Camping Bloopers

My husband and I were all set to test drive retirement until our 14-year-old daughter slammed on the brakes.

“No way. I’m not spending March Break in an RV,” she shrieked. “What would we do all day?”

“Hunt for food,” deadpanned my husband.

I admit we’re a bit of an anomaly among our fifty-something friends who are starting to gear up for their golden years. While others look to trade in suburbia for chic downtown condos, my husband and I have our sights set on the open road.

Who knew that trailer trash could be trendy?

It’s RV show season and attendance is through the fibreglass. The recession may have taken some of the air out of the tires south of the border but here, in Canada, show sales are hitting record levels and the RV industry is on the cusp of an unprecedented boom thanks to baby boomers like us.

“Boomers are looking for (RVs) that have everything and lots of storage so they can take it all with them,” says Larry Boyd, who has been selling RVs for almost 40 years.

“We even have units that you can drive a golf cart into.”

Even he was surprised to see attendance at Toronto’s recent RV show up 52 per cent over last year and sales skyrocket 91 per cent (12 per cent over the previous record year, 2008.)

It’s that Toronto show – a sprawling concrete campground of RV and Air Stream innovation – that supersized our notions of what could be happy trails or hell on wheels.

The minute we stepped into the Sabre 31 CKTS, we knew we’d found our home away from home. Even the glossy brochure made our aging hearts beat faster: “Uncage the beast.”

I pictured the two of us – shatterproof wine glasses in hand – perched on stools around its kitchen island, swapping stories with our temporary new neighbours.

March Break seemed like the perfect time to belly up to the moving bar, if only briefly. We would take a cheap flight to New Mexico, rent a motorhome and set the GPS for Sante Fe.

We tried to sell the trip as an all-inclusive, telling our daughter Claire that she could bring a friend along. But the look on her face said it all: The shame. The humiliation. The tiny bathroom where she would have barely enough elbow room to properly disguise herself with makeup.

What about a night or two in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I thought? You can’t get two teenagers any closer to 24-hour shopping than that.

None of my tactics got traction.

“Don’t be such a snob,” I pleaded. “You’ve slept in a barge. (Okay, so it was in the south of France.) What could be so awful about an RV?”

Well … dated upholstery, I had to admit. Fussy wood trim. Stuffed animals crowding the dashboard. Was a faux fireplace really the style sense I wanted to take on the road?

I assured Claire we wouldn’t sit around the campfire drinking beer and watching The Biggest Loser on a flat-screen, even though some RVs now come with them tucked in exterior walls. We might whip up eggs and bacon if we get one with an outdoor kitchen, I warned her, but never near a construction site. We didn’t want to be mistaken for a catering truck.

Just think about the fun, I insisted. The adventures! The stunning scenery!

But our youngest child was thinking about her friends: “They said we’d be fighting for water.”

A day or two later, Claire seemed strangely contrite. She and her friend Emily had been surfing the Net. They’d forgotten that New Mexico has a bit of history: It was the backdrop for High School Musical.

“Emily says she’ll come along,” Claire announced at dinner. There was just one camping caveat.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider renting the Ferrari or the Fairmont version?”

This story is by Susan Pigg and originally appeared in thestar.com. To see the original version of the story, click here. If you would like a RV of your own to take on Family RV Vacations, see this RV Sales site.