By Chuck Woodbury
PUBLISHER, RVtravel.com
Before we traveled with our RVs, most of us traveled in cars. If you are older than 65, you likely recall long road trips with overnight stays in motels that were actually called motels — not hotels or motor inns or other fancy names.
And what you also remember are those times as you rolled past Burma Shave signs in your Ford Country Sedan that you needed to respond to the call of nature. This was expressed most urgently by little freckled-face Billy, who would wait until his bladder was about to burst before yelling, “I GOTTA GO!” to which Mom would say, “Billy, you will have to wait,” to which Billy would say, “But, Mom, I’ll pee my pants!”
Today such a crisis means locating a McDonald’s, convenience store or maybe a rest area if you happen to be on a road important enough for such a public luxury. But back in the olden days, it meant stopping at the next “service” station.
In the late ’30s the average service station restroom was suitable for only the most germ-defying motorist — no place to “rest” for sure, especially for the dainty ladies. It was a filthy never-never land of bacteria and brake fluid, a home for the motoring brave, but mostly the desperate.
But businessmen, always seeking a competitive edge, wisely figured that if they built a cleaner restroom, the motoring public would come. Phillips 66, for one, went a step further: It hired a brigade of perky, traveling nurses, outfitted them in capes, and sent them adrift in cream-colored Plymouths to sling Lysol from coast to coast. These caped crusaders of cleanliness were dubbed Highway Hostesses. Their goal: “Hospital Clean Restrooms.”
HIGHWAY HOSTESSES would visit each of Phillips’ stations at least once a month. At each stop they would inspect potty rooms as well as provide suggestions about how the station could be more appealing to motorists, especially the “feminine motoring trade.”
On the highway, a hostess would stop to provide assistance when she found a car in trouble. This could range from summoning help to repairing a mechanical defect to rendering first aid. During the summer, a Highway Hostess would carry ice water to refresh thirsty travelers.
These 20th century Florence Nightingales of the road actually performed some heroics. One helped save a child from drowning. Another administered first aid to five members of a Negro baseball team that had rolled its car near Kansas City.
Thankfully, we RVers of today carry our potties with us, so we needn’t mingle with unfamiliar bacteria. This is a very good reason to travel by RV — especially a motorhome where you can simply walk back from the cab to do your thing while Dad or Grandpa tries his best to avoid potholes.
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I’m a compulsive fixer and tweaker, and I will confess to also being a BBQ fan. Not a fanatic — I don’t have a fancy apron or wall full of tools and sauces. But I love that charred, smokey steak or drumstick hot off the grill. I can usually be coaxed to cook up some savory stuff in almost any kind of weather.
ALL THIS TIME I’d been cooking up pretty decent grillings with my sequential collection of “deficient” BBQs. But no matter — as any perfectionist knows, there’s satisfaction and joy to be found in both the quest and the prize.
I received an email from a woman the other day saying she admired my “guts” in getting out there as a solo woman in a 36-foot RV and towing a car, to boot.
But, really, I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. He had spent most of his professional life in the RV business — first as a manufacturer, later in sales. In between, he had worn about every hat. He was fully aware of how RVs are manufactured — some with great care, others as fast and cheaply as possible. I asked him, “What would you advise an RV buyer about where to begin to check an RV’s quality? What’s the first thing a person should inspect?”
Veteran RVers don’t look at their RV and say, “That’s my hobby.” Rather, they see their RV as a magic carpet taking them to new destinations, a mother ship providing opportunities to visit and explore diverse landscapes, a time machine opening a window on the vistas of history. You can’t do that staying in the neighborhood, where life demands a more predictable routine.
To get the most out of RVing you need to ask yourself an important question. What are the things you enjoy doing most? If it’s off-road pursuits, then you’ll want to consider a toyhauler for packing gear to your favorite destinations. If it’s hunting and fishing, perhaps a truck camper loaded on a four-wheel drive to get into those out-of-the-way places. With these interests, you can’t be the type to worry about scratches and dirt; besides, a little mud tells me you’ve been having fun!
If you enjoy sightseeing at state and national parks, a smaller motorhome might be the way to go, providing access to many beautiful locations with campsites too short to accommodate larger rigs. If water sports, hiking and biking are your hobbies, you may want to carry a kayak on your towed vehicle and a bike on your motorhome ladder. Who cares what you look like going down the road? When I see rigs like this I say to myself, “Now these folks know how to squeeze enjoyment out of life.”
But if it sometimes annoys you when your neighbor leaves his porch light on for hours when away from his rig just so he will have light for a minute when returning, and which directly in your eyes and destroys your night vision when stargazing, then your neighbor may have the same annoyance from you doing the same thing. You can correct this un-neighborly annoyance (and save battery power) with a motion-activated porch light.
In April, 2004 I explored part of Alaska in a rented RV. I was not able to use the on-board water system for fear of freezing it. So I had to search for showers. Mostly, I found them in laundries, where you can wash your clothes and yourself at the same time. But I did not like searching for showers because it delayed my morning ritual of a shower, then coffee, then consciousness.
Other possible situations when using public campground showers in the winter include:
Have you seen the TV program “Hoarders?” It’s about people with a compulsion to hoard just about everything. Nothing gets thrown away. According to the program, three million people in America qualify as “hoarders.”
I’m 62 years old. Some people think I’m 100. The reason is that I was in my 30s when I started traveling by RV and writing about my travels. At age 40 I began seriously traveling by RV writing for my on-the-road newspaper Out West. Back then, people thought I was much older because most people who traveled with motorhomes were senior citizens. “We’re Spending our Children’s Inheritance” was the leading RV bumper sticker of the era followed by “Grandma and Grandpa’s Playhouse.”
Go back 100 years. Just imagine: there were no RVs and only a few primitive cars with few roads to travel. There was no television or movie theaters. Hardly anybody owned a camera, and the handful who did shot in black and white. There was no Travel Channel or fancy travel magazines.
Now fast forward 100 years. Nobody needs postcards anymore. We email digital photos from our laptops, post them on Facebook, or send them via text messages. We’ve seen every corner of the world in living color on TV and websites, in movies, on YouTube and in newspapers and magazines. Our neighbors return home with blow-by-blow videos of where they traveled.