Christopher Hodapp - RVs & Campers For Dummies

RVers love all these slower, scenic routes, and they talk about them a lot. Unlike Route 66, most of them are still commissioned U.S. highways, and they make for great trips. You can follow the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail or the Great River Road, steering the course of the Mississippi River through ten states. There are apps for both trips and websites of people who’ve done it.

Here are just a few of the major old U.S. highways, apart from Route 66 and Route 40, that you’ll also hear about around the campfire:

U.S. 30 and U.S. 20: These roads run parallel to one another, and both are parallel to I-90, running across the northern United States from east to west. They still call U.S. 30 the Lincoln Highway, and it still runs from New Jersey to Oregon, while U.S. 20, the longest highway in America, is still the old Yellowstone Trail. Both are famed for their incredible scenery.

Highway 101, the King’s Highway, or old El Camino Real: The great north–south West Coast highway. It’s famed for its remarkable scenic drives and hairpin mountain curves. It runs from Los Angeles to Mount Olympus in Washington State. The Pacific Coast Highway, also incredibly popular for RVs, is a state road, California State Route 1.

U.S. 1: The major north–south East Coast highway is the old Atlantic Highway, running from the Canadian border to Key West in Florida, through just about every major East Coast town.

Dixie Overland Highway: Not to be confused with the Dixie Highway, the Overland runs east–west. It’s the old auto route between Savannah, Georgia, and California, across the South. Much of it is the old Route 80, a haven, like Route 66, for nostalgia, Southern-style, with some very pretty towns.

There are scenic highway websites, like the very good www.myscenicdrives.com . But in the planning stage of any trip, you just can’t beat the National Geographic Guide to Scenic Highways and Byways (National Geographic). Every region of the country is here, all 50 states, with 300 suggested drives on the old U.S. routes, as well as the state and county roads. Each drive offers a few brief but detailed paragraphs on the condition of the roads, sights to see, even suggested times of year, and the majority of them can be easily done in a day.

Every RVer should try to make a trip to Elkhart, Indiana. It’s like going on a pilgrimage. If you own an RV, your whole rig, or at least a lot of what’s inside of it, was likely built in Elkhart. More than 80 percent of the RVs in the United States are made in this part of northern Indiana, so the opportunities for factory tours are a major draw. But for a town of 50,000 people, Elkhart has a lot of attractions and museums; the Wellfield Botanic Garden, the Museum of American Art, the New York Central Railroad Museum, historic homes like the Ruthmere mansion, even the Hall of Heroes Superhero Museum.

But one of the best things to do in Elkhart is to visit the RV/MH Hall of Fame ( www.rvmhhalloffame.org ). This museum dedicated to RVs and mobile homes is beautifully laid out, with interior exhibits parked along a curving road. People started renovating cars into RVs about a week after they were invented, and you’ll get to see things from this early period, like the 1915 Model T Ford with a “Telescoping Apartment” custom addition. Other exhibits include a 1913 Earl Travel Trailer, movie star Mae West’s personal motorhome while working at Paramount Pictures, a gem of a 1974 GMC motorhome from when General Motors briefly entered the RV business, and a 1958 Wally Byam prototype mini Airstream trailer. If you love RVs, you’ll have a blast! It might even inspire you to modify your own rig.

Chapter 2

IN THIS CHAPTER

Learning the ABCs of motorhomes

Surveying the crowded landscape of towable trailers

Piggybacking on your pickup with truck campers

Any RV is like a small vacation home that happens to have wheels and a license plate. Like vacation homes, RVs can be as simple as a tent, as cozy as a cabin, or as spacious as a penthouse suite. But unlike a house, you can pack up and move it to a different location when you get bored with the surroundings, irritated with your neighbors, or numbed by the weather. Try that with a timeshare condo.

The term recreational vehicle (RV) is an all-purpose tote bag crammed full of types of vehicles to choose from. (Arguably, a bike is a recreational vehicle, but we won’t get into semantics.) The RV world has its own vocabulary that can baffle a beginner. But all the different types of RVs and campers can be divided into three basic categories:

Travel trailers or towables: These don’t have their own engines, so you have to pull them behind something else, called a tow vehicle.

Motorhomes or coaches: These are self-contained, drivable RVs with built-in engines. No tow vehicle is required.

Truck campers (sometimes called truck caps or camper shells): These actually have to ride piggyback on another vehicle — usually a pickup truck.

You can find all kinds of variations within these categories, more every day it seems, but these are the basics you’ll encounter when the love of your life suddenly elbows you at 7 a.m. on a Saturday and says, “Let’s go to the RV show!”

The type of RV or camper you ultimately pick will depend on how you plan to use it — your needs and wants. But you can’t (or at least shouldn’t ) make that decision without knowing what’s available. So, that’s what we cover in this chapter. If you don’t have an RV or camper yet but you’re looking to get one, this is the chapter for you!

You’ve seen them on the highway: giant motorhomes the length of a Greyhound bus with a sparkling paint job, the driver sitting up high in a big, comfy, padded chair behind a giant picture-window windshield. These are the Class As, and the moniker is easy to remember. But this is only one classification of motorhome. Motorhomes actually come in all kinds of sizes and configurations.

Motorhomes (sometimes called motor coaches ) are extremely popular, partly because you don’t need a separate vehicle to tow them with. The simplest way to think of a motorhome is an engine and transmission mounted on a chassis, with a complete trailer plopped on top. Motorhomes can be powered by gasoline or diesel engines, and both engine types have their cheerleaders and detractors (see the nearby sidebar). (Some manufacturers are working on electric coaches, but they’re in the infant phase of development.)

Motorhome manufacturers don’t actually build the engines for their vehicles, and few build the steel chassis they sit on. Instead, they buy parts from established consumer truck builders like Ford, Chevrolet/GMC, RAM, and Mercedes. Parts for larger and diesel units come from the makers of commercial trucks and buses, like Cummins, Freightliner, and Spartan.