Home sweet motor home

Breakfast of champions, breakfast of crew

Actually, when it comes right down to it, RVs are not all that comfortable. To be fair to RV afficianados, I will say that my previous RV experience is rather limited and also that my current RV experience comes in an already challenging environment. The thing is, I'd rather just sit in a moving vehicle and ride to wherever I'm going. I guess I'm odd that way, but all this holding on for dear life is starting to get a little irritating. Last night, I opened the refrigerator and a can of Coke dropped on my toe. Doesn't sound like much of an injury, but that hurt. My body now has numerous dings and bruises that I'm not sure were here a week ago.

Please hear, however, that no one is complaining.

There are some circumstances that make this RV experience both unique and especially challenging. Our refrigerator is absolutely stocked with liquids in small bottles or cans - Ensure, Gatorade, bottled water, Coke - and that combined with the neccesity of all of our starts and stops for exchanges makes opening the door a unique opportunity for self-defense. When the vehicle is moving, the situation is, of course, exacerbated.

Our RAAM RV is pretty much divided into two sections - the racers' quarters in the back and the crew space in the front. Richard and Charlie have pretty much exclusive domain over the bedroom, bathroom and shower. Crew, of course, drives, navigates, cooks, cleans and sleeps on the forward couches/beds.

It's difficult enough for Richard, who is 6-8, to even stand up straight in the bedroom - in fact, he can't. When he comes in, he usually sits down on the bed to drink his Ensure or to eat. If he stands, he has to contort himself in odd ways just to drink from a bottle. I don't even want to know how he makes the RV shower work.

Richard's feet don't exactly fit the bed

Charlie, at his size, has no trouble at all fitting into the RV shower. But that doesn't mean he especially likes using it - particularly when the vehicle is moving. After a harrowing experience, he asked the RV staff to wait until he's taken his shower before moving the vechicle. That wouldn 't affect our race results after all, because when Charlie's in the shower, Richard's on the bike. So that's our new rule - the vehicle doesn't move until the racer is in and out of the shower and comfortably getting massage.

"I could just see it, a DNF (did not finish) by my name and the reason listed as being 'RV shower injury,'" Charlie said. "Seemed best to avoid that."

Good call, I say.

I have no inherent prejudice against RVs; I just don't think they're all they're cracked up to be. It's one thing to think of the concept of a rolling living room but it doesn't actually translate to reality all that well. Unless you have everything in the place bungee'd down, you will be picking up stuff off the floors, things that slid around or fell out of the cabinet, anything that wasn't nailed to another surface.

I'm not even going to get into that whole dump station/fill up thing. Let's just leave that alone, shall we?

From here on out, though, the one thing that I will always love about RVs is that they are an essential element in the RAAM process. That right there, in my estimation, is enough to make them very special machines.

So I guess I actually love RVs. Under certain circumstances.