RV Driving is an Attention Getter

We weren’t desperate for gas, but we had reached the half tank point and I had decided that would be the time to refuel. When you have a 50 gallon tank and use a single gallon for every 9 miles, the sticker shock at the pump is a lot less for 25 gallons vs. 40 gallons. I pulled into a local gas station that had room enough to maneuver the RV in and out of the parking lot.  I had to pay inside, the pump wasn’t reading my card. I went in and the first words the young guy at the counter said was, how do you drive that thing?

Our RV is not especially large, just yesterday two families pulled into the campground we are staying at, they were both pulling 40 foot RV trailer homes behind a flat bed truck. 40 foot long and pivots at the truck bed. I have no desire to deal with that, but my 31 foot RV built on top of a Ford Econoliner chassis provides us with plenty of living space, and it really is quite driveable.

A few neighbors and friends took a tour of the RV while it was parked in our driveway and they often asked the same question the young man at the gas station asked. The truth is, driving a truck is hard work. Sure, the steering is power assist and the transmission is an automatic, but we don’t have a tow car and all you gotta do is keep it steady. But the main thing, I find, is to be diligent. It’s wonderful sitting up high looking out across the highways and the back roads too, the view as we move from one type of geography to another can be breathtaking. And often enough the highway is clear, and I just pop it into cruise control and let the truck roll and shift gears, while I can lower my alert level one notch (out of 9), and soak in the ride. Other times it is nerve racking, as cars enter the 70 MPH speed limit highway and forget to accelerate. Usually I cruise those roads at 65 MPH, see gas consumption above for the reason, but every 10 or 15 miles those speed up / slow down decisions come up.

Then there is the big, I mean really big, trucks. And if you get scared driving next to them in a car, just imagine rolling at only a couple of MPH faster or slower and neither of you have a whole lot of room to spare when you pass, as I hold my breath and Keep that damn wheel as straight as humanly possible.

Finally, there are the driving challenges and I will only relate two of them so far on this trip. The first one occurred somewhere around a town named Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  I have actually been to the town numerous times, and traveled on the nearby highways. So, it came as no surprise when we got near Carlisle and the truck population on the highway suddenly, from seemingly nowhere, grew exponentially in a matter of moments. We were also looking for a place to eat, but I was in the left lane of only two open lanes due to heavy construction on the highway. My objective was to take the next exit that had signs for food, but I was encased in a left lane line of trucks each one 1 1/2 times as big as my puny 31 foot RV with the same moving barrier on my right. The lines of trucks infrequently punctuated by cars barely visible went on for as far forward as I could see. Suddenly, a space opened up on my right, I flipped on my right turn signal, and jumped in. Which is nearly impossible in a truck, at least not like you can jump a lane in any decent sedan. We took the next exit and ate at the Route 11 Diner. Don’t make the same mistake we did, eat at Subway or one of the other fast food chains, trust me.

Then, just a few days ago, we were following the Garmin RV GPS directions to a campsite called Hungry Mother, and they differed from the directions given to us by the American Automobile Association (AAA). So, inevitably with two conflicting directions we ended up going right when we should have gone straight.  In other words we ended up zig zagging, when we should have been just driving along further before zig zagging up and down a mountain. This route we took by mistake literally zigged then zagged up and then down an entire mountain. We realized our mistake early on, but the lanes were so narrow and there was no pull offs large enough and big enough to safely turn around in. When we reached the bottom, we could finally turn around and do it all over again, but somehow the road in the reverse direction was even steeper. That took an hour and a half of 100% attention driving. And once we got on the right route to the campground, there was another zig zagging up and down a mountain to get there. We spoke to a couple of people staying at the campground about what happened, and they both told us, that the only way one would even think of driving that road was with an RV smaller than ours and certainly not with a trailer.