I've long been attracted to the idea of traveling the country in an RV, and I think I know where it comes from. I grew up road tripping everywhere because we couldn't afford to fly. We camped in tents at KOAs, stopped at roadside attractions, toured caves, and took pictures at every stop worth stopping at. But mostly I remember the car: my sister and me cozied up in the back seat with food, games, and books, and the small towns going by outside. I used to watch them and wonder what life was like for the people who lived there.
In high school I read Blue Highways, William Least Heat-Moon's account of driving the back roads of America in a converted van he called Ghost Dancing. In college I watched Easy Rider in a Sixties-themed English course. Somewhere along the way, the road stopped being how we got places and became the point.
Sprinter fascination
There's something in it that appeals to me. Maybe it's the self-sustaining aspect - the ability to go where I want, when I want, and to stay overnight as I desire. Or maybe, as a relatively frequent business traveler, it's the freedom from tight schedules, endless lines, security pat-downs, and crowded spaces.
Although the traditional class A RV appeals to me on a certain level, it's the camper vans that really fuel my imagination. There's something about being able to go nearly anywhere a car can go. Or to travel in "stealth mode" - the ability to just park anywhere like a car, except with the full comfort and facilities of home.
I didn't even know they existed until I saw a VW camper van at Burning Man in 2004. One of our neighbors had a beat-up VW camper van that he used as part of his setup. It only had a small kitchen set in it, but that was all it took for me to realize there was a class of vehicles that could be much more subtle than a huge honking class A RV or a Winnebago.
June 2006, at a gathering of VW campers: Simon and me with a hand-painted bus, and a field of pop-tops.
My friends would often laugh at me when I brought up the idea. I think there's a stigma that RV vacationers are somehow cheap, or lower class than their air-traveling counterparts. More than one friend regaled me with stories of friends whose RV trips turned into nightmares. I've heard stories of people who had sewage spew in their face as they emptied their black water tanks. I've heard stories of couples who left on the best of terms only to return on the brink of breakup. I've heard stories of breakdowns and rollovers.
Shortly after returning from Burning Man in 2004, I began to research van conversions, and it didn't take long to stumble across the Sprinter chassis. A bunch of manufacturers took the Sprinter and converted it into a full-blown RV far beyond the VW camper van I had seen at Burning Man: Roadtrek, Airstream, Great West Vans, Sportsmobile, and others. I had to see them in person.
Jess and I started going to the RV shows in Chicago, the first in January 2005. Many RV manufacturers design dated, overstuffed interiors - floral patterns, green and beige, thick patterned upholstery, oak, and laminate - at complete odds with my own taste. The Airstream Interstate jumped out because of its streamlined, contemporary looks: aluminum, dark cherry wood, and solid leather upholstery. Jess really dug it too. The first time I walked into one, I was impressed by the design, the quality, and the layout. The space was definitely small, but it had everything. I could visualize it happening.
Jess did have a bit of motion sickness in some of the camper vans. I think the small space, the overly warm air, our thick winter jackets, and probably slightly deflated tires on a convention floor just combined poorly. That worried me a bit, but she was still willing to give it a go.
At the Chicago RV show: Jess trying out a Sprinter conversion, and me looking up at the cabinets.
After the shows, I was hooked. I read about more RVs and the lifestyle, online diaries from full-timers, television shows, and so forth. Although I had never spent a single night in an RV, I was essentially an addict. I started looking for places that would rent Sprinter RVs.
Sometime around August 2006, Jess and I started talking about a long (for me, anyway) 10- to 12-day vacation. With our Labrador Retriever, Simon, getting older (13!) and us extremely hesitant to put him in a kennel or leave him with someone for that long, it seemed like the perfect time for a long road trip in an RV. We've always been big fans of road trips. We had long talked about how cool it would be to take a couple of months and travel the country taking pictures (mainly Jess) and writing about (mainly me) roadside attractions and strange places throughout the US. We had also run across a WSJ article about ghost towns that seemed a pretty fascinating thing to chase.
It took a while, but we finally made it happen. I got swamped at work, so October became November, and I blocked off November 8th to 19th. We reserved a camper van from Obie's RV, and since apparently no one else was renting camper vans that week, they let us pick. A week or two before the trip, we made the hour-long drive to look at them: a pretty new Great West Van Sprinter Legend and a much older Xplorer Sprinter Xtreme. The Xplorer had a queen-size bed but was a bit worn inside. The Great West Van had two single beds separated by a side table, but it looked nearly new.
The first trip
We took the Great West Van. Two single beds instead of a worn queen seemed like a fair trade for something that looked nearly new, and it was the closest thing to the Interstate we could rent. We picked it up on November 8th and pulled out of Naperville the next morning with Jess still fighting a cold, Simon on his bed between the seats, and a brand new Garmin we named Jill on the dash. Jill went black somewhere well before Davenport. So did my confidence that I knew what I was doing.
Simon on his bed between the seats, and the Great West Van Sprinter Legend at the edge of a harvested cornfield.
What was planned as a week to get to know the Sprinter turned into thirteen days and a loop through half the country: Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and home along Route 66. We drove through rain, sleet, snow bad enough to turn us back at Monarch Pass, and desert warmth, sometimes in the same afternoon.
The things I remember aren't the things we planned: a white dollhouse alone in an abandoned barn an hour from home, Tammy from Tiny Town, a clay road into Chaco Canyon that Jill picked for us. And the van did its best to talk us out of it, with a water tank that leaked from the second day on, a furnace that worked beautifully for a few nights and then not at all, and a refrigerator that flung our groceries across the floor. The whole trip, day by day from the journal I kept, is in Blue Highways, Gray Skies.
None of it mattered as much as I would have guessed. The nightmare stories my friends told never came true. Nobody got sprayed with sewage, nothing rolled over, and Jess and I came home on better terms than we left. Simon's back legs gave out more than once, and he kept going. He got two weeks with his people instead of two weeks in a kennel, and I'm glad that's how he spent it.
And Jess came around. She hadn't really expected to like it. She came along because it was something I wanted to do and something we could do together, and somewhere between the dollhouse and the Pueblo Alto trail it became something she wanted too. She was the one who figured out how to keep the bed cushions from separating, and she was the one who took the pictures.
Jess, who took the pictures, at the van door, and one of hers: Simon and me at the National Route 66 Museum in Elk City, Oklahoma.
That was the first one. It started a life of RVing that we've carried on ever since, and that our kids have grown up in.