Why We Buy the "Go RVing" Marketing

So today I have promised to give you the good points of RVing. And there are many. So many, in fact, that we are seriously thinking about saving up to buy one for ourselves. So if the quirks and annoyances from yesterday’s blog scared you a bit, I hope today will balance out the scales.

There is no way to beat the convenience of an RV. It is convenient for everything. Hungry? Go grab a snack from the fridge, freezer, or pantry. Want some microwave popcorn? Fire up the generator while you’re toodling down the road, and put that bag in the microwave! Ice cream? Sure! Have a hankering for your favorite cookies or muffins? Bake a batch in the oven. We have had all our favorite meals on the road. The gas stove is super easy to use and with three burners and the oven, we can cook or bake anything we have at home, and have done so. This is a HUGE plus for toddlers, because we’ve been able to give DD all the food she is used to eating at home. Compared to trying to get her to behave in a restaurant, where she won’t eat much anyway because of all the distractions, this alone makes it worthwhile when vacationing with young kids. And if you do eat out, you can take the leftovers with you and have a second meal out of them just like you would at home. And you really, really gotta love being able to pull over in the middle of Antelope Flats in the Grand Tetons, with a panoramic 360 degree view, and hang out and eat a nice hot lunch, and have your own toilet facilities available at any time. Try doing that in a car.

Likewise it is so nice to have the self-contained, self-sufficiency. If we were too tired to drive, we could pull over and set up for the night, no problem. No worrying about finding a motel and whether it will be clean or safe. We get to use our own pillows, our own sheets. We could bring DD’s whole assortment of sleeping stuffed animals and not worry about running out of space to put them. We brought DS’s exersaucer, and his playmat. We can set up the laptop so DD can watch Veggie Tales on the road, and we can plug it in without worry. We have our cable box for the laptop so we’ve been able to catch some of our favorite shows and have “normal” evenings. We’ve even had a Skype video chat with DH’s family in Ireland, in the wilds of the Grand Teton National Park!

You really can go wherever there is a road, and set up shop. In the national parks, this meant we could hang out wherever we had the urge to stop, and for a few or several hours it was our own little slice of the park. You really see a lot of animals being up high, too, and the ladder on the back hosted DH a couple of times when we wanted to get some photos of animals that were being crowded by stupid tourists (more on that another day). We got great shots when others weren’t able to see the animals, most noticeably one day when some bison were wandering behind some trees and weren’t clearly visible, except from the top of the ladder! Ha!
The RV parks are also great places for kids. We stuck to the KOA camps, but next time we will stay in the national parks and hang out there. It’s cheap camping as things go, although the fudge, ice cream, and restaurant offerings can be tempting at the KOAs. Every KOA had a playground, which DD loved, and they all had some other amenities (like an indoor pool at West Yellowstone KOA—loved it). Everything was super clean, and the employees were all very helpful and friendly. I loved all the trees at the sites, which hosted a variety of birds. We also saw cottontail rabbits and smelled skunk (okay, not so attractive). And the views were pretty spectacular at most of the sites. We had a great view of the Continental Divide at the West Yellowstone KOA, next to a barbed wire fence where I saw swallows, white capped sparrows, and robins. Watching the wind blow the grasses and the clouds across the landscape, with the sun dappling through the cloud cover—that was pretty, and it was right there out the bedroom window.

Needless to say, we were also favorably impressed with our RV park neighbors, who stopped by to let us know about the continual gushes of water out the side of the RV. I suppose we were a bit worried that we would encounter a family like the one portrayed in the movie, “RV”, but fortunately everyone pretty much kept to themselves and only stopped to knock if they saw a problem. It was our neighbor in West Yellowstone who told us that their hot water heater overflowed when it got too hot, like ours was doing, and that was probably the problem. Ah, we could at last stop worrying about that one! At least, the explanation made sense to us and when we started using the hot water as soon as it was ready, we had fewer issues. Apparently having a full and very hot hot water tank causing the pressure to relieve itself.

We browsed the used RV sales online when we had good signal at West Yellowstone. We could pick up a similar model to this one for $26,000, give or take a thousand or so. I’ll bet we can find some on craigslist for cheaper than that. Yep, I think we will do this again—probably in about five years so the kids get big enough to go for some hikes and maybe do the whitewater rafting thing. And they can sleep in their OWN beds. Yep, that would be ideal. I think I’m going to be setting up the RV savings fund on ING when we get home—and that’s a good thing. Yes, we like to go RVing.