Having finally slain my valiant foe, Dry Heat, after eleven years of full time RVing in the western states, I found that life had became a hopeless abyss of misery and despair. Well OK, that's being a little melodramatic. But I like the melodrama of travel.
In all seriousness there was a void. Recently I was in a Carnegie library in Salida, CO, and found a small room allocated just to financial reference materials like Morningstar and Value Line. The room was so tasteful that it seemed like a humble, yet decent, temple of finance undefiled by the temple prostitutes of Wall Street.
I've never imagined stock charts as topography: peaks and valleys, or slow descents into financial oblivion. This could be the great opportunity of an early retiree's career. Play it wrong and he could eventually decline into one of those old guys who lives in a van and hides from the rangers in the ponderosas of northern Arizona in the summer and migrates to the Slabs in the winter.
I think retired full time RVers underestimate how difficult the next twenty years are going to be, primarily because of inflation. We lapsed into complacency because the years from 1983 to 2003 were in our favor, when low inflation, cheap gasoline and easy credit turned RVs (pickups, houses, etc.) into the behemoths that they are.
If I was a newbee RVer I would resent seeing high fuel costs hamper my "RV Dream" like it was a dragging brake. But since I had already decided that running all over the North American continent didn't really interest me, limiting myself to the American Southwest was acceptable.
But if I have to worry about each time I step out to the van with the keys, I too will start to resent it. RVs are supposed to be our freedom machines, not tiny prison cells like this old mining shack in Leadville.
And so we have a new dragon to slay. After a lot of web surfing it seemed hopeless to find a lighter trailer and fuel-sipping van or truck that could pull it. Finally I got excited about a four cylinder pickup, with a low first gear, and traction-control as standard equipment. The trailer would need to weigh less than 3000 pounds.
Finally the experience of an RV friend brought me to fiberglass RVs like a 16 or 17 foot Scamp and Casita. It might work...
