Big Rigs

My wife is a member of quite a few Facebook groups related to travel and she tells me about things people discuss sometimes. Typically she tells me the sort of stories that make us both shake our heads, like the person from Britain who wanted some advice on getting RV to travel the U.S. and was told it would be simply impossible without a massive rig with twenty slide outs and every conceivable gadget. Obviously, as our lives show, not the case.

Normally I wouldn’t care, but since there’s a chorus of people out there arguing that you need a huge rig, I’m going to add my dissenting voice so the other side of the argument gets some air time. So here it goes:

Getting too big of a rig is possibly the biggest mistake you can make when setting out to live this way.

The problem with big RVs is that — aside from weighing you down with a ton of crap you don’t need, offering up more places to leak water[1] and more things to break — they limit where you can go. I can count on one hand the number of campgrounds we’ve stayed in that could accommodate a rig over 35 feet. If you go big, you’re restricting yourself to RV parks and Walmart parking lots.

We’re 27 feet long bumper to bumper and honestly I wish we were bit smaller so we could get into some places that we can’t (for example I know we can’t do the main road into San Miguel De Allende because we’re a foot too long and I also know we can’t drive the road into Natural Bridges, among others).

Then there’s the part where these rigs cost about 200K, which is enough to travel the world like we do for about eight years. And then there’s the part where, once you drive that 200K RV off the lot it’s suddenly worth 100K. But of course no one actually owns their RVs. I already know we’re anomalous in the fact that we like to own things rather than rent them from a bank.

[1]: All RVs leak water. Even brand new ones sitting on the dealer’s lot. People who say their RVs don’t leak water just haven’t yet discovered where their RVs are leaking.