Raven’s RV
The ongoing education and adventures of two rank newbie RVers

It feels utterly pretentious for such a rank newbie as myself to already be using RV slang, i.e. “the rig”, to refer to our vehicle, but that’s what it will be until such a time as a name suggests itself.

Knowing that we would be losing our home sometime in the Fall, we had been looking around for a while without actually doing anything about it. Don had been hooked on a Toyota Dolphin until I pointed out that there was no way he, I and three cats could peacefully coexist in a 19-foot box.

Instead, we’re going to be peacefully coexisting in a 26-foot box.

Though we lived in Sunnyvale, California, our storage shed is in Stockton, where we were paying a third of what we would have in Silicon Valley. We had been living our lives between two cities for almost a year now, and with the imminent move that only intensified. On one of our many trips over we started seeing an RV dealership nestled by the freeway in French Camp, with displayed prices well within our price range. One September afternoon we stopped by to take a look.

Bennett’s RV Sales is an eclectic mix of mostly older rigs, many of which are sold on consignment. They do, however, act as agents for new Carson trailers. The quintessential old-style dealer, we were left alone to poke through the unlocked RVs without the annoyance of sales people.

During that three hour wander we gained an education in what we did and did not like. We’d had some ideas before, but these now coalesced into something more solid. For my part, I was attracted to the Class C rigs with their cab-over beds and in particular those with a separate bedroom in the back. I find the Class A vehicles intimidatingly large, and since I’m fond of lofts in any case, I figured that a rear bedroom would provide easy storage if we slept in the loft.

There is never enough room in an RV, and with a business to run I had a few needs that other people might not consider, such as the need to store shipping envelopes in bulk, and the need to store boxes of my books and other products.

I was depressed that day, I admit it. The looming move was a heavy burden and Don’s relaxed attitude to the likelihood of homelessness gave me no hope that we’d buy an RV before we moved. Still, we were both attracted to an RV by Coachmen, the “Leprechaun.” It had two distinct work areas, a sweet almost turquoise decor, and felt immediately home-like to me. Unfortunately, though, the price tag was some $4000 more than our agreed-upon budget. We sighed and moved on–we thought.

The move came and went, and was every bit as horrible as I had expected. We wandered through motel after motel for over two weeks, sneaking our cats in and out. Eventually we realized that we simply could not live live sanely between two cities a hundred miles apart, especially since we had now added a second storage shed to our growing collection in an appalling reminder of how much junk we had accumulated over the last eight years.

The “where” became easy, then; we were familiar with Lodi, a small pleasant town close to the storage unit, and could stay there until we sorted out our storage shed. Once the decision was made, I felt inexplicably lighter. There were still a few more loose ends to tie up: we closed escrow, I quit my part-time job, we moved the van and both bikes to the storage shed. Then, last Friday, we made a second visit to Bennett’s to check out some RVs from our “look at again” list. Again, the Leprechaun was the only one that made sense to me; it just felt like home.

We met the salesman, Jim, who told us that it had been reduced by–get this–$4000.

Serendipity, anyone?

I wrote a deposit check for $1000 and said we’d come back the following Monday or Tuesday to collect it, since we needed to get a cashier check and the bank was already closed, not to mention the paperwork and smogging that needed to be done.

We went down to the gas station where Jim discovered that he didn’t have the correct key for the gas hatch, so we had to go back again. This time he let us go out on our own. Bolstered no doubt by his recent days of driving a 33′ long U-Haul, Don did great and I was really impressed by how smooth and quiet the ride was. He said that it had a lot more power than he had imagined it would, also.

This is a really neat way to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary (it was two days ago)!

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