Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Voyage of the Titanic - An Epic RV Adventure

Chapter 1 – Sounded Doable

I remember getting the call, but I don’t remember actually getting it, if you know what I mean. I don’t know if I was at home, work, or on the way to or from work. I know the call came on January 15th, 1997. Not a day that will live in infamy, necessarily, but a date I remember for some reason. I might have gotten the call on the cell phone. We actually had one at the time, the big bulky flip phone with the antennae and the roaming charges. When you were out of the 2 mile service area that rarely worked, you paid a roaming charge. If you used your cell phone a lot, it was like taking on the national debt. Roaming charges were ugly.

“Daddy,” the voice said excitedly, “Tracy and I are finally getting married.” If I was out of the service area when I heard that announcement, it had already cost me $5.50. They’re right about weddings being expensive.

“Well congratulations,” I said. “When is the wedding?”

“June 6th. I’m so excited. We’re going to have it at the canal park, in the gazebo. It’s really beautiful. Flowers everywhere. You have to be there. I want you to give me away.” This call was going to cost me a fortune whether it was inside the service area or not.

I had already technically given her away to my ex-wife about 5 years ago when they moved to Buffalo, New York with her new husband. The second one or third one, I’m not really sure. Actually it was North Tonawanda, New York. Kind of rolls off the tongue doesn’t it, ton-a-wan-da? The new husband was from there originally, I guess, maybe not. I figure it’s an American Indian word for “Suburb of Buffalo.” Like Tucson, where I was living at the time, being an Indian word for “The spring at the bottom of Black Mountain.” But, actually it is. Indian shorthand of sorts, one word replaces eight. Probably have a hand sign that eliminates the word altogether. Bet it utilizes a middle finger.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, “We’ll be there.” How in the hell we were going to accomplish that feat, I wasn’t at all sure.

We were barely, and I stress that word, getting by, paycheck to paycheck, living in a 20-year-old double-wide, in a mobile home park that was a few miles east of the “Corridor of Death”. So named by the local Tucson press to identify the area where the majority of homicides had occurred in the Tucson area in the last few years. This corridor pretty much ran the length of the main drag in South Tucson, an incorporated city by itself, also known as the barrio. We had lived in the area for three years now. The very day we were moving in there was an incident involving firearms. Police were everywhere, and they kept our U-Haul truck from entering the park for several hours while they cleared up the matter. We should have known then. No one was hurt, and they found the suspect hiding under his girlfriend’s trailer we learned later. No one was hurt except me, who had to pay for an extra day on the U-Haul truck in order to finish moving in.

I had to leave town the next day, and left my wife and daughter to fend for themselves without water, electricity, heat, and facing a possible armed conflict in a high crime area. I left them for a week. It was because I had to be in California for training on my new job. I was staying at the Holiday Inn outside of LA and although I had heat, electricity and water, I also had a hotel full of cheerleaders running through the halls screeching, playing in the elevators, and practicing their routines at the pool, in the lobby and any other open space they could find. I was slowly going insane. My wife and daughter, to this day, have not forgiven me for leaving them without utilities in the drab little double-wide though. I, to this day, insist I suffered more. These weren’t Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, or even high school cheerleaders, it was a competition for Pop Warner cheerleaders. Yep, average age of 8.

Did I mention the drive-by shooting at the nearby high school? That changed the face of high schools throughout the city a few years back, and was also one of the homicides chalked up in the “Death Corridor.” It happened at my daughter’s new high school. High schools throughout the city now had fences, razor-wire, and guards. It was said that our prisons looked like schools and our schools like prisons. They looked at least similar to me. The difference being one was to keep people in and the other was to keep people out. Although, once you were on the high school campuses, getting out wasn’t easy either.

I only tell you all this so you understand the conditions we were living under, and why the idea of purchasing a Class A motor home and driving it across country 5,000 miles might have been a bit insane, even if we could have afforded it.

But that is exactly what Plan A became. We would buy an RV, a used one surely, drive it to Buffalo, NY in four days, go to the wedding, and save all kinds of money by staying in our own “hotel”. We added the Ford Museum, Hannibal, Missouri (boyhood home of Mark Twain), Canada, Niagara Falls, and would hit Washington DC and Graceland on the way back. Sounded doable, at least it did at the time. We immediately began shopping for the motor home.

We had recently owned a “conversion van” of 70s vintage. Those are the Class B motor home classification. They have a raised roof, or a lowered floor, so you can stand in them, a pull out bed, table, a stove, sink and ice box with some limited cabinet storage. We had completely remodeled the inside of this one, and then sold it, at a considerable loss, after the transmission went out. I remember my father, who was visiting when the transmission went out, saying “That’s too bad, it still has good rubber.” I think that goes back to the war days when rubber was a scare commodity and tires that weren’t bald were just as scarce. “Good rubber” became a very important element in this greatest of RV adventures to come.

Transmission failure was the monkey on my back. Every used car I had owned in the last five years had developed transmission problems. I had had two of them rebuilt on two different vehicles and they amazingly cost the same amount: $1,700. I chose not to rebuild the van’s transmission, but I’m sure it would have cost $1,700. I took a road trip with a friend once, and the transmission went out on his car in the middle of the night outside of Stillwater, Oklahoma. The monkey didn’t care if I owned the car or not. The nice old mechanic, that worked all day on a Sunday to rebuild the transmission, charged us $1,700.

The Class B was a Chevy van. Yeah, can’t you almost hear Sammy Johns belting out the chorus about making love in his Chevy Van? Our Chevy van was known as the “Park N Bark” by our friends, because of a local dog grooming business that used an identical vehicle. We called him Bernie. He had a gas-sucking V8, a foot of extension at the back, and a foot and a half of fiberglass roof cap that ran the length of the conversion. We put a swamp cooler in it (not able to afford the preferred AC unit) so we could survive the Arizona summers, the dry heat travels even to the highest elevations, and we had gone camping in it on many occasions. It was the first of a long line of Recreational Vehicles we would own over the years. The Class A motor home was the dream though.

We actually drove a used one on the same consignment lot where we had purchased Bernie. It was great sitting in the armchair driver’s seat and maneuvering the coach the few blocks the dealer let me drive it. It was fully self-contained, had automatic levelers and the coach was in excellent condition with less than 12,000 miles on it. We didn’t have anywhere near the $28,000 asking price, so I reluctantly gave back the keys and told him that, even though it was, it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. That was a year prior to Plan A, but it was where the dream to own a Class A started.

It so happened, that every day on my way to work, I passed a dirt lot with a bunch of motor homes on it that looked every bit like a junk yard. I had always thought it was a place where motor homes went to die and be parted out. But it had a sign out front, “Desert RV”, and there were a few coaches parked under the sign that appeared to be in one piece, possibly running, and for sale. I starting thinking this might be a place to get a bargain on a used coach. They obviously enjoyed a low overhead, and maybe they passed that savings on to the buyer by way of their margins. Here we might be able to get a Class A that we could possibly afford. Well, could at least afford the down payment. I’d seen many an older motor home still running down the road, and I knew that mileage was usually low on these units. People just didn’t get to use them much after they bought them. They ended up parked for months at a time in storage yards, beat to death by the elements so the outsides looked grim but the interiors were often in excellent shape. Even if their past owners were “full-timers”, people that actually lived in them, whether by choice or otherwise, they usually stayed in one place for long periods of time.

So I told my wife about it, and that following Saturday, sometime in March 1997, we drove up to the sales shack, I’m not kidding, on the lot of Desert RV and parked in front. Immediately I noticed that I was right about the junk yard. There were motor home parts and pieces everywhere behind the chain link fence with the razor wire. This was predominantly a place were moving vehicles no longer could be made to move. As soon as we got out of the car, the proverbial car salesman emerged from the shack. He was dressed in yellow plaid pants, a noticeable amount short of the tops of his white, I’m still not kidding, white leather shoes with a matching white leather belt. The wrinkled short-sleeved white shirt clung to his ample frame and looked like he had slept in it for several days, maybe weeks. Dark circles of sweat were visible under his arms and the way he smelled, I was going with weeks. A crumpled and stained yellow tie rounded out the ensemble. He reached out his meaty hand and I reluctantly shook it.

“Well, what can I do for you folks today?”

“We’re looking for a motor home,” I said.

“I see”, he said. “Well we have a few here. How much are you’all thinking of spending?” This is the trap question, the one that drags you in to commitment, the question that limits to a great extent what you are going to be shown. This question has to be answered carefully.

“We’re just looking,” I said. It clearly didn’t please him, but he kept up the cheerful front.

“Well, what do ya want to look at?” He put an emphasis on the word “look”

I had my eye on a Class C that was a step up from a conversion van, but still built on a van chassis. Class Cs have the signature cab-over bed. He opened up the door and we climbed inside. I could tell right away that she didn’t like it. The “she” being my wife.

“What do you think?” I said. “Pretty nice. Lots of room. Looks like it’s in good condition. Look, it only has 75,000 miles on it.” I added that last part pointing at the odometer as though we should really believe what the odometer reading was.

“Has brand new rubber on it,” the salesman said. “Hardly driven a’tall. Look at how good a condition everythin’ is. Looks to most like brand new. And I guarantee everything works, or we’ll make it work ‘fore you take delivery. We stand by what we sell.”


Our salesman’s name was, you’re not going to believe this, Charles Manson. I swear to god. He gave me a business card with “Desert RV, “Charles A. Manson”, the address, and a phone number crossed off on the bottom, and a new number penned in. I wondered if he did it on all the business cards he had or just a few at a time. I could see him sitting at his desk in the shack passing the time by crossing off the phone number on his business cards and writing in the new one.

“I’ll bet you get a lot of comments about your name,” I snickered.

“Not much, why?” he replied.

I let it go. I could hardly wait to tell everyone that Charlie Manson was trying to sell me a motor home.


When Barb stepped inside the 1982, 33 1/2 foot Fleetwood Southwind, with the queen bed in the back, there was no turning back

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