Why Not Rent an RV for Family Road Trip?

Jennifer Walker-Journey — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:50:23 +0000

My grandparents bought a boat not long before they retired, and every time we visited them we loaded up and cruised to Catalina Island. I’m not sure why my Grandpa decided to sell the boat, but when he did, they purchased an RV. As a kid I loved traveling in that big thing, playing cards on the compact dining table and sleeping on an actual bed while my Grandpa drove endless miles to god-knows-where.

When we made our first cross-country venture with our son, who was 18 months old at the time, I actually looked in to renting an RV. I had no idea you could rent them. For whatever reason, we decided against it, and Truman managed the trip just fine confined to his car seat. I had all but forgotten the notion of renting an RV when we drove past a rented one somewhere sparse west Texas, and I got the fever again. (Rick thinks I’m insane. He knows I wouldn’t drive the thing so he’d be stuck navigating it. Bless him, because I know if I pressed, he’d do it.)

Garden gnome says all his exes live in Texas.

It’s not cheap, at least not if you’re traveling a great distance. The package I looked at (with a pickup in my home state) from Cruise America (which a Google search will show you is just one of many companies that rent RVs) costs about $300 for three days, plus another $100 for 300 miles. And that’s just for the base RV. God only knows what kind of gas mileage those things get. I suppose the trade off is that you save money on hotels and restaurants, because you can just drive up to a campsite and stay pretty cheap and cook your own meals. Truman could have an actual table to sit in to play his computer games and a couch to sit on to watch DVDs. And I could grab a nap in an actual bed while Rick drives endlessly. Now that I think of it, what’s not to love about the arrangement?