Читать книгу RVs & Campers For Dummies - Christopher Hodapp - Страница 11

IN THIS CHAPTER

Becoming an American nomad

Finding your kumpania

Getting your kicks on Route 66

They’ve been known by different names over the last hundred years: campers, caravans, tin cans, trailers, Winnebagos, motorhomes, and RVs. There are teardrops and minis, pop-ups and tagalongs, fifth wheels and toy haulers, and motorhomes as small as vans and as big as buses.

When we were growing up, camper was the word for a shell on a pickup truck, while recreational vehicle (RV) was strictly something with its own engine, like a motorhome, and no single word fit everything you could camp in. Nowadays, both words are used more loosely. We had to pick one, and in this book, we chose to use RV as the best overall term for anything with wheels that you can eat and sleep and have fun in, including motorhomes, trailers, fifth wheels, and truck campers.

So, what sort of people have an RV? People just like you — and almost anybody else. Identifying a cross-section of RVers in order to define some “average” owner is as futile as trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. RVs are owned by campers and glampers, nomads and full-timers, homeschoolers and gig workers, loners and families, retirees and newlyweds, weekend warriors and tailgaters. Super-rich, middle-class, and flat-broke campers park side-by-side in campgrounds every day and then sit around each other’s campfires and share in the fellowship of RV life.

All the other chapters in this book are the how-to’s of RVing, from buying to boondocking to plumbing. But this first chapter is an overview of who’s RVing, why they’re doing it, and what effect it’s having on the culture. Friends and family, even acquaintances, ask us all the time, “What kind of people go RVing?” And, more commonly, “Why would you even consider living full time in an RV?” In this chapter, we try to answer both.

RVing is wrapped up with the romance of the open road. Sooner or later, the majority of RVers you encounter will say that they hit the highway because they wanted to actually see and explore the country around them. So, we talk about how and why those highways came about, why Route 66 is such a big deal to RVers, and why the United States, in particular, really is the land of the RV.