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They're widows, widowers, divorced, and they live their lives on the road, nomads in RVs. For companionship, but not romance, they have each other.
By LEONORA LaPETER
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 12, 2002
AVON PARK -- Sandy Underwood moves her motor home slowly along the blacktop at the RV resort, keeping her eye on a woman on a red bike in front of her.
"Follow the bicycle, I think that's what they said," she says, her arms hugging the steering wheel of her Roadtrek 190, which looks like a large van.
The cyclist stops and turns her head. Underwood points her left fingers right and her right fingers left. Where should she turn in? The woman points right, and Underwood backs her motor home into Lot 233. "It still feels like a semi to me," she says, laughing.
Underwood, 65, has driven hundreds of miles from Tennessee for this. At the Adelaide Shores RV Resort in Avon Park, she gets to meet other people like her: nomads in RVs who are divorced or widowed. Singles who live their lives on the road.
"These are my peers and friends," says Underwood, who divorced in 1973 and has been on the road in her motor home for three years. "This is my support group, basically."
They call themselves Loners on Wheels, and they meet at campgrounds around the country for fellowship and good times. The club was created 33 years ago by a California woman who was tired of being the only single traveler among couples.
"Where singles mingle," the group's Web site says.
Florida has five chapters that hold campouts once a month. Several times a year, there are larger regional gatherings like this one, the Southeast Citrus Rally. About 150 single travelers have gathered for the five-day event in Avon Park this past week to line dance, play shuffleboard, attend auctions and seminars, hold costume parades, wear their clothes inside-out, watch comedians and magicians, and get together for happy hour.
Most of them are in their 50s, 60s and 70s, people who have lost their spouse or are divorced and want to keep their wandering lifestyle.
People like Diane Marion, 61, of Syracuse, N.Y., who lost her husband in February to skin cancer. They had traveled in their motor home, and she didn't want to give it up. She went to her first Loners on Wheels campout in New York a few months ago. The Avon Park gathering was her second.
"But (a motor home is) a big responsibility at first for a woman," she says, adding that it's tough to ask for help from married men at campgrounds because often their wives view her as a threat. "There's a lot of mechanics, generators and switches and mirrors to adapt, and engines. It's very complicated."
David Wooton, 65, of Lakeland spent five years taking care of his wife before she died of cancer in March. He had enjoyed camping with her before she got sick, so he started going to campouts several months ago.
"It's been a therapy thing for me," he says. "It's getting back involved with people. Years ago, I wasn't involved with people because I was married. Well, you find yourself in a totally different situation. I don't want to sit home and watch the grass grow."
"Anyone know where my glasses are?" asks Penny Grover, 63, turning toward three people dressed as clowns in her spacious, comfortable 30-foot motor home.
Grover is dressed in a knee-length clown dress with ruffles and polka dots. Her nose is painted red. The rest of her face is covered in white paint, a small silver heart etched on one cheek with small, clear plastic dots.
She finds her glasses and puts them on, then retrieves a Raggedy Ann-style red wig from a closet and places it on her coiffed blond curls.
"You look so good with that wig on," says Larry Wiggins, a Canadian and fellow single who's dressed in a shirt with rainbow patches, a black hat, a rainbow wig and a plastic red nose. He bends and kisses her hand.
"Oh, you are so sweet," she says, clearly loving it.
She smiles, and the four hop down the steps of her motor home and head to the clubhouse to conduct an opening ceremony in a circus theme for dozens of other singles gathered for the start of the five-day Loner event.
Yes, this is a place where a man in a motor home can hook up with a woman in a motor home.
But Grover, who lost her fourth husband to cancer 10 years ago, insists that's not what the group is about. She says it's about people with a common interest -- traveling the country -- getting together for friendship.
"Those who (travel) don't have to quit if their spouse dies," Grover says. "If you're retired and you have a desire to see the country, there are people you can do it with."
She says that there are always more women than men at these get-togethers. And there are rules about mingling.
Don't get caught in your camper with a member of the opposite sex. It's grounds for dismissal.
"Other singles groups are more lax," Grover says. "We want to inhibit the idea that we're partygoers and sexually promiscuous."
She wears a badge (Loners are big on badges with pithy sayings) that says: "Charter member, N.A.T.O," which stands for "No Action, Talk Only."
"I'll flirt; I'll tease," Grover says. "I don't want to be misunderstood, though."
Loners also are big on hugs.
"We always hug when we get together," says Herb Bates, 65, who travels in a Greyhound bus converted into a motor home. "We're hug-deprived. Most people are not especially interested in hugging a bunch of singles, so we make up for it. We hug each other."
You're also out of the club if you meet your match. Organizers say it's not a dating or matchmaking service. If you get married, you become alumni and can come back to one event a year. If a couple that is not married comes together, they must have separate rigs.
That's how Ed Ingve, a 73-year-old widower from Chicago, found himself with a motel room down the street from the RV resort. He traveled to the Avon Park event with his companion, Jean Carpenter, 72, a widow from Miami. But the pair cannot share their 34-foot Gulfstream Scenic Cruiser at night. Ingve has to sleep at the motel.
And a woman who's there with another man is sleeping on the couch in Carpenter and Ingve's motor home. Carpenter and Ingve, who met six years ago at a Loners on Wheels rally in Michigan, are willing to put up with the inconvenience because they like hanging out with singles.
"We have been with other married people, but we find it kind of boring," says Carpenter, lowering her voice and putting a hand around her mouth. "We just don't want to be part of that. We enjoy this. We go dancing, and he dances with the women, and I dance with the men. We're not joined at the hip. It's just more fun."
Which brings up another rule.
"You're not supposed to dance with one woman again until you've danced with every other woman there," says C.L. Wilson, a member of the Loners on Wheels national board in Deming, N.M. "But that one tends to get overlooked. Still, any organization has to have rules, and there are a lot more women than men in the organization. So it keeps from getting one person monopolized."
Members of the group say it is rare for couples to get together, and many members aren't interested in finding a spouse. Grover, who has been married four times, says she will never marry again. "Been there, done that," she says.
"I'm a committed single," says Charlotte Kane, 68, who travels in her motor home full time ("Home is where you park it"). "I've been divorced longer than most people have been married. When I first divorced in 1969, I had seven kids, and nobody wants to marry you when you have seven kids. By the time they were all gone, I liked the single lifestyle too much."
Couples who do get together find each other but lose everyone else. Some join family RV clubs. Others come back once a year to an event such as this one. Two alumni married couples were at the Avon Park event.
Tom Alton, 63, a retired Ford Motor Co. supervisor, says he joined Loners on Wheels in 1999 because he weas lonely after the death of his wife. He met his current wife, Barbara, through the singles group, but now that they're married, they can't go to as many gatherings. He says he misses his friends from the club.
"We like to see our friends," Alton says. "They're like family once you get to know each other. We've tried to get a group going with people who are married from this group, but there are only three couples that we know of."
Underwood doesn't think she'll ever get married again.
"Am I here to meet a fella? No, I just like being single and independent," she says. "I've been independent so long, I don't know how to be half anymore."
She has adapted to her small motor home and goes about hooking it up to the campground electricity with the quiet confidence of someone who has been doing this for a while.
She has a fridge and a stove, a microwave and a small TV. She has a toilet on one side that can become private if she pulls a door across the van and closes the curtains on the back windows. She sleeps in the back in a space that is 5 feet 7, just right for her.
If she wanted, she could hook up a shower curtain and take a shower right in the middle of her motor home -- between the toilet and the stove -- and let the water seep down a drain in the middle.
But it's easier to wash up at campgrounds. She keeps her hair short and no-frills, wears simple shirts, shorts and sneakers, and doesn't fuss much with makeup.
She was a recording officer for a housing finance corporation in Anchorage, Alaska, when she decided to sell her furniture and townhome and buy the $35,000 motor home three years ago.
"A lot of people can't leave their stuff," she says. "They can travel, but they can't leave their stuff."
She's trying to figure out where she'll go next. She spent her last two winters in Texas and says that a lot of singles are at a park down there.
After the Avon Park gathering, she'll head to a friend's yard in St. Cloud for the rest of November. After that, she's not sure where she'll go.
She pins her name tag to her blue flowered shirt and heads up to the clubhouse with a can of peas for a hobo stew that will feature a can of vegetables from every Loner.
Underwood enters the clubhouse. "Is that Mo?" she says to no one in particular. A head turns, and a short woman with curly brown hair comes toward her, all smiles.
"Hi."
"Hi, how are you?"
"It was about a year ago in Texas, right?"
"Yeah, I think so."
For information about Loners on Wheels, click on www.lonersonwheels.com or call Trena Manville at (813) 971-5233.