The short, sweet life of our motor home . . .
Much as we share and agree on, there are a few topics which have caused,
shall we say, disharmony, in the past, until management's point of view
prevailed.
One was our motor home, which we bought on credit early in 1998 and
sold at a substantial cost three or four years later.
Management christened it "Edgar," after the butler in the
Disney film "The Aristocats" who tried to poison his
mistress's pussy cats. Not an auspicious origin for the name, and Edgar's role
in the household was less than auspicious.
But let us start at the beginning.
Here is the RV during our first trip in it in around April 1998 up into the
mountains to Truckee. Our old Mazda is behind, still attached, after being towed
from home in Santa Cruz during a late season storm.
Beautiful snow, warm late-season skiing, and eight of us, including a
three-month old baby, sleeping in the motorhome!
Okay, so you women are starting to see the germ of a problem!
Not papa. he was thrilled with his new toy, and
parked it in a trailer park called Trailer Villa near Palo Alto when his long
hours of work at Wilson Sonsini made an hour's
commute each way almost impossible. It was the internet bubble period and in
Silicon Valley's largest high-tech law firm, eighteen hour days were the norm.
Of course, his law firm colleagues did not exactly understand this arrangement,
although it did give them something to laugh about!
Well, we did not see any problem with Edgar, at least not at first. And it wasn't that much of one, at first.
The opinions of stuffy people have rarely preoccupied us.
There were beds for seven of the family, and Alex slept in his baby bed. The dinette in
the photo below right turned into a short but double wide bed for two of the children,
and the sofabed was a queen for three. The slide, visible from the outside in
the photo on the right and from the inside in the next, created a real sense of
space inside, even with us all in there.
The children
loved Edgar. Even before they figured out that they could watch TV or play video
games in the rear bedroom on long drives, they loved it.
But it was a love affair that was doomed. The beginning of the end came
during a trip to Yosemite about two years later. We
were cruising East while Marie-Hélène was preparing a
baby bottle for Alex, which spilled as we went over a bump. She was furious, a
feeling which was not improved when Ian suggested that she could have asked him
to stop before making the bottle! Her coffee ended up half on Ian and half all
over the floor and seat of the motor home. "It was warm," she says describing the
coffee when we recount this little family tale to our friends, "not hot!"
There were a few fabulous trips, notably one on the Coast Highway (California
Highway 1) up from Disneyland and Los Angeles when we
parked just above the ocean below Hearst Castle and the children went rock
scrambling before breakfast. But the trips were too few and too far between.
After a period of reflection, to permit us to realize that it had to be done, we
sold Edgar over the internet.
There had been a kind of premonition that motorhome life was not going to
work out.
Edgar was typically parked at the bottom of the driveway at home, where there
was plenty of space although the trees overhead created problems in keeping
it clean. Which is nothing like the problem the trees caused when one of
their number was no longer overhead! The photo to the left shows the sorry
result of a Bay that fell during a storm. We had only owned the RV for
less than a year when that tree fell.
We still have great vacations, of course,
including the occasional great road trip, great
skiing, great trips to the likes of
Vancouver BC, New York
or Florida, but some of us still miss Edgar a teeny
bit! Maybe some day . . .
