RV Parks and Mobility

Along the same line of thought as my pondering of a life out of a trailer or RV, I also wonder about the value and advantages of better quality RV parks instead of the more infamous and bottom dwelling "trailer parks", the kind that get hit by tornadoes and are populated by skanks and hillbillies in wifebeater shirts and flipflops. I'm not really the flipflop and wifebeater type, you see.

When I was a lad, we would sometimes take camping vacations, with a car and a big tent and usually bicycles on the roof. We'd go someplace with good fishing, and we'd cook meals out of doors and swat at mosquitoes while we ate on a picnic bench, often under pine trees somewhere in the Eastern Sierra. Sometimes these were state park run campgrounds, which in the 1980's were really nice btw and often had flush toilets rather than just pits. They also had water taps so they weren't completely dry campgrounds. Sometimes these were fancier KOA campgrounds, which had a tent side and an RV side, since RVers often run generators all night which is damned annoying when you want peace and quiet while you sleep. Remember that because it might be important later.

The KOA campgrounds have something valuable about them. First, they have hot showers, with facilities that are clean and well maintained. They have proper flush toilets so you don't have to use the one in the RV, and they don't stink. They have a club-room with a TV, usually a ping pong table, a coin-op laundry and coin op video games. The one we went to between Blairsden and Portola had all that and a small shop with a few essentials. You pay extra for that, but I really think it was worth it, so long as it is cheaper than a 3 star motel. KOA was 4 star camping, basically. Ze Germans are fond of KOA because it is very orderly.

The big advantages of those facilities is that you don't have to use your own bathroom on your RV when you want to get properly clean. You can stretch out. You can socialize with other people. You can do your laundry, because no RV comes with a laundromat. Its those crucial things which makes living in such a small space bearable, namely treating the RV as a shelter for sleep rather than a jail cell on wheels.

I have written before of the existence of the very tiny ultralight trailers which can be pulled by a station wagon or SUV. The smallest are basically a picnic table and a sink on wheels so you can get out of the weather and eat in peace when you're going somewhere rough with bad weather for the weekend. I don't think those are properly liveable space. You have to be able to get clean. Dirt is fun and all, but its also full of things that can give you fun infections, and contains parasites and other fun stuff. Best to wash off. We aren't dark ages peasants anymore. Having clean clothes, a clean living space, being able to stretch out, these are important. Trying to picture carrying laundry via a motorcycle... yeah. Not so great. You could probably get away with it on a scooter, though, using that footwell space that will hold 3 bags of groceries.

I think that right now, RVs are too expensive to justify this, and rent at the high end RV parks with all these facilities is probably nearly as expensive as a leased apartment. I don't know that this will always be true, however. When the baby boomers start dying off, their superfluous stuff, like RVs will be selling cheap by descendants who don't want to deal with their fuel economy problems or store those huge things when they're in super-high density apartment complexes with open gates and burglars meandering through (Florida?). RVs are for people with time, space, and money to deal with them. A bit too specialized for the people so codependent that they can't leave their families or home towns. We have to be more flexible than that. Even though Peak Oil is happening MUCH SLOWER than we anticipated back in 2005, it IS happening. Ergo the value of bubble cars.

My current interest in personal mobility is due to experiencing the downsides of being a captive labor market. When managers of businesses think they can exploit the local labor, mostly because that labor won't leave a bad place, they end up with both lower pay and sometimes forced to do either illegal or immoral things.

I am glad that you don't actually NEED to own an RV to escape. Renting a Uhaul and minimizing your stuff, packing up and leaving town for somewhere, if not better, at least different, is often the right answer. Ideally, everything I own should be light enough I can pick up each part of it by myself. I currently own furniture which takes two to pickup. I hope to replace that at some point so it isn't necessary to have help when I move. A small victory, but a victory just the same. You just can't count on people.

The Western States are dangerously isolated without the fuel to run away from bastards and brutes. Peak Oil can really hurt us here. If the oil in the Monterey Shale gets into our economy, the West will stay habitable. If it all goes to China, things are going to get a lot worse, and the suicide rate in the West will climb until most of the towns are empty, and the cities implode like Stockton or Oakland have. I have noticed the Smug claims of arrivals in the really remote mountain hideaways claiming that THEY will be spared from destruction because the community likes them, but go back far enough and you'll find an excuse to cut them off and there's good reason the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi were full of human bones. Many of them gnawed upon by human teeth. If you don't grow food, you are dead meat in the worst case scenario. Every mountain town is under threat of this.

I consider this the strongest argument for decade/century scale public works projects to distract the public and its predatory capitalists/socialists so there's always some pressure relief valve, some place to go. The Columbia River canals, and the Grand Canal from the Frasier River through the Rockies into the Great Plains to refill the Ogalalla Aquifer and restart agriculture there, these are worthy projects which will cost billions of man hours in labor and result in major stability in food supply and thus protection from most of the bad 60-year droughts North America has history of experiencing. The Ogalalla has about 40-60 years of water in it. Refill that and you've got enough protection should conditions change. When idiots go on about sea level rise and unstable weather, I point to the actual research into these enduring droughts which have collapsed complex civilizations and require enormous effort to protect against. If I were in politics, this is what I would be pushing:

1. Dredge ports and reservoirs. 
2. Build the Columbia and Frasier River canals. This means making nice with Canada, but America is becoming Socialist like them so this is easier than it sounds. 
3. Fill in the below-sea-level "islands" of the San Joaquin Delta to prevent flooding and water contamination. 
4. Deliberately flood the Kern River Basin farms runined by caliche for wildlife refuges, ending the temporary desert that's formed near Bakersfield and Wasco. 
5. Fund practical desalination for water supply to LA and San Diego, and export that tech to Mexico so Baja can do more agriculture. Make that a major US export for farming and civil use. 
6. Fund State campgrounds and staff them so mobile people have somewhere safe and clean to stay. We did it in the 1970's. We can do that again. Offer tax breaks to private campgrounds which go above and beyond (KOA). 
7. Build more commuter rail and tourist rail options, not just high speed rail. We need BOTH options to survive. Pass the laws allowing safety exceptions for the ancient steam trains. It is currently illegal to start them due to safety requirements, despite them working for decades. 
8. Punish abusive corporations cheating the tax code and harming the population. Make them PAY. 
9. Correct all the things wrong in the state constitution. Currently, every male 14+ is in the state militia, a law from 1850. Every married woman's children are her husbands, even if they aren't and you have DNA tests to prove it. Those must be fixed. 
10. Scale back the requirements for riding scooters so tourists can rent and ride rather than need a full motorcycle license. Allow reciprocity. 
11. Correct for missing alternate routes through passes so slow vehicles can get through off a freeway. Connect frontage roads, and offer signs so routes are marked for bicycle and scooter tourists using them. 
12. Remove fees from state parks which operate fine without them. There are parks which charge a fee to pay the wages of the person collecting the fee, but nothing more. This is stupid. 
13. Admit and accept that California is about Gold Rush history, about Golden Age Hollywood, and play up those looks for the tourists, complete with uniforms appropriate to the era. Living history works to draw tourists. 
14. Rebuild streetcar routes in all towns and cities, and have them run frequently so they are useful. As oil runs out, electric streetcars will become primary transportation. We had them until Standard Oil destroyed them in 1925. Cheap solar provides the power. 
15. Allow lower safety vehicles from EU to be sold here, accepting the high death toll. Gain advantages of high fuel economy vehicles and lighter weight. 

Many of these things will come from state money, from taxes. Many are things which cost little anyway. Some of them are going to employ a fair number of people. If tourists and retirees find more convenience living in more places, the state will get more residents and visitors, bringing more money here and putting the population closer to the food supply. Thanks to all the sunshine, this also means more abundant solar power to run those desalination pumps on the coast, which resolves the water supply issue until the Columbia River canal irrigates Eastern Oregon and Nevada for those real estate booms. The West ends up being the pressure relief valve for the imperfect or ambitious in the East to have somewhere to GO rather than revolt, rather than turn to terrorism to make their demands heard in a place that INSISTS that birth is most important, not ability. The East is all about the Blood. The West is all about Merit. It should stay that way, for national stability. As long as people are having kids, we have a responsibility to offer places for them to go where they aren't trapped and desperate, a place that their talents and ambitions can fuel positive ventures rather than endless wars as we saw in Europe for two thousand years. We can't afford to make those mistakes. We are better served solving the problems with big public works and long term plans with long term payoff. It just makes sense.