I came across another bloggers website in the RV Net Forum last week which I found interesting because of his take on the gas situation & how to maybe adjust accordingly. It is an encouraging concept in the face of all the gasoline related RV gloom & doom these days.
RV Net Forum......http://www.rv.net/forum/index.cfm
The second article, also found in the RV Net Forum, is by author Garrison Keillor & I'm afraid his predictions for the future are probably correct. Somewhere between these two viewpoints many of us are standing quietly beside the road, waiting in a thick fog of apprehension, wondering which way to go..............
First, the article by, "See Ya Down The Road"
Their Website is....http://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/
The High Price Of Fuel
Recently I have received many questions about the high price of fuel and the questions fall into two categories. 1) Will the price of fuel curtail your travels? 2) I am thinking about going fulltime and now I'm changing my mind because of the price of fuel - what should I do?
First, fulltiming and even part-timing is a lifestyle and not a vacation. If you think traveling in a RV is cheaper than living in a house you are wrong, but RVers can dictate how their money is spent and still enjoy the RV lifestyle.
The best way to save money is to travel slowly and stay in an area long enough to see everything before moving down the road. Drive the RV 100 miles and stay a week, then drive 100 miles and stay another week. In the winter stay in one place in the sunny south three months and during the summer pick a place in the north and stay two months.
Doing the above you will be moving the RV seven months a year and averaging 400 miles during those month for a total of 2,800 miles a year. If your RV gets 8 miles per gallon and fuel costs $5.00 a gallon you will need 350 gallons of fuel during the year and spend $1,750 or an average of $146 a month. Surely you can afford $146 a month for fuel for your RV.
You say driving 400 miles a month is crazy because you want to see this beautiful country. Lets look at one trip. You have just spent the winter in Orlando, Florida and you want to spend two months in Michigan in the summer. Leaving Florida you travel 100 miles a week and tour the states of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan. The trip is 1,227 miles and after your stay in Michigan you decide to spent the winter in Corpus Christi, Texas. So on you trip south you tour Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas. The trip south is 1,567 miles so your RV mileage for the year is 2,794 miles - just under the targeted 2,800 miles per year written above and your RV fuel cost is $146 a month.
The same type of annual trip can be taken from southern California to the Canadian border and back to Arizona or most anywhere in the USA going north and south. Of course you will need fuel for driving to the grocery and sightseeing, but those trips should not cost too much.
Another advantage of staying a week or months in one place is many campgrounds offer a discount for longer stays. We have stayed in campgrounds that have a daily rate of $30, a weekly rate of $175 and a monthly rate of $400.
There are many other ways to save money as you enjoy your RV lifestyle and I will name just a few. Drive slower to save fuel, use discount campgrounds such as Passport America, eat in more than eating out, when you eat in restaurants get the daily specials which are usually good until 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., use coupons (often found on the internet), do some of your own maintenance and repairs, go sightseeing with another couple so four people can ride in one car, and if you have a craft make gifts instead of buying them.
So don't get too concerned about the price of fuel because there is nothing you or I can do about it. But there are many ways to control the cost of fulltiming or part-timing so get out on the road and enjoy this beautiful country and the RVing lifestyle.
Their Website is....http://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/
Recently I have received many questions about the high price of fuel and the questions fall into two categories. 1) Will the price of fuel curtail your travels? 2) I am thinking about going fulltime and now I'm changing my mind because of the price of fuel - what should I do?
First, fulltiming and even part-timing is a lifestyle and not a vacation. If you think traveling in a RV is cheaper than living in a house you are wrong, but RVers can dictate how their money is spent and still enjoy the RV lifestyle.
The best way to save money is to travel slowly and stay in an area long enough to see everything before moving down the road. Drive the RV 100 miles and stay a week, then drive 100 miles and stay another week. In the winter stay in one place in the sunny south three months and during the summer pick a place in the north and stay two months.
Doing the above you will be moving the RV seven months a year and averaging 400 miles during those month for a total of 2,800 miles a year. If your RV gets 8 miles per gallon and fuel costs $5.00 a gallon you will need 350 gallons of fuel during the year and spend $1,750 or an average of $146 a month. Surely you can afford $146 a month for fuel for your RV.
You say driving 400 miles a month is crazy because you want to see this beautiful country. Lets look at one trip. You have just spent the winter in Orlando, Florida and you want to spend two months in Michigan in the summer. Leaving Florida you travel 100 miles a week and tour the states of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan. The trip is 1,227 miles and after your stay in Michigan you decide to spent the winter in Corpus Christi, Texas. So on you trip south you tour Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas. The trip south is 1,567 miles so your RV mileage for the year is 2,794 miles - just under the targeted 2,800 miles per year written above and your RV fuel cost is $146 a month.
The same type of annual trip can be taken from southern California to the Canadian border and back to Arizona or most anywhere in the USA going north and south. Of course you will need fuel for driving to the grocery and sightseeing, but those trips should not cost too much.
Another advantage of staying a week or months in one place is many campgrounds offer a discount for longer stays. We have stayed in campgrounds that have a daily rate of $30, a weekly rate of $175 and a monthly rate of $400.
There are many other ways to save money as you enjoy your RV lifestyle and I will name just a few. Drive slower to save fuel, use discount campgrounds such as Passport America, eat in more than eating out, when you eat in restaurants get the daily specials which are usually good until 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., use coupons (often found on the internet), do some of your own maintenance and repairs, go sightseeing with another couple so four people can ride in one car, and if you have a craft make gifts instead of buying them.
So don't get too concerned about the price of fuel because there is nothing you or I can do about it. But there are many ways to control the cost of fulltiming or part-timing so get out on the road and enjoy this beautiful country and the RVing lifestyle.
Their Website is....http://www.seeya-downtheroad.com/
Eighty-six percent of the American people believe the price of gasoline will climb to five bucks a gallon this year, a big shift in public opinion from a year ago when most people felt that oil prices were spiking high and would soon return to normal—which is 35 cents a gallon, same as a pack of smokes—and we'd be able to head west in our Winnebagos for a nice summer vacation.This does not appear to be in the cards and Winnebago stock has fallen about 50 percent in the past year. If you are selling a big box on a truck chassis for as much as a quarter-million dollars when gas is at $4 and rising, you are aiming at a rather select clientele indeed, folks who might rather buy a beach house in Costa Rica than go cruising the Interstate.Nonetheless it's sad to see the motor home fade into the sunset. I used to despise them when I was a canoeist, of course. You paddle up to a campground at the end of a hard day and see a few RVs parked there, the air conditioners rumbling, the flickering blue light of the TVs in the windows, and as you set up your tent as far from them as possible, you feel a moral grandeur purer than you will ever feel again. A holy Christian pilgrim among the piggish heathen.The fantasy of comfortable vagabondage lies deep within each one of us, though, and once, 30 years ago, driving a GMC motor home around western Minnesota, I fell under the spell. To have the freedom of the road and the comforts of home—your own books on the shelf, your clothes in a drawer, your brand of beer in the fridge—is an aristocratic privilege and I was happy to give up moral grandeur for a couple of weeks and enjoy it.
Five-dollar gasoline is pushing that fantasy to the wall, and it's also showing most of us that we live in communities whose design is based on the assumption of cheap gasoline—big lots with backyard privacy make for a long drive to the grocery store. In the big old-fashioned city neighborhood, if you're bored in the evening you just stroll out the door and there, within five or 10 minutes, are a newsstand, a diner, a movie theater, a palm reader, a tavern with a bartender named Joe, whatever you're looking for.But in the sort of neighborhood most Americans prefer, there are only a lot of houses like yours and residents who give evening pedestrians the hairy eyeball. The mall is a long hike away and it's an amalgam of chain outlets, with a vast parking lot around it. To a person approaching on foot, it feels like an enemy fortress.So we will need to amuse ourselves in new ways. I predict that banjo sales will pick up. The screened porch will come back in style. And the art of storytelling will burgeon along with it. Stories are common currency in life but only to people on foot. Nobody ever told a story to a clerk at a drive-up window, but you can walk up to the lady at the check-out counter and make small talk and she might tell you, as a woman told me the other day as she rang up my groceries, that she had gotten a puppy that day to replace the old dog who had to be put down a month ago, and right there was a little exchange of humanity. Her willingness to tell me that made her real to me. People who aren't real to each other are dangerous to each other. Stories give us the simple empathy that is the basis of the Golden Rule, which is the basis of civilized society.So when gas passes $5 and heads for $8 and $10, we will learn to sit in dim light with our loved ones and talk about hunting and fishing adventures, about war and romance and times of consummate foolishness when we threw caution to the wind and flung ourselves over the Cliffs of Desire and did not land on the Sharp Rocks of Regret.I'll tell you about the motor home trip and how lovely it was, cruising the prairie at night and drinking beer, stopping by a little creek and grilling fish on a Coleman stove, listening to coyotes. The vanishing of the RV only makes your story more interesting. One thing lost, something else gained. Life is like that. Garrison Keillor is a radio host and author.
Five-dollar gasoline is pushing that fantasy to the wall, and it's also showing most of us that we live in communities whose design is based on the assumption of cheap gasoline—big lots with backyard privacy make for a long drive to the grocery store. In the big old-fashioned city neighborhood, if you're bored in the evening you just stroll out the door and there, within five or 10 minutes, are a newsstand, a diner, a movie theater, a palm reader, a tavern with a bartender named Joe, whatever you're looking for.But in the sort of neighborhood most Americans prefer, there are only a lot of houses like yours and residents who give evening pedestrians the hairy eyeball. The mall is a long hike away and it's an amalgam of chain outlets, with a vast parking lot around it. To a person approaching on foot, it feels like an enemy fortress.So we will need to amuse ourselves in new ways. I predict that banjo sales will pick up. The screened porch will come back in style. And the art of storytelling will burgeon along with it. Stories are common currency in life but only to people on foot. Nobody ever told a story to a clerk at a drive-up window, but you can walk up to the lady at the check-out counter and make small talk and she might tell you, as a woman told me the other day as she rang up my groceries, that she had gotten a puppy that day to replace the old dog who had to be put down a month ago, and right there was a little exchange of humanity. Her willingness to tell me that made her real to me. People who aren't real to each other are dangerous to each other. Stories give us the simple empathy that is the basis of the Golden Rule, which is the basis of civilized society.So when gas passes $5 and heads for $8 and $10, we will learn to sit in dim light with our loved ones and talk about hunting and fishing adventures, about war and romance and times of consummate foolishness when we threw caution to the wind and flung ourselves over the Cliffs of Desire and did not land on the Sharp Rocks of Regret.I'll tell you about the motor home trip and how lovely it was, cruising the prairie at night and drinking beer, stopping by a little creek and grilling fish on a Coleman stove, listening to coyotes. The vanishing of the RV only makes your story more interesting. One thing lost, something else gained. Life is like that. Garrison Keillor is a radio host and author.
Thanks for the Garrison Keillor article, I love his writing.
ReplyDeleteIt helps to keep gasoline in historical perspective. The last time fuel costs were as bad as now was back in the bad old 1970's.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of RVs did they have back then? Didn't people still enjoy those RVs even though they weighed half as much as the monstrosities of today?
So, what's the problem? The twenty year inflation in RV size has run its course. We'll adjust by getting back to reasonably-sized rigs.
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