Our first real trip was to the winter home of thousands of RV’ers to the desert in Quartzsite, Arizona. We had become members of the Escapees RV club and belonged to a subset group for Baby Boomers. They carved out a small part in the desert and named it Boomerville!
At this point we were 90 days into RV ownership and learned our first lesson. First, we LOVED the RV lifestyle and second, that our 30 foot Vista was not large enough to accommodate us and 4 dog crates for the type of travel we wanted to do. At this point in our RV adventure we were still looking at 2 to 3 weeks travel each year and our thought was that we would stay frequently on public land and “boondock”. We had solar so electric was not a limitation, at least in the winter when we didn’t need to run AC. The bigger limitation was water and sewer tank capacity.
Most of the Boomers we met stayed at least two weeks in the desert but we only had about 3 days worth of water. Yes, we could bring 5 gallon water containers to replenish – but the sewer capacity was small too. We would also need to breakdown camp and go to town to dump our tanks. We were also not towing a car which limited our ability to explore around when camped.
We were in the perfect place to discuss lifestyle and options with other RV’ers as well as some of the vendors at “The Big Tent”, an annual RV show in town. We learned quickly that we loved meeting people from all walks of life that we had not been exposed to in our “regular life”. We leaned so much about RVs and what others loved about the RVs they owned. The more we learned and the more we considered where and how we would be traveling, our thoughts about our 30 foot Vista changed.
What we came away with from our short experience at Boomerville, was that for our particular needs, our 30 footer was not going to be adequate. Because of our love of the mountains, our need to accommodate our dogs and their crates as well as our interest in towing a car so we could explore, we needed to make a change to a rig that was larger and more powerful. After returning home, we started our research for our next RV and based on our needs and budget, narrowed our choices down to either a Country Coach or a Monaco Windsor.
