Box Canyon Blogger reprimanded me for my amateurish and emotional accounting: he thought I should stop obsessing over $4 gasoline since it doesn't really amount to that much at the end of a year. Indeed, it's easy to overemphasize gasoline prices because of their high visibility.
The beauty of being a full time RVer, in a traditional land yacht, is that a retiree can kiss off the burdens of being a stick-and-brick houseowner; not just the financial burdens, but the domination of your ever-dwindling time by repairs, maintenance, remodeling, and buying excessive crap that you don't need just because you have space to put it. (Not that you'll ever be able to actually find that crap when you need it.)
There is something even worse about house-slavery if you believe that true Evil is a banal and insidious thing: in a house you settle into soul-numbing routines centered around comfort, cleaning, and other trivia. One day leads comfortably to the next and you don't remember any of them at the end of the year. (By the way, how many non-doctor-dominated years do you still have?)
Ironically most RVers reproduce the comfort-obsessed lifestyle when they begin their so-called "alternative lifestyle." They wrestle with "practical" tips on their forums, ad nauseum. Somebody should ask them, "What if you finally succeeded at making your RV as comfortable as a house? Won't it just be one more expensive bore in your life?"
The small-house-sized RV is a pretty sizable expense. They do wear out, you know. If you have the bucks to replace one, "Te Salud, Don Corleone." Replacing a rig doesn't get talked about very much in the RV literature because of demographic reasons: by the time a rig wears out for a conventional retiree, their health problems have forced them off the road anyway.
In addition to being over-rated, comfort is expensive. Since everybody has a different budget so there's no point of going into details about that. What might be of general interest are the aspects of camping and travel that really add something special to life, in contrast to hum-drum, bourgeois, comfort-worship.
The beauty of being a full time RVer, in a traditional land yacht, is that a retiree can kiss off the burdens of being a stick-and-brick houseowner; not just the financial burdens, but the domination of your ever-dwindling time by repairs, maintenance, remodeling, and buying excessive crap that you don't need just because you have space to put it. (Not that you'll ever be able to actually find that crap when you need it.)
There is something even worse about house-slavery if you believe that true Evil is a banal and insidious thing: in a house you settle into soul-numbing routines centered around comfort, cleaning, and other trivia. One day leads comfortably to the next and you don't remember any of them at the end of the year. (By the way, how many non-doctor-dominated years do you still have?)
Ironically most RVers reproduce the comfort-obsessed lifestyle when they begin their so-called "alternative lifestyle." They wrestle with "practical" tips on their forums, ad nauseum. Somebody should ask them, "What if you finally succeeded at making your RV as comfortable as a house? Won't it just be one more expensive bore in your life?"
The small-house-sized RV is a pretty sizable expense. They do wear out, you know. If you have the bucks to replace one, "Te Salud, Don Corleone." Replacing a rig doesn't get talked about very much in the RV literature because of demographic reasons: by the time a rig wears out for a conventional retiree, their health problems have forced them off the road anyway.
In addition to being over-rated, comfort is expensive. Since everybody has a different budget so there's no point of going into details about that. What might be of general interest are the aspects of camping and travel that really add something special to life, in contrast to hum-drum, bourgeois, comfort-worship.
Comments
That's the beauty of RV travel... TIME! When gas goes up, you slow down. Even better!
And now, since we've "seen the USA," we're content to roam the Four Corner states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado; a microcosm of America's most beautiful and remote places all within a long day's drive. And you can boondock for free if you want/need to.
I do reserve the right to return to the great northwest once in a while tho... I really loved the way July and August treated us there.
I believe a very modest house and an RV is the way to go. It's nice to "belong" to a community and "come home" from the road and spread out a little. This might not apply to single RV'ers as much tho.
Be careful with those straw-man comparisons: 'it wasn't as much as...'
Using that line of reasoning, a dieter should expect to lose weight eating a dish of ice cream every night, since that is less than...