By Gail Marsh
To my way of thinking, there’s no better way to vacation than with an RV. But if you’re fortunate enough to park your RV on your property with electric, you’re in luck! That’s because RVs aren’t just for traveling anymore!
Special gatherings
Sometimes you just need a separate space—a place where you and a few friends can gather. If your parked rig lacks a water hook-up, plan to use your nearby stix-n-brix bathroom. Or fill plastic milk jugs with water to use for “flushing” the RV toilet. With a little ingenuity, you can make almost any small gathering work inside your RV.
Friends’ night
An RV is the perfect place for a small gathering of friends. Depending on the size of your rig, you can host a girls’ night out, a ball game watch party, a book club meeting, or poker night right inside your RV.
Intimate celebrations
Use your RV for hosting small, intimate celebrations like a baby shower. Decorating your RV doesn’t take long, and the guests may enjoy the unique setting.
Sleepovers
A friend recently hosted a sleepover for her daughter and three friends—in their RV! “Mom” slept in the master bedroom and the girls slept on the sofa bed and dining booth bed. Everyone had a great time!
Going solo
Quiet time
A friend of mine likes to retreat to the family’s RV, especially when things get hectic in her stix-n-brix home. With four, active teen boys and her husband, this friend lives among a lot of testosterone! There are times when she just craves peace and quiet, so she grabs a book and heads out to the RV.
Work
Working from home is great until it isn’t. New parents have discovered that a crying baby is not conducive to Zoom meetings. When a meeting is scheduled, one of the parents stays with baby while the other takes her laptop to the RV for the meeting.
Respite
Speaking of baby, one parent can catch up on sleep in the RV while the other parent cares for the fussy baby inside the stix-n-brix home. Taking turns for a quiet respite in the RV helps each parent cope.
Fun and games
Hunting
Sportsmen enjoy taking their RVs to their favorite locations during hunting season.
College
Several families we know take their RVs to nearby college towns for football games and other collegiate events. Using the RV for “Family College Weekends” is also a fun idea.
Reunions
A few years back, we took the RV to our family reunion. I loved the convenience of staying close to the scheduled activities and invited family members back to the RV for invaluable one-on-one visits.
Do you use your RV in unconventional ways? Please use the comments to share your ideas!
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Our “special needs” camper is currently parked in the driveway at my husband’s parents home, about 150 miles away from our sticks and bricks. We have 2 dogs and one of them is “special needs” because he has to take anti-seizure medication daily. The cost to travel with them to hotels, or to board them was outrageous and many lodgings didn’t even allow dogs. The medication for our dog is a “controlled substance”. Because of this, our window of time for travel is, IMO, unfairly limited. I have many grievances about the “inmates running the asylum” on this issue. My husband’s “special need” is that he has a physical disability and wears a prosthetic. He has very limited walking, and is unable to drive. My own “special need” is having a gluten allergy. All of this made travel, even just to visit family very expensive and difficult until we bought our camper. For us to travel and find all the needed accommodations was more expensive than making a monthly camper payment.
After extensively searching for our perfect retirement location, we purchased a house in Las Cruces New Mexico in 2016. There were several changes we needed for the house to make it more accessible. The remodel was quite extensive so we driveway camped in our 2016 Thor ACE until the dust cleared and it was habitable.
in 2019 we switched to a Cirrus 820 truck camper with a Ford Super Duty because our travel requirements had changed. We now had a home base from which to travel. When the Covid pandemic interrupted our planned travels we weren’t going to be deterred from enjoying our rig. We used it as our exclusive Covid Isolation Unit (CIU). Every afternoon we would go to our CIU to play cards, watch over the air TV, and enjoy an adult beverage with a snack. It provided a welcome change of environment and invoked many discussions of where we were going to travel when the Covid restrictions were lifted.
Parents’ apartment to help with a new grandchild. Our daughter & family live 1,600 miles from our home and there were no nearby relatives to help the new mother. We parked the camper in the driveway behind the house. Fortunately the kids’ house had an exterior sewer cleanout, water tap and electric outlet within reasonable distance. We removed the cleanout cap and replaced it with hardware store available inexpensive PVC parts that added a standard hose thread to the center of the cap. We invested in an RV macerator pump and contractor grade 3/4 inch hose*. We mostly used their house during the day, but the camper still gave them some private family time in the evening. And if they wanted help at night, we were a cellphone call and seconds away in their backyard.
*worked so well that we often no longer bother with communal dump stations. If we don’t have full hookups at the campground and will be home that day, it is easier and more thorough to clean holding tanks at our home.
Quiet space – constant noise jangles my neuro-atypical nerves, so I have a retreat from raucous teen boys and stupid TV shows.
Remote workshop – if cleaning guns or soldering circuit boards, it’s easier to vent out RV than gas family in the house.
Traveling office – I used to give safety seminars and having lots of hardware, “home” business office and stable living space while on the road was great.
“Just more space” – my pre-family house is tiny for all of us now, so I park RV functionally joined to a side door. It becomes a wing of the house, only needing to retract a breezeway of sorts in order to roll. Because it STAYS in use 9 months of the year, it’s already packed and systems are running “turnkey”
Spare bedroom when we have a houseful; esp for an adult son with very different sleep patterns from the rest of us
Our small TT lives in the driveway. I use it for a change-of-pace, which was nice to have during shut-downs, and/or feline-free work space. We also planned to use it as an isolation chamber if the need arose during the early days of shut-downs, but that never happened.
A few years ago, when I had a massive head infection and was home on IV antibiotics for 6 weeks, the trailer became my visiting parlor.My good friend is allergic to my cats, so can’t come into the house. We visited in the trailer, which got me out of the house too. We had a/c, water and snacks in the fridge, and a bathroom. One bonus was that I could hear her, since we sat at the smallish table to chat. (At the time, I was almost deaf from the infection.)
For a number of years, our coach was my place of business. I was doing specialty work for racing sailors. There was no way that they could bring a 30+ft 5ton boat to my shop. So, as I had no other employment at the time (and not a lot of money to travel), I loaded my tools and materials into the coach. This worked out very well. The coach was my tool crib, an electric instrument repair shop, a place for comfortable meetings with clients, a quiet office to prepare and print quotes and of course my own restaurant and occasional motel. It worked very well for me.
Our motorhome is parked next to house with power. I use it every day at home during warm season from 5:00p to 6:15 pm. I watch the news in peace and quiet – except for my yelling! I also drink two cans of beer. We have portable fones – and DW calls when supper it ready. (PS: I also use it as a hobby – being a DIY I have enjoyed updating it and changing many things).
We started using it during COVID, and still do, for nice restaurant meals. We call in our order ahead using the place’s web menu. Then we drive there and my guy goes inside and gets the meal while I set the table. Since our RV is the size of a van, we can park in the parking lot and eat enjoying the same view as the other customers. What we miss out on are the crying babies and noisy drunks at the other tables.
We keep ours at home and has electric. We moved into it when Hurricane Irma knocked out our power, back in 2017. Our house is an L shape so we backed it into that corner. Turned on GEN, had fridge cooled and hung out in there all day when power was out. That night, power came on and we went back into the house.
We have been using our RV as a shower and bathroom while both of our bathrooms have been remodeled. It has also been a haven while construction noise has taken over the quiet of the house. It has also been a Zoom conference call room for my wife these last 14 weeks our remodeling. The A/C, and now heater has come in handy as well.
I’ve rebuilt the RV’s bathroom shower, and rebuilt the water heater during this time as well. In my opinion RVs are completely awesome! It has kept our family sane for these last 14 weeks.
We used our RV as our guest house for years. Our older married children (and grandchildren) liked to stay up late, watch TV all night, sleep late, etc. So we put them in the RV where they had everything they needed and we could visit during the day, eat meals together, but still have our privacy (and quiet time) when needed.
Interesting discussion. We are forunate to be able to park our RV on our property, behind a locked 6ft gate and with electricity. We frequently sleep out in it, even in the winter. We get that getaway feeling with out actually being away. The dogs love it too.
We had out of state company who knew nothing about RVs, rather than have them “mess up” something in the motorhome we left them in the house(where they were familiar with the way things work) and we went to the RV. It worked perfectly. That’s also why we don’t lend our motorhome to even our family. I don’t need an amateur playing with all the interesting buttons and leaving me a mess to straighten out.
Our Coach is an older (Ok Antique) that we bought for a trip we wanted to make but we could not at that time. I was doing a lot of work for sailboat racers and was trying to work out of my Neon. This was a lot of extra work. Then it occurred to me that the coach was an ignored asset. I moved my operation into her (Chaumière). Yes, she burned more fuel, but now the back room became my tool crib and I never had to load carefully for the day. She was also My Meeting Room, my office and now the ink jet printer came along with me to print work lists and quotes that day. The dinette was also a place to repair electronics and she was also a restaurant and an occasional motel.
Thank you, Gail! I did seek sanctuary in our RV recently. It was the weekend of Thanksgiving and we unexpectedly and suddenly had a full house. After enduring several minutes of loudly celebrated merriment, I fled to our RV parked about 1/4 of a mile from the house. I returned home after four or five hours and, to my surprise, I gratefully found an exhausted silence. 🙂
The extended family has a summer-only cottage on a pristine Lake Superior beach. Electric but no potable water & an outhouse. When multiple guests visit we give up our bed fill the water tank and haul the camper out to the cottage for our bedroom & toilet (better mattress and beats a busy outhouse in every regard). We have 20A of power for fans or even A/C on a hot summer night. I have an external macerator to clean the waste tanks when we return to our house.
During a 5 hour plus, area wide electrical black out a few years back, we had the in-laws over for the day. As our rv is parked at home, we gathered in it with the generator running and watched a couple of football games and played some cards until the power was restored.
It’s also been available to any family or friends when needed due to out of control wild fires in the area
We built a 50×30 RV garage for our LondonAire and we have dart boards, chairs, bar, bathroom, septic, games and storage. Its fun to just use as a couples cave in the fall and spring. We even got a Pickle ball net to use , but have to back the RV out to play.
Our rig has become the 3rd guest room for our house.
My house doesn’t have A/C, about 10 days a year I wish it did, out in the fifth wheel I go.