Before the First Mile
Every journey begins somewhere. Why buy an RV and travel thousands of miles all over North America? Our journey started with the idea to camp our way around the country. Our first trip was north to Williamsburg to visit Janice's aunt and then on to Niagara Falls and back.
We arrived at Anvil Campground. We had practiced setting up the tent at home so we were ready to go. Setup went fine but took a number of hours to complete; it was not only the tent but the sleeping items and cooking items that needed to be set up. Once we got settled we learned one thing: if there is a campground there are railroad tracks nearby! It was close enough that the ground shook in addition to the horn. The other thing is getting up at night to make your way to the bathroom facilities was not always convenient. We chalked this first night up as a learning curve.
Through this first trip there were a number of other factors that could only be learned. First, sometimes bathrooms were a bicycle ride away. It does rain, duh. And the number of hours we spent setting up and tearing down at each stop cut way into our time to enjoy the area or move on to the next stop.
We arrived home that summer with great memories of the trip but with the realization that it was WAY too hard camping with a tent and there needed to be a better way. Maybe explore purchasing an RV.
There was an RV dealer not far from our home, and we began visiting. Janice had no interest in towing anything, in backing up with a trailer or in a lengthy setup at every stop. We climbed into countless rolling living rooms. Most of them were too big. The Class A motorhomes felt like buses. The medium-sized Class C rigs with the bed over the cab were closer, but every time we rode in the back of one on a test drive, we got bounced around like a stone in a paint can.
Then we found the Roadtrek RS Adventurous.
The first time we saw one, we both laughed. It looked like a FedEx truck. Twenty-two feet long, built on a Mercedes Sprinter chassis, tall and a little awkward in profile. No bed over the cab, no slide-outs, no painted graphics. Just a tall white van with a clean shape. Inside, it had everything we needed: a queen bed that converted to a back-seat couch by day, a kitchen, a wet bath you could actually shower in, storage, water, and a Mercedes diesel engine up front that would later carry us thousands and thousands of miles without complaint. Most importantly, it drove like a large SUV.
Now we knew what we wanted, but the price was pretty dear. Roadtrek had been making them for years, but the RS Adventurous was a specific model with a specific layout. Today there are many Sprinter RVs; back then there were only two manufacturers, and used ones did not sit on lots for long. We searched RV Trader online for weeks. Eventually we found a 2008 Roadtrek Adventurous for sale by a private owner in Highlands, North Carolina.
We had a long phone conversation with the seller. He and his wife loved the van but had not been able to commit the time to it the way they had hoped. He had also bought a transferable extended warranty, which took the worry of mechanical issues off the table. We bought it sight unseen, and John flew up and drove it home to Florida.
We took it to an RV dealer in Lakeland for a thorough checkup. The salesman walked through it carefully, then told us, only half joking, that he wished he had spotted it first and bought it for himself.
We found there were "meet ups" of Roadtrek owners at various places and there was an online community. John went to a local Roadtrek rally, where owners meet up in a field and trade stories.
We found an active Roadtrek community online and joined the forums. One thread caught our eye: the Western Chapter of Roadtrek International was organizing a caravan to Alaska for the summer of 2011. The group would gather at Dawson Creek, British Columbia, at the start of the Alaska Highway, and travel together through Alaska and back. The organizer, a gentleman named Wendell Nunes, had given the trip a name: Walkabout Canada-Alaska. The word walkabout was right. This was not a tour, it was a wander. People could join for parts of it, leave when they wanted, stay longer if they liked. The plan was loose. The spirit was open.
We were in.
We spent that winter getting the van ready. New tires, fresh fluids, a stockpile of guidebooks (The MilePost chief among them), and lists upon lists. We pinned maps to the wall. We read about Dawson Creek and the Yukon and the Marine Highway.
On a morning in early 2011 we pointed the FedEx truck west and headed out of our house in Florida for our first RV adventure, and Walkabout Canada-Alaska began.
