video games they can play. The terrible gas mileage is definitely an issue, but these friends rarely camp more than two hours away from their homes in the Big Bear or desert areas of Southern California.
Personally, I think people who buy these vehicles are nuts. To me, it’s just like the folks who buy jacuzzis. When they first get them, they use them all the time and won’t shut up about awesome they are. Five years down the road, they are used once a year, more out of guilt than desire, and the ‘for sale’ sign goes up the second they need a major service.
I agree somewhat. It’s like yachts; many people say “don’t own, always charter” because owning is expensive and a hassle.
Mrs P and I have considered buying a motorhome, but haven’t for the reasons you give. It would be nice to just have one packed and be able to go whenever we want though. And the generic hired motorhomes always have irritating flaws of the type that makes me think, “dammit if this was mine it would take me maybe a day, a hardware store and my workshop and I could make this van 30% more convenient” but you can’t do that with a hired van.
But the other thing for us is that Australia is a very big place and always starting from one’s home means you effectively have to drive for several days before you get anywhere really new. So it’s better for us to fly to a completely new place and hire a motorhome there.
I wasn’t even thinking about leveling an RV. Not to mention doing and undoing all the hookups when you didn’t have to. I’m thinking of stuff like “Does that McDonald’s have room in the parking lot for me in my 40’ motorhome?” It strikes me as being a lot easier to use a 4 wheeler to make a grocery or laundry run. Not to mention, groceries are MUCH cheaper and there’s much more variety at a grocery store than at a truckstop or the little grocery inside or just outside the entrance to the RV park.
I think of a camper as something in the back of a pickup truck. A trailer as something you pull behind a vehicle, and a RV as a self propelled trailer. And a motorhome as a BIG RV. Okay, I do think of a trailer that opens up to having a tent as a “Pop-up Camper” more than a “Pop-up Trailer”, but there you go.
The biggest asshole I’ve ever seen/heard was shouting at the cashier at a truck stop because he followed the Car/RV signs to fuel up his monstrous motorhome only to discover there was no diesel at those pumps, so he had to work his way out of there to the truck diesel fuel islands in the back. Like he wouldn’t have had to do that to leave anyway? Then I saw his motorhome. It was one of those greyhound bus types converted into an RV. On the back was a hydraulic lift holding a dressed out Harley with the hard saddlebags, trunk, and fairing. Below that was the towing hitch and connected to that was a late model Mustang GT convertible. On the trunk lid of the Mustang was a bike carrier with 2 high end Trek hybrid bikes. My thoughts were 1) Where’s he keep his in-line skates, in the trunk of the Mustang? B) Did this clown just win the lottery? and III) Does this asshole clown really think it was that cashier’s decision to put up the signage that way?
This is why I drive a van conversion. Twenty feet long, parks pretty much wherever a car can park, but is completely self contained. Most times in a campground, I just back into my spot, hook up water and electric, if available, and I’m done in about five minutes. On occasion, I may have to use the small ramps I carry for leveling, but not very often. I never hook up the sewer hose, as most campgrounds have a dump station. We don’t use the RV toilet for solid waste, as it can cake up in there and cause problems (ours doesn’t have a backflush hookup). That’s what the campground toilets are for.
Well RVers arent typically people on vacation. They are retired and when they pull into a RV park they are there to stay for several weeks or months.
These people as I said are retired so they have plenty of time and tons of stories to share about grandkids, jobs, and such. In the daytime there is golf and sightseeing.
I was told that’s part of the fun. Getting to know different people all the time from all over the country. One man told me at night at the RV place they go to in Arizona at night all you hear is the sound of conversations. And if you want privacy that night you just stay home.
Sometimes they do meetups where say 20-30 RVers will head to one area for a week.
Oh, I agree.
I just think that other factors contribute more.
I think that most of the people who tow a car behind their motorhome do so because without it … trying to get a 40 foot RV into a McDonald’s parking lot (or at least fairly close to one) is the least annoying thing on the list of annoying things about that trip.
Re: built-in garage:
I have seen really big motorhomes (50 feet?) with a 5th wheel hitch, pulling a trailer that seemed 40 feet long, and the door at the back of the trailer had the hinge along the bottom, so it turned into a ramp when it opened.
At some point it stops being a “motorhome”, and becomes a house with a steering wheel.
Right. So, instead of having neighbors up and down the street that you’ve known for years or decades, you have neighbors that stay for weeks or months and then you never see them again. Still sounds like food vs. candy to me.
Right now, I spend my days surrounded by thousands and thousands of strangers in my home city, plus about a hundred people I consider friends and neighbors. If I went RV-ing full time, I’d be surrounded every day by thousands and thousands of strangers in a strange city and only a few dozen temporary friends and neighbors. Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound like an improvement.
FWIW, I lived in Florida for two years. I found it was very difficult to make friends there because half the people you meet will be gone in six months and the other half are wondering if YOU will be gone in six months.
I travel a bit, and I have had some enormously powerful friendships with people I’ve know for short, intense periods of time. Sometimes a short friendship is like a beautiful little novella, a perfect little jewel that never fades, gets messy or falls apart.
Other friendships stay alive via this tool called the “internet”. It’s been a pleasure to watch as my former companions grow up, get jobs, form families and start on new adventures. Some I email, some I follow on Facebook. Some I visit.
Finally, it’s a small world and some people don’t stay out of your life long. I live in DC now, which tends to draw international types. People I’ve met on various travels tend to end up here for a while. Sometimes people leave, for months or years. Sometimes they come back. Sometimes I see them where they are. Sometimes we see each other every week and sometimes it’s once a year. It doesn’t really change the nature of our friendship.
I do think it is important to have at least a few longstanding, deep relationships. But living next to someone isn’t the only way to have that.
I had a camper van once – a 1969 VW microbus. It had been used as a garbage shed prior to my buying it. It blew up while I drove it home. Rather than junking it, I let it sit in the driveway for several years, until a fellow came knocking at the door wanting to buy it to drive form Canada to Mexico. I explained to him that it did not work because it had exploded. He said he would fix it, so I sold it to him for what I had bought it for, and he had it towed away the next day. I consider my hippie campervan ownership to have been a near brush with insanity.
We don’t go RVing to make either long-term or short-term friends. We don’t hang out around a campfire having a good ol’ singalong with temporary neighbors, nor do we stay long term in any of those giant parking lots that pass for campgrounds. We’ve met up exactly once with a friend at a campground, and I don’t see that happening again in the foreseeable future.
We go to enjoy the scenery, go on hikes, visit interesting restaurants, visit historical sites and national parks, and spend some days or even weeks just looking at different horizons. Then we go home to our real lives.
Full time RVing isn’t for us, and really isn’t for most people, even though it seems like the road is full of them. That’s why the used RV market is crammed with huge Class A buses with very few miles on them. People who have been working for 40 years believe strongly that a life on the road (or life way out in the boonies) is just the thing for them when they retire, so they often divest themselves of home and possessions, take out a huge mortgage on a depreciating asset, and in six months to a year sell it at a big loss because life on the road turns out not to be the idyllic scene they had envisioned. It’s a really, really stupid and expensive experiment, which is why I always recommend renting an RV first. Three months in a rental is expensive, but it beats spending $300,000 on something you’re going to dump in a year.
A lot of the full-timers I talked to in the six months we spent on the road had that wistful, uprooted look about them, like they’d seen way too many giant slabs of pavement located way too close to railroad tracks and shitty little one-horse towns, and suffered way too many crappy motel rooms while their rigs were being repaired at enormous expense.
The thing with boats is that it’s the pride of ownership and what many owners consider the pleasure of working on them and constantly improving and customizing them. This is especially the case with sailboats that have more gadgetry than you can shake a stick at, but there’s always (always!) something more that it needs. Every marina has a chandler’s shop whose purpose is to separate the avid sailor from his money by providing these things at exorbitant cost.
So there are really two classes of boaters with almost nothing in common – those who charter a boat to be out on the water once in a while, and those for whom it’s an obsessive hobby. I suppose there’s a third category, those who own a boat because they’re filthy rich but don’t really care that much about them, but I don’t know anybody like that myself.
I’ve never heard anyone trying to justify ownership on a cost basis, and where a boat can only be used seasonally and with the constraints of weather and free time, the calculated hourly cost of the few hours a year that it’s actually in use is kind of a standing joke among owners. They don’t care.
Boating is actually a wonderful alternative to RVing if one happens to live near the ocean or the Great Lakes. I’ve only experienced the Lakes, and the great thing about it is that a boat can take you to some of the most pristine and beautiful places on earth, relatively or completely uncrowded and unspoiled.
Yes I’m pretty much the type of person who would very much like to own a yacht or RV just so I could tinker around with it even though it wouldn’t be cost effective. But demands of work and time are such that it wouldn’t work.
Definitely the place for beauty and solitude, but you don’t even have to go that far. This picture shows a lake within Killarney Provincial Park that is accessible only by canoe, but I’ve cruised Georgian Bay and been anchored in little inlets in the northern parts that looked just like that. You can sail right up to the park boundary on one side, so that while hardy campers are portaging their canoes and pitching tents inside the park, you can luxuriate in your floating home just on the perimeter of the park. I’m allowed to do this because I’m old.
And I do mean “just like that”. I have dozens of digital snapshots that look just like Group of Seven paintings. All you have to do to get that kind of masterpiece up there is just point a camera.
Killarney is truly lovely. It’s one of my old stomping grounds. I guess solitude is relative. Killarney is solitude compared to further south on Georgian Bay, and the north shore of Superior is solitude compared to Killarney. Hudson’s Bay is solitude compared to Superior.
But back on topic – Killarney is ideal for small RVs pulling a boat. Used to be there was no road, but since the early '60s it has been connected, allowing easy water access south to the French River delta (although IMHO, the bays to the north over to Manitoulin are nicer).
