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This has been the weirdest spring in ages.  One day we’re in the mid-20s, next day there’s a frost warning in effect.  I had planned on breaking out my summer wardrobe for this trip up to Barrie, but those of you in southern Ontario know the rule: 2° drop as you cross Hwy 7, another 2° drop as you cross Hwy 9.  And Milton is forecasting low teens this week.  Cosy sweaters and sturdy jeans it is.

I leave in six days on my first adventure.  My contractor, who started working the first week of February, is still here.  Still to be done: re-install my bathroom vanity & shelves; install office bookshelves; paint my back door frame; and hang an 8’ x 5’ wall hanging in the stairwell.  I’ve given him until 4pm Sunday to finish.

Update: Saturday at 6:45pm he was almost done.  I’m not satisfied with the wall hanging (not his fault), but I can’t.  I just can’t.  I can’t do this anymore; I want him to leave.  I will deal with the wall hanging another day, I just need this whole renovation to be done.  So after a bit of a Duncan good-bye (as the Scottish Reids call a prolonged farewell), I shoved him oot the door. 

Great – 36 hours until I’m off!

My RV is 25’ long.  My driveway is not.  (Although, by February, it seems longer as I shovel the drifts).  It seems that I can park in the street up to 25 days each year, which will be handy for the occasional I-want-an-early-start trips, but doesn’t really address the big questions: Where do I keep my rig between trips? and where do I over-winter my rig?

I sent out a blast email to about 30 people I know, not asking if I could park in their driveways, but rather, did they know anyone with a long driveway, or who owns a business with its own parking lot.  This was a long shot, and I really had no idea what I was going to do if no one answered, but I figured, just write to anyone you know in the GTA or even as far afield as London.

Well, much to my surprise, I had two replies within 20 minutes.  (Interestingly, they were the only two replies – I had half expected people to at least write and say, ‘sorry, can’t help, but a new RV sounds fun!’. But maybe they thought it was a scam email?  After all it did rather come out of the blue. But I digress.)  Two wonderful ladies from my women’s group each came in with a different offer (I will refer to them as Bee-lady and Gardener respectively, for privacy’s sake): Bee-lady has a patch of unused land tucked away on her property 8 minutes from my house, which will be perfect for between-trips over the summer; and Gardener has a massive covered barn about 25 minutes from my place when I can over-winter the rig. How wonderful this club is; I really do owe MB a lot for recommending CFUW when I retired.  And of course, I will be paying both of these ladies rent for their property.

What a load off my mind.

I don’t want to say I hustled my nephew out the door on his last morning at my place (internship ended last week), as he had been a delightful house guest.  So as a courtesy, I waited 15 whole minutes after he left before I started piling RV stuff in the guest bedroom.  I should have taken a photo – the room looks like a cross between the Marketplace at IKEA, and the Outdoor Department at Canadian Tire. 

Everyone is giving me ideas of what to buy, and my incredibly generous friends who spent the last two years in their own RV touring North America have been giving me tons of their old equipment.  But I don’t want to do too much shopping up front for two reasons: 1) solo travelling means I am going to have a lot of free time on my hands, so why not use that time to shop; and 2) picking things and learning what’s needed will be half the fun!  (Edit 31 May 2025: ‘fun’? Hunh.)

So apart from one indulgent trip to IKEA with a friend (that’s my Strandskata laundry basket, which is going to dictate the colour scheme in the motorhome), I am just making lists to fulfil once we’re underway.

It’s been a month since I bought my RV, and you’d think I’d have spent that time packing and shopping in readiness for D-Day, but a lot else has been going on.  I decided last fall to have some renovations done around my house and hired the Eldon of contractors (think Murphy Brown).  He took 13 months to finish my sister’s house last year (original timeline: 3 months), and will have taken four months to finish what I would have thought would take 3 weeks at my place.  Don’t get me wrong: I knew going in that I was paying for quality workmanship, not decent time management. And, it’s looking pretty good so far.  But it means he’s commandeered my basement, my living room, my bedroom, and my garage – his is a peripatetic approach to task management: why finish one room at a time, when one can keep things interesting by doing several different tasks each day?  The only room unscathed is my guest bedroom.  But I can’t use that as a muster point for all things RVing – my nephew is staying with me for a four-month internship on Bay Street.  It’s bad enough for the poor guy that each Sunday, when he arrives at my house, another small portion of his bedroom floor, or the closet, or his dresser, has been taken over by my laundry, or stacks of books, or rolled up carpet.  I can’t also start piling ground tarps, and lawn chairs, and flashlights on top of his bed.

So, instead of packing, I make lists.  As with my previous adventure, I am using Trello and One Note to track To Dos, Questions, To Pack, To Buy, etc.. lists.  And I swear, I have bookmarked at least 30 different YouTube videos on RVing.  But those are their own topic.

I’m picking up my motorhome the last week of May, and I need to map out an itinerary.  Heidi’s, up in Oro-Medonte, halfway between Barrie & Orillia, has a unique offer:  with the purchase of one of their motorhomes, the buyer gets two free nights at their attached campground.  How brilliant is that?  I just know that they are going to cover everything I need to know the morning I pick up the rig, and within 20 minutes of my having driven off the lot, I’ll have forgotten 90% of it.  But this way, I’m just next door, and can go trotting into the service team with 15 questions that all start with, ‘Remind me how I  . . . . .’  Excellent.

After 2 days up there, I’ve decided to head southwest.  I was so impressed by Essex County when I took the train to Windsor last year, and I’ve never been to Point Pelee, so why not spend a week or so tooling around Southwestern Ontario: close to major urban centres, but different from what I’ve seen before.

Tariffs, schmariffs.  If you want an RV, buy an RV! 

When I first started thinking about RVing, the plan was to go all over North America.  I had even planned out our potential first few trips on a map (of course you did, Elaine): a four-month swing through southern Quebec, New Brunswick, New England, and the Adirondacks.  And that was just one of many. 

And then one day, something quite specific happened that made me re-think travelling  in the States.  No, it wasn’t Nov 8, 2016 (the election of You-Know-Who) or even Jan 20, 2017 (inauguration date of same), although my spending habits did shift significantly over the months following those dates.  It was Aug 4, 2019. 

On August 4, 2019, there were two separate mass shootings in the United States, one in Dayton Ohio and one in Waco Texas in a Walmart.  A Walmart. 

With the many, many, many previous shootings in the US, while I deplored them with every fibre of my being, it seemed to me they were in places that I would never be: major entertainment venues (to what end?), minority gathering places (pathetic & abusive), or schools (truly, truly wicked and unforgivable).  But suddenly we’re talking places I could very easily be – a Walmart.  (I should maybe explain, Walmart parking lots are often a wonderful place to dry-camp for one night for RVers.)

And that was that.  I made the decision not to return to the United States of America.  Now, let me be clear, it’s not as if I’m denying myself anything – I’ve  been to 30 states in my lifetime, so I have already seen a great deal of the US (quite likely more than most Canadians or Americans ever have).  It’s just that the risk:reward ratio is too high – there’s pretty much nowhere in the US I haven’t already seen that I’m burning to visit, so why risk it?

AND, let’s face it – there is SO MUCH to see in my own country!  Canada coast-to-coast is going to consume a huge amount of time and mileage – that is more than enough for me.

(Although, she says in a small voice, there are three places I would have liked to have visited before this self-inflicted moratorium: Washington DC (last there when I was 14): New Orleans, and Mansfield Missouri, the home of The Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Museum.  Ah well.)

How is He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Allowed impacting my life now?  I went RV shopping (round 2) yesterday.  When I asked, ‘What sort of depreciation for re-sale should I expect?’, I didn’t get the answer I was anticipating.  Instead, I got two new pieces of information, one of which could be in my favour, and one of which has me a tad freaked out.

First off: more than one dealership has indicated that due to the tariffs being levied by the twit, there is a very good chance that used RVs will be much in demand over the next several years and, if I maintain my rig well, I could see a better than normal re-sale price.  Well, I’m not really thrilled about benefitting from petulant nationalism (feels like profiteering somehow), but hey – whatevs – I’ll take it.

But, today, Wednesday March 19^th 2025, we are only days away from another round of tariffs.  And the salespeople are all warning me that that means motorhomes currently sitting in the dealers’ lots are going to jump in price.  Immediately.  Granted, this could be a tactic to hurry a sale, but do I really want to gamble with that?  Here’s the problem with this: those of you who have been following me for a while know that (a) I hate shopping; and (b) I take a looong time to make a decision.  But if I want to avoid a sudden across-the-board price hike, I have to decide.  Now.  Crap.

Years ago an RV salesman gave me a piece of advice I thought was pretty sound: list your top 10 requirements for the motorhome of your dreams, and if you find something that meets at least seven of those ten, buy it. Seems sensible.

I’ve done a fair amount of online research into such areas as floor plans, manufacturer reputation, solo-traveller choices, and features and options. From there I crafted the list you see here, asked a friend if she wanted to come shopping, then headed off to my first dealership.

Almost immediately I got veered off track at the dealership. I knew I wanted what was known as a Class C, but the minute I saw those cute, perfectly fitted-out, compact, obscenely expensive Class B vans, I wanted one. Oh dear. I don’t know why they are so much more expensive than the larger truck-style RVs, but they are. And I love them. And then we saw something callled a Class B+ which was equally cool. And even more expensive, dammit.

The salesman reminded me of why I was there, and re-directed me to the Class Cs (what a spoilsport). But somehow, even tho we ended up with the Make and Model I was investigating, we weren’t looking at the right size. I was definite in wanting a small motorhome. But he happened to have a used 27′ Sunseeker for an excellent price – too big, but very tempting. Dammit again. Then we saw a 24′ Redhawk that my friend really liked, but I wasnt crazy about the layout. But the price was good. Double dammit. See, this is why I hate shopping. Decisions, too many damned decisions.

So, being my mother’s daughter, I did the only thing I could do: I went home. I took his business card and went home to (a) sleep on it; and (b) have a glass of wine. (Sorry, (b) was supposed to say: keep shopping elsewhere. Oops.)

Rank	Wants
1	<$150k
2	< 25’
3	Twin beds
4	U-Dinette/Sofa
5	Slide
6	N. Amer chassis
7	Solar panels
8	U-Dinette/Sofa
9	Over cab storage
10	Solid bathroom door