I woke just after dawn. Laying in the comfortable queen bed, I smelled the salt air and I listened as the wind buffeted us and rain splattered on the overhead. Faintly a harbor bell clanged. Several spaces down a diesel "grummmed" into life and settled into a slow idle, warming up for the day ahead.
Florence, Oregon! How many nights have I spent at this marina? As a boy in the 50's and 60's my dad had kept a variety of fishing boats here, and in 1964, I worked a summer as the Master Baiter on a salmon charter boat based here. I moved far away in 1966 but managed to swing through every couple years and visit. And while it has changed, like all our coast towns going from a small family fishing boat economy to a tourist economy, there's still some of the "Old Florence" left, like this marina, even though today it is almost empty of boats....
But this spring day in the year 2001 we are not in a boat! No, Gail and our old dog Teddy, and I are in a "Recreational Vehicle", an RV, specifically, a new 2000 Pastime 8' 8" "pickup camper." It has a "fore & aft" queen bed extending over the cab of our diesel Dodge pickup. It has a tiny bathroom, a galley, a furnace, pressure hot water, an indoor and outdoor shower. It has a stereo and a telephone jack. There's screens on the windows, an awning rolled on the side, lawn chairs tied to the back, two bikes hooked to the roof ladder, and a platform attached to the truck's front receiver hitch where I carry an old Honda motorbike. It's amazing. A friend when he saw it sneeringly said it looked like a "Bayliner" boat, which, to a wood sailboat man, is like saying your mother sleeps under the porch and bites the mailman. But that's alright. If you had told me years ago I'd be sitting in this camper at this marina instead of in a salmon troller I would have just laughed. If you told me just 5 years ago that for the next two winters we would cruise over 6,000 miles in pickup campers, finally buying a brand new one and a Cummins Dodge pickup, I would have thought you were hallucinating. And if you had told me 3 years ago that July 2001 we would take delivery on a brand new 26' KOMFORT 5th wheel, with 12' slide, 16' awning, A/C, TV, telephone, micro-wave, bathtub, CD/am/fm/weather channel sound system, ceiling fan, floor ducted furnace, and even a freaking recliner chair, and in that luxurious beast we'd cruise 7,000 miles in two winters, well, I would have called the Men In White Coats with their butterfly nets to come collect you before you harmed yourself....
But back to what I was saying. When this book idea came to us we were in the camper, "docked" in a small RV park at the old marina. Waking up aboard my dad's boat 35 years ago to diesels idling would have signaled a new day of salmon fishing. It was very odd being in the same place, 35 years later, but experiencing it in such a different way; the morning wake ups of diesel and gas engines idling signally not another day of fishing, but rather, another day of folks, all ages and backgrounds, from all over the country, disconnecting shore power and water, rolling up awnings, walking the dog; getting ready for another leisurely day of "land yachting," cruising on land....
I call it "Land Yachting" because it is JUST like cruising in boats used to be until maybe the early 1970s. Until then, people in boats could cruise pretty much anywhere they wanted, and few of them were rich. There weren't to many doing it, and those who were, found they were welcome anywhere. Guest docks were common, and inexpensive. You could anchor practically anywhere you pleased. And everybody was friendly.
It's a different world now! Real Estate prices have soared and the resulting property taxes have closed many of the small casually run marinas or forced them into remodeling and charging accordingly. The collapse of sports fishing, thanks to corporate trawlers scraping the bottom clean and "Native American" nets corralling anything that swims up the river, didn't help either and has driven out of business many of the little marinas that catered to the sports fishing crowd.
Too many waterfront home owners get annoyed seeing a boat anchor for free in "their" cove, and resulting legislation has drastically cut down that freedom.
Just keeping a boat is expensive; city marina moorage rates have made it hard for a middle income family to even park a boat, and smaller boats in many cities can be bought for peanuts because the people who would like them, can't afford to pay the monthly moorage for them.
This of course has effected boat prices. When inexpensive mooring disappears, so do inexpensive boats. Even trailer boats are effected since now days many neighborhoods have "covenants" forbidding parking a boat in your driveway. New boat prices are unbelievable when compared to what you can do in the RV world. I rarely buy new, and NEVER pay retail, but, for the sake of conversation lets take new numbers.
A 2008 Cummins diesel 4 x 4 Dodge depending on options costs about 35K to 50K. A 26' trailer is the biggest we suggest you look at because that will fit into any state park slip yet is big enough to be very comfortable. KOMFORT is a good quality production builder, and a new 26' KOMFORT 5th wheel is 27K, or between about 62K to 77K plus taxes for the both. This isn't chump change, but that same amount is just the down payment on a new powerboat big enough to spend any time on. Figure 360 to 420K "base price" (dock lines, anchor, etc. are extra) for a new 40' production built powerboat with the features the 26' 5th wheel has, not counting the several hundred a month to dock the damned thing.
If you've been involved with boating for some time you might, at the risk of me sounding rather pompous for a moment, be familiar with my name. I've been an active yacht designer since the mid 1970s. I've written several books about boats, numerous boat magazine articles, a brochure telling how to use a sextant. I've built several boats and lived aboard several boats. I sailed an engineless sailboat from San Francisco into Mexico and over to Hawaii and I've sailed on sailboats or putted in powerboats on many bays and seas around the world. Sitting in our yard now is a 3/4 finished 50' wood schooner, a craft that 20 years ago was my all time fantasy but now, sadly, just sits unfinished. So for me to get so involved in RV stuff that I would want to write a book about it is almost a joke! I say almost, because I'm hooked. This cruising on land is great. Thousands and thousands of folks are doing it and it's so big it is not only a sub-culture, but there's subcultures within it!
How did this happen?
We live in western Washington State; the Pacific NW. I've been many places so I'm saying this with some perspective, I ain't seen anywhere as pleasant as the Pacific NW in the summer. In the summer the sun starts showing at 4:30 AM and it doesn't get dark until almost 11 PM. Up here in Washington there's no bugs to speak of, little humidity, no poison oak, poisonous snakes, or killer bees. There's mountains and still a few huge trees left and once you leave the few cities there are eagles, bears, cougars, fish; you can drive miles and miles and still be in the country. There aren't to many people yet.
But winters up here are another matter; while they are mild they are absolutely miserable. Here on the west side of the Cascades they aren't really cold; it rarely snows, infrequently freezes. Many winters I never even wear a heavy coat. But I hate winter here; it is an oppressive and depressing time. It doesn't get light until 7:30 and then it's dark by 4:30. It rains or at least drizzles all the time so the predominate color is gray. We own a cabin over on the coast and last year there was 102" inches of rain. That's over eight and a half FEET.
But at least that is honest rain. Here on Whidbey Island, near Seattle, where we live, there is normally only 3' of rain. But it comes as drizzle. Steady drizzle. Eight months solid and sometimes summer doesn't even come for the drizzle. Everything is damp and moldy here in the NW in the winter including sometimes even your spirits.
For some years we fought this by flying off on vacations. We'd go to Mexico or southern California or even southern Europe. One year we went to Baja and almost bought a house, stopping only because I didn't feel old enough to buy a place there and then be committed to going just there every year. There's to many places to see!
And that's how we got into RVs. Gail was set on the Mexican house so, like the way many husbands handle situations they really don't want to follow through, I got sneaky. I didn't immediately say I didn't want one or say flat "NO." "No" doesn't work on Gail; she'll do it if she wants to. Instead, I suggested since we didn't see anything that was exactly what we wanted, let's buy a trailer, tow it down, buy property and park the trailer on it, and BUILD a house. I described a walled property with a small building for bedrooms and bathrooms, with the rest of the living area outside; typical Latin American digs because of the warm climate, and very pleasant. I described pleasant times shopping for local tiles and furniture, and in the afternoons meandering down to the town center for a cold beer.
She went for it.
So we started looking for a trailer. Since we didn't know a damned thing about RVs we didn't know what we were looking at. It was 6 years later which translates to one trailer, two campers, and a 5th wheel, that we realized the first rig we saw was perfect and way under priced. We didn't buy it and it sold the day after we saw it. But that's the way it goes. We were to new to it to understand what we needed and THAT is an important point for you to think about. Before you spend thousands or go into serious hock, get some experience so you know what you want. Buy a second hand late model version or an older one with ALL SYSTEMS WORKING, something that looks like what you THINK you want, and try it. If you find you don't like it you can sell it a year later and not loose to much money, and, it might actually really be what you want! But either way, if you do that, now you'll have some practical experience to call upon when shopping for what you DO want! Or of course, like some couples, you could discover that traveling in a small space gets to you and you'll decide you can't handle long term RV stuff. That doesn't mean you still can't do it. But your choice of "rig" will be something ideally suited and outfitted for weekends and short hops.
We ended up buying a 15 year old 24 footer that was only $2500; it needed "a little work" but I didn't mind that. I've fixed up enough old boats and cars that the trailer didn't seem a big thing. The fact that the hippie girl who had been living in it had painted the interior burgundy didn't stop me; I'd repaint it. The fact that the floor was a bit bouncy (due to rot) didn't bother me; I could fix that. I sure wish I'd had them demo the systems aboard because the furnace didn't work, the batteries were shot, and I didn't know how to work the holding tanks.
What we ended up with was a 2500 dollar piece of junk that we spent weeks cleaning and fixing and painting. We bought a new furnace. We put down new carpets. Thankfully before we bought new batteries, re-upholstered it, installed an awning, had the brakes and bearings gone over, and mounted new tires, I realized it was to heavy to easily tow so resold it for $2500, loosing around 1,000 bucks and an awful lot of time on the deal. BUT, it was worth it all because we learned a great deal from it, the bottom line being I'm not going to fix up some old beater again! The exception, and I hope somebody comes up and kicks me in the behind if I actually do it, would be if I wanted to restore something "cute" like an antique Air Stream or a sheep herder's pickup camper. OK, that sort of thing at least can be rationalized. But buying a 15 or 20 year old broken down rig is a mistake; for little more than it will cost you buying something like our first trailer, you can find one that has been cared for and everything works. You might want to re-upholster it, maybe the carpets are ugly. But don't look at anything that isn't all "there" and working. You'll save a lot of time and probably money too!

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The recession has slowed things but if you think about it, RVs make even more sense today for family recreation and vacations. Airstream is one of the most expensive out there and they don't have "tilt outs", but they have a "cult status so sell well!