It’s all I can do to laugh and enjoy the morning, just easing into my work day as Olivia has gone off to shower and Tristan is scheming up whether he’ll ride his bike and then play with GI Joes, or play with GI Joes and then ride his bike. And where will the snacks come in? I can imagine him pondering it all as intently as a stock junkie looks over rice commodities.

It seems that they’ve sprung a leak. They’re trying to put in a dump station — a dedicated area where RVers who don’t have full hookup access to sewage pipes can stop and unload their human waste — and they’ve sprung a leak. Actually, it’s the third time they’ve accidentally sent their shovels and pick axes into an underground pipe and struck it rich, water geysering up from the dry dirt like a fool springing out of the king’s court after a good show.

They’re not the only ones in trouble on this hot and windy January morning. It seems our tire, the front right one to be exact, has seen it’s final days, and as I sit outside to sip my tea and call my loving mom back in Pennsylvania, I see her sagging heavily, an old fat tortoise no longer fit for sea, dead in the sand.

It’s not that we haven’t seen it coming. She had herself a slow leak, we’d lose about 10 psi a week, if you can call that slow. A few phone calls to our insurance company, Geico, and the local tire repair shop, Oasis Tire in Alpine, Texas, and we find out that the inside of the tire has a complexion resembling Edward Scissorhands dear, sweet face. So it’s a new tire for us, and within a few hours Jorge from Oasis Tire has actually come to us, replaced the tire and back home in time for his afternoon smoke break.

Leaks will spring, let’s just be happy you can replace a tire, or patch a water pipe.

I would love to come out and just dispell this as complete myth, however, I can’t. Like most things in life, there are pluses and minuses to living in a home sweet recreational vehicle. Having less space is both a burden at times as well as a blessing, more often. I thought I’d share a few tidbits about what it’s like to live this way for anyone who might be considering it, or is perhaps simply curious.

Is There Really Enough Space?

This was one of our biggest concerns going into this lifestyle. On one hand (my own), I wanted a vehicle that was realistic to drive and wouldn’t increase my current rate of hair loss trying to squeeze it between parked cars in city streets. Olivia, on the other hand, was very concerned that we’d have enough space to exist.

When Olivia first joined Tristan and I in the States, we all moved into a small apartment and it was very close quarters. Though we had three rooms, and the place was three times the size of our RV, we were constantly on top of one another, and it was at times incredibly aggravating for all of us. We were on the top floor of a three story complex and Tristan was too young to just go outside and play on his own. In the RV, however, we’re all basically living in one room, but we’ve learned that having instant access to the outdoors is a necessity for not feeling hemmed in. If one of us feels like the other two are getting to be too much, it’s just a few steps out the door to all of the space we could use.

Let’s also look at a few facts about American lifestyles. The average US family these days is made up of 2.6 people. The average house is 2300 square feet. That’s 885 square feet per person. We have about 40 square feet each, yet we’re much happier than when we were living in the afore mentioned small apartment and I suspect the answer has something to do with the fact that we are forced to spend more time together and so we become accustomed to one another, used to being in each other’s company. That and, again, our ability to simple step away from it all and get outside in a moment.

Well, At Least You Don’t Have to Clean as Much

That’s a great point, though one thing to consider with living in a small space is that there are less “cleaning days” and more just keeping picked up after yourself. It’s very important for us that we put the stuff that we use away immediately after we use it, because what might be a small pile of clutter in your living room is a large obstruction when your home is a hallway. In that way, it’s likely teaching Tristan a good lesson about how to keep cleaned up after himself as well, and a thing or two about preventing procrastination.

Using the Bathroom Though, Is there Any Privacy?

This is one of the big boys, the major things that you’ll realize changes about your life. Long gone are the days of sitting around on the toilet creating a toxic hotbox while you catch up on the latest issue of Victoria Secret. Taking long hot showers and just letting the water wash your hangover away are left to the corners of my mind dedicated to memory.

As the eldest and stinkiest male in the house, I can testify that, unless you’re a bachelor or your companions suffer from anosmia (“blindness” of the nose), you’d be cruel to use the open toilet in your RV when others are around. So get used to the idea of dropping your bombs in grotty RV campground toilets and, if you want a hot shower that lasts for more than 10 minutes, get yourself a pair of rubber flip flops and get used to the idea of strange and moldy shower curtains. Cleanliness is for the rich, anyway, long live Pigpen.

Do You Have Enough Cupboard Space? Or Do You Go Out to Eat More Often?

When we lived in our last apartment we would go out for lunch or dinner at least once a day, so my perspective here is a little skewed, but we definitely eat out less often now than we did in our sedentary lifestyle. At first I thought this was due to the pleasure of cooking over an open fire, nothing makes a vegetarian’s food more worthwhile than slow cooking it yourself over an open flame. But since we’ve been in Austin, with half a dozen restaurants on our block and no fire pit in our lot space, we still eat at home for nearly every meal. Again, since Tristan doesn’t go off to school every day and I don’t in turn go off to work at the local coffee shop as much, we spend a lot more time together. We eat all three meals together nearly every day, and it’s one of the best parts about this whole RVing lifestyle. I suspect that’s a large reason why we haven’t been going out to eat as much. (Also, someone mentioned we’re in some type of recession, or so I think I may have heard once or twice on the radio.)

As for storing our food, there is actually plenty of space to do so right in the RV. The biggest difference is that instead of going to the grocery store and stocking up once a week, we do smaller shops every few days. I suspect this is better for us anyway, as it allows us to keep fresh ingredients in the house rather than packing our cupboards full of boxed and frozen goods.

What About Private Time for the Lovers on Board?

Luckily Tristan is either young enough to not catch on to our adultly antics or wise enough to never mention that he’s caught on to what’s happening when a man loves a woman, but for the most part, just like I’d mentioned above, if one portion of our family needs a little space, the other portion can easily acquiesce by simply stepping outside and getting a few laps around the park in on his bike.

All in all, I think it’s more about the personality of a family as to whether or not they would be comfortable living in a smaller space. The very nature of having a home built around mobility makes it difficult to get board with your surroundings. Tired of looking down into the Grand Canyon? Move your house into the Sequoia National Forest.

I think a few personality traits that might make it easy for you to enjoy this type of lifestyle would be that you aren’t all that concerned with owning things, that you’d rather have experiences than possessions, and that you can be comfortable finding your “alone time” outside of your home. Pack rats and those obsessed with filling their homes with antiques and lavishness might want to give it a test run before diving in. After all, if you’re an Olympic swimmer, sitting in a tub might not exactly be your thing.

Now on to the story.

On July 28th, 2008 we were leaving Pittsburgh to begin our adventure across America, when we made it no more than 15 miles out of town only to have our transmission catch fire. I managed to get the fire out and called Geico, because we had roadside assistance with them. I didn’t think for one minute that a problem with our transmission would be covered by our auto insurance, however I did know that they would have to tow us as part of the roadside assistance. Which they did, even though they towed the RV to an autobody shop rather than a mechanic’s garage. The other thing that the Geico representatives, who were not only very easy to get in touch with but were also very polite and always returned my calls (in the beginning), did was to tell me that:

1. Damage caused by the fire would quite likely be covered by our policy.
2. We were entitled to $1000 in spending money for things like hotels, car rentals and food while our RV, our home, was in the shop.

The setback was great, but those two pieces of information were a little piece of solace. So Olivia and I spent the next few days in hotels, frustrated by the delay to our plans but happy at least in the knowledge that everything was being taken care of on Geico’s end, and that soon we would be back on the road.

Two days passed, then three, and still the local claims adjuster still hadn’t gone to look at our RV, each day saying she would and then each day not actually going. It took her five days to look at our RV. We had been staying in hotels, the cheapest we could find in the area, for those five days. Finally, she calls me back and tells me that the damage is not going to be covered. Additionally, she tells me that the portion of our $1000 of spending money that we’d used thus far also wouldn’t be covered.

My jaw dropped to the floor. The $1000 was initially a bonus to us, we weren’t expecting it nor did we ask for it, Geico told us we were entitled to it. I complained, and a few hours later someone from Geico called back to tell us that they would cover whatever amount we’d spent up until that point, but that no more money would be able to be used. Additionally, the autobody shop that they initially towed it to couldn’t, suprise surprise, work on the engine. So we had to arrange for the thing to be towed to a garage some 30 miles away.

The RV’s transmission was fixed, on our dime, but in the end Geico owed us $660 for the initial towing and another $440 for the second tow, as they were responsible for this. They also owed us $540 for the portion of the $1000 we’d spent. Even though Geico had arranged the original towing, they wouldn’t pay us our $660 until we faxed them a copy of the receipt. In my mind, they could have easily taken care of this themselves, having arranged the towing. Then we ran circles trying to find out who we were supposed to send the receipts for the $540 to, and again with the $440. Today is September 16th, 51 days after the initial problem, and I still haven’t received the final check for the $440. A week ago I called Geico and told them I hadn’t received the check, and they assured me it was in the mail. Today I called back, and a very nice woman sympathized with me, stated that it hadn’t been mailed, and that she was placing it in the mail tomorrow.

All in all, the vast majority of people at Geico are very nice, and everything they said they would take care of they did, short of actually fixing the transmission, which I can understand because it wasn’t an accident, but a mechanical failure. It bothered me at first that they said it would be covered, and then retracted that, but I chalk it up to poor communication on everyone’s part and perhaps some less-than-well trained phone reps.

And to be fair, Geico has paid us $1200 with another $440 on the way for a policy that only cost us $69 for that month, so they have lived up to their part in that regard. It’s just unfortunate that if we hadn’t hounded them every day for several weeks, they wouldn’t have paid anything, and that they took so long to get an adjuster out to look at our RV, knowing full and well that we lived in the thing.

Update: Only a few hours after I posted this, a man named Tom from Geico’s RV division called me and formally apologized on Geico’s behalf for any and all problems we’ve faced. He even said that the Vice President of the RV division had read this post and was reviewing our case. I found this to be very cool on the part of Geico, and also an indication that they’re constantly monitoring the Web for information on their services, so they are trying to improve their customer relations. Great job, Geico!

Fitting, I suppose, that the thing gives us more trouble as we roll back into Pittsburgh. We’re taking it to the garage who fixed the transmission in the first place, so hopefully everything will be resolved today.

In the meantime, it’s another jaunt through the streets of our beloved hometown.

The scariest part is the fires are spontaneous, often occurring when the ignition switch is off and the key removed! This is because Ford designed the cruise control switch to remain on or “hot” at all times. When a crack develops in the film separating the brake fluid from the electrical circuit, the leak will cause a fire. This could have happened while we were sleeping and Tristan would have been right above the engine! I feel so lucky it happened on the very first day and that Nathan got the fire out in time before we lost everything. And that we have RV insurance… wow we’d be screwed without it. We were lucky on so many levels, most of all that we didn’t die in an explosion. RVing as it turns out is rife with danger and sex appeal.

Who knows how many days we’ll be staying in hotels waiting for the repair work to be done. In the mean time all our stuff inside the RV is at risk while it stays in the repair shop. For obvious reasons we had to hand over the keys. Back when we were looking at RV options I wanted to have a truck and 5th wheel for this exact reason, (and because it makes shopping in cities a whole lot easier, especially for full-time RVers) but we simply couldn’t afford this option. So hopefully once the engine is fixed we won’t have any more problems… hopefully.

The RV suddenly began having difficulty shifting, and then I noticed smoke coming out of the engine. I pulled over to the closest spot I could, turned the vehicle off and opened the hood. A group of men working across the street began yelling, “You’ve got a fire under there!”

For a split second I thought this was construction worker lingo for the engine smoking, but quickly looked underneath the RV to see flames billowing up and out from underneath. I screamed for Olivia to get out of the car and rushed to the side door to grab the fire extinguisher. Luckily I was able to put put the fire without any Hollywood style explosions prevailing.

However, before even leaving our hometown, we’re now stranded alongside Interstate 376 and at the mercy of our local towing industry.

Craigslist

This is my preferred stop as Craigslist is free to both post classified ads as well as view and respond to them, so theoretically you’ll get the largest selection. Depending on where you live, you might have access to only a few Craigslist sites or a few dozen, as Craigslist has expanded over recent years from only including major cities to smaller cities like Johnstown, PA or Fargo, ND. A few tips on searching Craigslist:

• Every Craigslist site’s homepage has a list of links on the righthand side of the page for all of the states and many popular US and Canadian cities. Click on the name of a state to see all of the cities in that state which Craiglist serves. You can start with the one closest to you, but we’ve found that having about a 300 – 500 mile radius of cities is much more realistic if you want to find some selection.
• Every city has an “RV” section, but these not only include motorhomes and trailers, they also contain everything from ATVs to boats to personal aircraft. I’ve even seen a hovercraft listed. To help narrow down your selection, so that you don’t have to wade through every old dirtbike for sale, use the min/max fields at the top to put in a wide range for your budget. For example, I use a value of $9000 for the minimum field and $25,000 for the maximum field, though our actual budget is around $18,000. This narrows down your choices and makes the list more manageable, while giving you some room on either side of your wallet to play with.
• When searching through multiple different cities, it can be a pain to click the RV link and then type in your min/max values again. If you know the name of the cities you want to look through, you can simply use this URL and replace the “morgantown” bit with whatever the name of your city is:
  
  http://morgantown.craigslist.org/search/rvs?query=&minAsk=9000&maxAsk=25000
  
  Keep in mind though that not every city simply has their name listed in the URL, some cities (like Johnstown, PA and Altoona, PA) only take on a nearby cities name.

Also, remember that you want to actually go and look at any RV before you up and buy it just from an ad on the Internet.

Large Online RV Databases

RVzen, RV Trader Online and RVT are two examples. These sites list both RVs being sold by individuals as well as those being sold by dealers, and they often have a huge variety and plenty of pictures to go around. On the other hand, the RVs are often much more expensive than they would be if you were buying from an individual (as is the case with Craigslist, typically) and sometimes they don’t list the price at all, which is annoying and fishy in my mind. Plenty of options to sort by price, make/model or even class make these sites typically very easy to use, but I’ve also found that while their inventory is huge, many times they’re not kept up to date and so you’ll contact a lot of people who’ve already sold their RV weeks ago.

Local Dealer Websites

These sites are almost always incredibly bad. They typically look like they were built in the 90′s by a high school kid, rarely have an up-to-date inventory to display, and sometimes they just don’t work at all. However, the good part about them is that since they’re local, if you get an idea of the quality and price of the RVs they’re selling, you could theoretically take a drive out and check out the inventory for yourself. This could give you a chance to see multiple units in one place and even talk to a dealer who will likely know more than an individual selling their old RV. All of that said, however, I have yet to find even one of these sites that produced a single interesting RV.

Other Resources

What I’ve mentioned above is primarily for finding RVs online. Keep in mind that you could also turn to your local newspaper’s classifieds (though since newspapers charge to print classifieds, you’ll often get less results than Craigslist, however many people, especially older ones, don’t even realize Craigslist exists and therefore still go with the old print methods). Keep an eye out as you drive around your own city or hometown as well, as many people will sell their RVs the old fashioned way, by sticking a for sale sign on it and letting it sit in their driveway. There are also Penny Saver-style magazines that you can pick up for a couple of bucks at your local gas station, however most of these do have websites so it’s kind of redundant to pay cash for something you can’t search through when they already have a more powerful, online resource.

Table of Resources to Help you Find an RV with Pros and Cons

We already knew that Olivia and I would require our own room, and the larger Class C’s will provide that private space for the two of us to retreat to, together or seperately, when we needed some space, but a 6 year old boy needs his own room, too. There aren’t many RVs that come with two bedrooms and even those that do are about $200,000 out of our price range. The bed above the cab, however, is the perfect size for a young boy – room to sleep and, in many cases, there is some storage up there as well. So he can have his bed and his toys, clothes, etc. all in one space that is clearly defined as his own.

Here’s a little chart displaying some of the pros and cons of the three types of RVs (Class A, Class B, Class C, and Fifth Wheel) that we had ever even considered.

This will largely be the focus of our little website over the next couple of months as we go through the process from planning to purchase.

So What Do We Want?

Of course we’d spent time discussing what it was each of us wanted out of an RV over the past few months, but we hadn’t actually formalized anything, so I proposed that we both come up with a list of the features we feel would be most important to the two of us. Hence the following:

Nathan’s List

• An RV that has a bed over the cab, so that Tristan has a dedicated space for his “room.” I think this is important so that he has a place he can call his own, and so that we don’t need to take down the kitchen table or pull out a couch just so that he can get to bed. There will be times when we’ll want to be able to sit up and work or play later than he’s going to be up, and we won’t be able to do that if his space is another space as well.
• Something manageable for me to drive, preferably Class C.

Olivia’s List

• A full-size refrigerator.  Big enough to hold the majority of our foodstuffs, which are fresh. This will help us especially as we wont be able to grocery shop easily and will double up as extra kitchen storage space.
• Plenty of cupboard space to check we have space for all these essentials:
  • Tristan’s clothes. Bulky.
  • Tristans school books and supplies
  • Tristan’s toys. Bulky.
  • Linen and towels. Keeping this down to the linen we have on our beds with no extra’s, though an extra blanket or two, and two towels, 10 facecloths, 2 dish cloths.
  • Pots and pans. Very bulky. I was thinking of getting a light stainless steel pan instead of the heavy cast iron one we currently have.
  • Cleaning supplies / backup toilet paper /econo laundry detergents / for kitchen and bathroom Very bulky – possibly will take up all the storage space under one small sink.
  • Bathroom supplies cupboard
  • Cupboard for my clothes
  • Additional space for my socks, etc.
  • Cupboard for your clothes
  • Preferably a side table each to hold personal belongings
  • Storage for our printer, cables, printer paper and other supplies
  • My crafts bag

As you can see, my list was quite a bit shorter — I was picturing it more as a “must-have’s” — but after reading through Olivia’s list it started to make sense that we should come up with a master list of everything that we’d need, in order to make certain we were realistically looking at enough space to keep us alive and in business for an entire year. We’ve lived in a small apartment before and it had its fair share of problems with small spaces. I’m personally hoping that, with all of America as our backyard, the RV won’t seem quite as small.

This was also a big point of contention between Olivia and myself: she was most concerned that we have all of the room we need while my largest worry was that I was going to end up driving around a small town on wheels. Hopefully we can find something that meets both needs.