... must be a lot like travelling with toddlers and staying at low-end motels.
Wife kitteh really wants to get an RV and take month-long road trips. She also loves the Catican Guards and wants to bring them along. I'm not so sure on either count. We rented an RV when we went on our Great Confederate Livermush Adventure to Tennessee and North Carolina. Here are two key drawbacks I noted in that post that are bugging me about buying an RV.
- It's not a VRBO house, it's an RV. It's nice enough, but it's not someone's house. Think one-and-a-half star motel, minus the vermin underfoot and the drug addicts staying in room next door.
- You camp where there are RV campsites. That means you may need to drive 30 minutes out of your way to get to your stop for the night.
RVs are expensive. $100,000 is entry level. Upkeep, fuel and insurance are very high. I think of them as hoglike vehicles with a tiny, poor-quality house glued on top. Ugh. Instead, for $100K, I can buy a late-model Chevy Tahoe and have $60,000 left over for VRBO rentals.
The Tahoe gets two to three times the mileage and the maintenance expenses are far lower, which means that $60,000 is a very low estimate. Let's call it $90,000 over the life of our wanderlust. That works out to 300 nights at $300/night VRBO houses. For $300/night, you can rent a high-end house.
We currently own a 2005 SUV that has become our utility vehicle, hauling dogs and construction materials. If we replace that with the Tahoe, we've got a larger utility vehicle. If we replace it with an RV, we have a toad permanently parked on the street.
Then we get to the question of the dogs. It didn't occur to me until I started gaming out test vacations. The idea was to take a week-long trip in each vehicle, renting them instead of buying them. Paso Robles might be one candidate trip and Utah might be another.
What do you do once you get there? Do you take the dogs wine tasting? Do they go on every hike with you? Bodie is effectively 75-80 years old. He's got severe arthritis. He still loves to go for walks, but he can't go more than a mile. Even after he passes away, the girls can't do 5-milers.
Dogs are like toddlers. We've travelled with tots and concerns for them dictate your choices. That's fine because part of a family vacation is exposing your children to things you love. The dogs couldn't care less. They'd love it if every day was exactly the same. Travelling to new places is stress for them.
Finally, there's the problem of living in San Diego. This place is an island. It's a good 7-hour drive to get anywhere interesting and that's only if you go north. If you go east, it's 22 hours to get to Dixie and that's to Shreveport, LA. Fairhope AL is 28 and Elizabeth City, NC is 40. If we went to Wife Kitteh's homeland - Chicago - that's 30 hours.
Ugh indeed.
Blogging Birds
I took this shot yesterday and rather liked it. If you click on the image, you can clearly see the bird with an open mouth and the looks of annoyance on the other two. Enjoy!
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| "So in my latest blog post, I explored how the Romanovs are just like ..." (Oh no. Here he goes again. This guy is completely nuts!) |
6 comments:
Yes, I think I'm with you on the "RV" versus "vehicle+rental place" approach. I just can't see how you can get around conveniently with an RV. They seem like the sort of thing where you go point-to-point from one RV park to the next, and once you get there you need to find some other means of transportation to explore the area.
We considered renting a camping trailer for our trip across Canada a few years ago, but looking at what we wanted to do versus the restrictions the camper would put on us, we ended up just doing conventional tent-camping, with periodic motel stays to get a night in a real bed from time to time. A couple of the places we camped at were actually predominantly RV parks. We were struck by the way that they had a lot of games and evening activities that were intended to keep people amused in the park as much as possible, because it wasn't really convenient to get from there to anywhere else. I didn't really care for them much, it was basically a case of spending a vacation in a trailer park with a lot of noisy neighbors. It was much nicer in the actual wilderness campgrounds, where you could set up and not necessarily have anyone else's tent be directly visible.
Mrs Ohioan and I had looked into the whole RV thing and abandoned the idea. One of the main reasons was that the City of San Diego made parking it on the street illegal. It was part of the effort to move the transients and people who sleep in their cars to central (and safe) locations. Short version... you can get up to 72 permits per year, each is good for 3 nights and they cost $1/night. See: https://www.sandiego.gov/parking/permits/torvp
First off, now is a terrible time to buy. Demand is still at peak.
Secondly-- I'd look at trailer, when it's a good time.
What's your SUV's towing power?
We got a trailer that swaps for two hotel rooms-- we are Horde-- and were able to ask local drug dog cops to walk through it to make sure it hadn't been...uh... used. It was less than a fifth of what you're looking at.
Storage would still be an issue for you, but it's also an option as a mobile bug-out bag.
Based off of our existing vehicle (for said horde) and the extra fuel cost, and a *nice* camping lot, we were still able to stay near my in-laws for two weeks at the price that a night and a half would've taken from our budget.
there are some freaking *adorable* little campers we saw on things that were basically Neons, too, no idea how they'd work with the dogs, when I looked them up they're beds with a toilet, sink and stove.
Foxie, I need to look into that. The existing SUV is quirky to the point of being on borrowed time. It eats oil and coolant. Fixing those would require an engine hoist. No. The Tahoe would be able to tow anything.
In fact, I was thinking it could tow a boat ... :-)
Tim and Ohioan, thanks for those data points!
You might look at some of those smaller camper-van type things. From the looks, they drive and fit in most car type slots, but have a lot of the amenities of the mobile home behemoths. They sort of fall in between the RV and Tahoe solutions. My sister took one down Chile and was pretty happy with it.
Anon, yeah, the Class B van conversions look reasonable. We clearly need to do some rental experiments.
Hypothesis: The Tahoe and VRBO is the best option for cost and utility.
Hypothesis: The dogs are good for some trips, not good for others.
Hypothesis: Driving to Dixie or Chicago is too much.
I could be wrong on all three. There's only one way to find out!
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