Travel: Learning by lumbering: a primer for RV travel

[Photo: courtesy of Sam Bleecker]

RVs set up at Connecticut’s Hammonasset Beach State Park, a short walk from the shoreline of Long Island Sound. Camaraderie among the legions of RVers compensate for a certain decrease in privacy.

MILLINGTON, N.J. -- After five moves in 20 years, our friends are hardly surprised when, for our summertime getaway, we announce we are carrying a house along with us.

Specifically, a motor home about the size of a Greyhound bus that has more moving parts than a lunar module and an operator's manual as thick as the Manhattan telephone directory. Did we mention it gets 9 miles to the gallon?

It's not a permanent move, just two weeks in a commodious 32-foot Winnebago. It's our first RV vacation, which will take us north from New Jersey along the crenellated coastline of Connecticut and Rhode Island to Cape Cod, Mass.

Phyllis Landow, Arline Bleecker and Paul Landow, left to right, roast marshmallows in front of the Bleeckers’ 32-foot rented Winnebago at a setup in Connecticut’s Highland Orchard Campground.

[Photos: courtesy of Sam Bleecker]

The Winnebago becomes, by turns, our cottage by the sea and our cabin in the woods, and ultimately it proves so alluring that we're planning to buy one. At first, though, our jaunt feels mostly hapless, as if Lucy and Desi's Long, Long Trailer meets Chevy Chase's Vacation movies.

While provisioning and outfitting the rig for all contingencies, we learn our first lesson: It helps to have the organizational capability of the General Accounting Office.

Prepping an RV isn't like unpacking at a hotel. It entails setting up house from scratch, particularly if you plan to eat most meals in it. Also, between campsites, we have to batten down for the road, then set up anew.

Before we get that routine down pat, our oversights result in a few broken dishes and, on one occasion, gathered rainwater sloshing through the windows, which we forgot to close before rolling up the exterior awning.

Because cramming our belongings into an RV depends on available space, it isn't long before most of our sentences begin with "Where's," as in "Where's the sugar?" and "Where's the flyswatter?" (With no hooks to hang the latter on, it's stored in the shower stall.)

Our checklist for departures eventually grows to include so many steps, we feel like pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit of a Boeing 737: TV antenna down, steps up, windows closed and sliders in. (Sliders are clever gizmos that extend the sides of the RV to add width and living space.)

Early on, the sound of "craaaack" alerts us thereafter to unhook the slideouts' tethers before extending them. Ultimately, we tack up so many yellow Post-It notes as reminders, the inside of the RV takes on the hue of an egg yolk.

Once on the road, we learn Lesson 2: We are not a car. We're a vehicle the size of a semi, tooling east across the traffic-choked George Washington Bridge out of Manhattan.

For drivers more accustomed to maneuvering a midsize Mazda, a bus takes some getting used to. We love the bird's-eye view we have over other vehicles (especially SUVs) but empathize with those 7-foot teens who self-consciously stoop to minimize their size.

We're not exempt from clumsiness, either, as a "thump" tells us we've knocked the passenger-side mirror -- a protruding contraption about the size of a bread box -- flat against the RV. Unable to stop on the highway to fix it, it falls to the co-pilot to dangle out the window to jiggle it back into place as we barrel along at 65 mph.

On smaller roads, steamrolling past pedestrians, we grasp the ghastly possibility that the mirror could decapitate an unsuspecting 6-footer.

Size brings home Lesson 3: Set your sights high -- literally. On Route 1, a sign at an approaching overpass reads: Maximum height: 11 feet 6 inches. Our RV is 11 feet 11 inches. Fortunately, we notice it in time and make the first of many U-turns.

By now, we feel like a pachyderm in a china shop. We forgo spontaneous stops at quaint roadside shops, keeping an eye out instead for parking lots and gas stations big enough to accommodate us. It's a whole new way to look at an otherwise familiar world.

We pull into our first RV campground with the relief of astronauts making it to the moon. Hammonasset Beach State Park, a vast Connecticut tract tucked between the shoreline and a nature reserve, is a festival of fiberglass: clusters of motor homes, trailers, popups and fifth wheels, even tents.

At 32 feet long -- and now fully extended to 14 feet wide -- we feel like Godzilla of the RV park, surpassed only by 40-footers that, boasting fireplaces and marble bathrooms, resemble Trump Tower on a truck.

Initially, our cheek-by-jowl location raises privacy issues. But we also get a sense of instant neighborhood. We're all here for the same reasons: a bit of God's little acre, a starlit sky and camaraderie, which we find in abundance.

RVers are never too busy to be helpful, sharing tips to neophytes eager to learn. Devout RVers put up wind chimes and set out potted herbs in the sun. Our neighbors Henry and Linda Griswold (no relation to Chevy Chase's Vacation family) set up a birdbath that draws a gazillion grackles at dawn and dusk.

In a scene repeated at every site we visit, we share sunset cocktails, fresh-picked produce from someone's garden and a spot around nightly fires, which, coupled with strings of flickering lantern lights, illuminate evenings with an incandescent glow.

In the lexicon of RVing, Hammonasset has no hookups, which means we rely on generator power for the comforts of home but also taste the paradox of heading to a wilderness carrying all the comforts of home with us.

Which introduces Lesson 5: Mornings Become Electric. Our Winnebago is totally self-sufficient. But having to crank up the generator to make a pot of coffee or to wash is the equivalent of taking a 747 to pick up your mail.

Mornings in the park virtually hum as generator-driven RVs essentially turn into 20,000-pound coffeemakers. The conservationists in us blush.

It takes three days before we rustle up the courage to try the RV's three-burner stove top, though more because we're afraid the propane tank might explode.

Which brings us to Lesson 6: Read the manual. It might have helped us avoid the sudden shock of running out of hot water. With a hot-water tank that holds 6 gallons, two of us cannot shower without the water turning cold.

RV terminology also includes "pull-through" sites versus "back-in" sites, a seemingly innocuous difference until you encounter the latter as opposed to the former.

At Wawaloam Campground in Rhode Island, the navigator's attempt to guide the driver into our heavily wooded back-in site results in getting us wedged between two trees on the site opposite ours and almost ripping off the rig's huge muffler. (For what to do when you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, ask a veteran RVer to back it in for you, as we had to.)

Lesson 7: Bring your own wheels. Lacking foresight, we've hauled nothing extra for mobility -- not a car or bikes or scooters or even inline skates. Forgot milk? Forgo it. You don't spend 30 minutes breaking camp just to drive to the grocery store.

Luckily, friends and relatives were eager to visit us at several stops, including Brewster on Cape Cod and in Mystic, Conn. At one campsite, we even rent a car from Enterprise, which delivers one to our doorstep.

Courtesy of these bailouts, we turn into tourists, taking in quaint art galleries in Wellfleet and delicious deep-fried clams and saltwater taffy in 35 varieties at Onset Beach, where we also discover the Thermometer Museum, a quirky repository of 4,056 of the gadgets.

We sample Mystic pizza and gamble at Foxwood's casino. And we make a pilgrimage to Plymouth, Mass., to see how 102 passengers on the Mayflower spent their 66-day trip.

Lesson 8: Life doesn't end at the end of the RV hitch. Even without wheels, each campground has something to commend it, and we amiably trade tires for treks. At Hammonasset on a morning walk at Meigs Point Nature Center, we savor the bay's salt air and spy zillions of tree swallows.

At Gateway to Cape Cod, a campground set deep in the woods in Rochester, Mass., we feel like forest rangers in a cathedral of towering ponderosa pines, so peaceful, so silent that only the sigh of the wind and whispered voices of small gatherings carry in the air.

From Shady Knoll, near the "elbow" of the Cape about halfway to Provincetown, our twice daily mile-long walks to Breakwater Beach yield scenes straight off a Cape Cod postcard: grassy reeds, cedar houses, bobbing boats, sand dunes, rock jetties; even two black labs, like props, scamper along the beach.

In the morning, the setting is awash in the incoming tide; by afternoon it's an open expanse of receding silvery sea, the air filled with gleeful cries of kids and keening gulls. In the low tide, a patient seagull sits on the shallows waiting for fish to pass by, like a patron at a revolving sushi bar.

As the pleasures of RVing sink in, by day four we refer to our rig as "home." What we love best about it is life compacted and simplified, two modern-day nomads attuned to quotidian rhythms.

Our last stop, at Highland Orchards in North Stonington, Conn., gives us a dead-on view of sunsets, skies sometimes like golden honey or turquoise brushed with clouds of pink. We toast marshmallows, silhouetted by the crackling fire, and realize that camp kids had the sweet life right all along.

Learning by lumbering: a primer for RV travel

A 32-foot Winnebago plus first-time RVers equals big lessons, learned quickly. But one couple quickly grasped that it's the little things - good and bad - that add up to a fun trip.