Decisions, decisions .....

The first major decision we tackled after deciding to travel cross country as a family was "What do we drive".  Initially, we were thinking of taking Browny, our 1968 VW bus.  Browny was in the process of a major renovation, and one thing I learned from driving her from SF to Annapolis was that an old VW is a great conversation starter.  My favorite conversation started with

Gas station clerk: "Is that your van?"
Me: "Yes"
Clerk: "I remember when those things were cool".

Thanks for the hospitality Salt Lake City.

The (main) problem with driving a 45 year old car on a 10,000 mile journey is one of time.  And not the "Be happy if you can go 40 mph up the hills" time.  It's the fact that we need to return to our jobs on a specific date. Or so they tell us.

If we could take, essentially, as long as we wanted to make the trip, breakdowns can be part of the adventure.  I've been entertained by several fellow adventurers in old VW's going through great lengths to affect repairs on their vehicle.  Such as bringing a transmission as "carry on luggage" on a flight from Texas to Central America.  But waiting for parts in Topeka for a few days would be a big deal to us.  We have to be home by a certain day, and missing one of the main attractions would certainly dampen the trip.  I can live with the noise, the lack of a/c, and top speed of 65 m.p.h, but having to decide if we skip San Diego or the Grand Canyon so we can get back to our jobs before our vacation time ran out was just not something we want to deal with.

Then there's the sleeping arrangements.  If we decided to camp, there are two options.  Tent on the ground, or tent on the roof.  The bus can sleep 2, but we are 4.  The good news is the bus can park just about anywhere in a National Park, not just in the "RV Camping areas".  But that leads to the third problem, the bathroom.  Women like bathrooms, my wife included.  And she really likes one at 2:00am.  And 4:00am.  And 6:00am.  We've been using a marine port-a-potti for our camping trips, but on a cross-county journey that's going to get old, fast. It tipped over in the bus once when full. It was like a hundred cats using the car as a litter box awful.  This lead us towards an RV.

I thought about pulling a very small trailer called an Eriba Puck. But that didn't help us with the time/breakdown problem.  Although, a bus and a puck together are probably even better conversation starters than a bus alone, we kept looking at other options.  After much debate we landed on a motorhome (as opposed to a trailer).  But we wanted something small. Must have's included a bathroom (see above), room to sleep 4, hot water, and a refrigerator.  The smaller the better.  I sometimes drive a Chevy cargo van at work, and that thing has never failed to punish my body on any drive longer than 30 minutes.  This made me very apprehensive to the class C motorhome path we were headed down.

But luck intervened, and we found the smallest motorhome with a full kitchen and bathroom that's out there.  And, it's a VW to boot! At 21' this Winnebago made RV called the Itasca Sunstar checked all the boxes on our list. Plus, it is built on a VW Eurovan with a 6 cylinder engine, and the gas mileage of 13-14 mpg is going to be appreciated on the long trips. The larger class C's with V-10 engines get 9-10 mpg.  And the deal clincher is we found one in the next town. On it's second owner, it was immaculate.  We couldn't believe our luck and pounced on it!  It literally needed nothing other than gas, so we took our first trip to Assateague National Seashore new year's weekend.  Our first RV experience, and we were hooked.