Livin' the RV Life

Here’s the idea: Drive an RV down the Oregon coast. Take the family. Talk to people. Stop at interesting places. Make it home in one piece.

Our adventure starts just south of Portland in Wilsonville, home of RV’s To Go, one of several local rental outlets for recreational vehicles. Owner Mark West sits me down in front of a video about the correct way to handle every RV chore, then circles back 45 minutes later to help me with the walk-around inspection of the unit before he hands me the keys for the weekend.

The unit in question is a 2004 Forest River Sunseeker LE, a 30-foot Class C behemoth that sits atop a Ford F450 cab and chassis. It sports a full kitchen, shower, toilet, queen bed in the back, on-board generator—really, it’s got everything. That I’ve never driven a vehicle larger than a Chevy pickup seems of no great consequence to Mark. He has complete faith in me. Which, of course, makes one of us.

As I drive up to my house in Northeast Portland, I forget my clearance height and take out a few branches of the walnut tree in front. Hearing this, my 7-year-old son, Owen, bounds off the porch to see our home for the weekend, and is instantly captivated. “This is awesome!” he says, leaping the steps to inspect the loft bed above the cab. This is his dream come true— a house, complete with TV/VCR, that travels with you. My wife Sarah climbs aboard, too, and begins her own, more critical survey of our accommodations. She opens the refrigerator and says, “This is nicer than ours.” Within the hour we’re loaded up, heading across the St. Johns Bridge to U.S. Highway 30 and the winding drive along the Columbia River toward Astoria.

As we motor through the stands of fir and spruce that tower above the old highway and occasionally break to show off an expansive postcard-worthy view of the Columbia, my family ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the scenery, I’m concentrating on our side mirrors, and trying to stay in my lane. Our family car is a zippy VW Jetta, and, well, this is a different animal I’m driving. But by Clatskanie I’ve eased up on the gas and have the LE—or “the mo-bile unit,” as we’ve begun to call it—more or less under control. It’s late in the day as we approach downtown Astoria, and the thought of backing 30 feet of mo-bile unit into a campsite after sundown has me a little freaked out. But I say nothing and head south across the bridge to Clatsop Spit.

At Fort Stevens, part of the new Lewis and Clark National Historic Park, the place is teeming with young families. Kids on bikes, rollerblades and scooters tear fearlessly through the campsites. Our site—a pull-through, thank goodness—is huge, and hooking up the LE to water and power is even easier than it appeared in the video. Owen looks wistfully at the rampaging children for a moment, then announces he’s going to help me build a fire.

Sarah smirks and raises her eyebrows. “That would mean firewood,” she says, watching me unroll the enormous canopy on the starboard side of the big rig.

It’s then that a man in his early 60s walks into our camp. He’s wearing jeans held up by suspenders. He looks at us for a second, and then his eyes brighten. “This isn’t my truck,” he says, smiling. “Looks just like it. I was wondering, who are those people trying to get into my truck?”

Tom, it turns out, is in the next site over, down from Port Orchard, Wash., for the weekend. As Sarah tells him about our virgin RV outing, I’m tickled to find myself on alert. All week friends have been warning me about what to expect from old RV pros like Tom—that they’ll make us ask “permission to come aboard,” that they’ll silently snicker while we try to figure out the dump hose, and worse. So I’m ready for whatever Tom has to offer.

“Hey,” he says, “let me show you a neat trick with that canopy.” He shortens one support arm by a few inches, so it hangs slightly lower than the other does. “If it rains, all the water will run off this end, away from you.”

He’s a mean one, all right. He shows his colors again when he reappears five minutes later with an armload of firewood and kindling. “There’s more if you need it,” he says.

Thanks to Tom, we’re grilling our steaks in no time. We microwave a few potatoes, steam a little broccoli on the propane stove, and head to bed sated and thinking that we could get used to the RV life.

Saturday morning, we take a leisurely walk along Fort Stevens’ bike trails to the glassy Coffenbury Lake, where a fisherman shows Owen how to attract a crowd of fry around the dock by dropping some bait into the water. Later, we ease the LE onto Highway 101 to begin our day’s quest toward Florence and the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area. Following a quick stop in Gearhart for coffee and pastries at the Pacific Way Bakery, we’re off.

Over the next hour, Sarah and I spy a dozen roadside flower stands with honor-system money boxes, a repeating sight that buoys our mood even as we crawl through Seaside, dodging the finishers of the annual Hood-to-Coast foot race. We opt to bypass Cannon Beach and pick up picnic supplies at Manzanita Fresh Foods (nice wine selection!), but before jumping back into the fray on 101, I decide to take a quick spin through downtown Manzanita—an impulse I quickly regret. The mo-bile unit takes up a full lane and then some, and I spend the entirety of our circle through town swiveling my head between the side mirrors to avoid clipping any cars or pedestrians. By the time we navigate our way back to the coast highway, I’m sweating.

“Relax, Dad,” Owen says, curling up with a Calvin & Hobbes book on his bench seat in the morning sun. “We’re on vacation.” How can I argue with that logic? More important, why would I? So I put on my cowboy hat and we all laugh, and Sarah offers a game of 20 Questions to pass the time. Because, to be honest, we’ve got time to pass. Curvy, beautiful 101 is making us pay for the amazing vistas on this glorious summer weekend. It’s looking like a longer drive than we had planned. We decide to abandon a few of our hoped-for stops, like the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, in order to once again make camp before dark.

“When are we going to get there?” Owen says.

“Looks like a couple more hours,” I reply.

“I’m tired of driving,” he says, flopping dramatically sideways on his bench seat.

We do stop on the side of Neahkahnie Mountain for an outstanding azure view of the Pacific, and at Rockaway Beach for a tumble in the chilly surf before tucking into our picnic lunch, but mostly we press on. I have learned the LE’s tricks by now—proper hill acceleration, braking distance—and am enjoying the drive, even when we decide to stop at Otter Crest to show Owen the collapsed sea cave called the Devil’s Punchbowl, which means more maneuvering through narrow, winding streets.

As we pass through Florence and enter the gates at Honeyman State Park, I understand why there are 7.2 million RVs on the road in America: They’re fun! It’s like being in a hotel room on wheels. You almost want to bounce on the bed. It’s no more complicated than that.

At least, that is, until I find our site at Honeyman: a back-in. Nearly 300 miles into our journey, I put the LE into reverse for the first time.

The axles are 12 feet from the back bumper, so negotiating a half-blind turn without hitting something will be a miracle. I start wheeling to the left, and suddenly hear someone yelling, “Whoa!” It’s two men, actually, from the site across the way, there with their family members, all 12 of whom are now watching me. One of the men says, “You’re turning in too early. Pull straight out another 10 feet.”

“I’ll steer you from the back,” says the other, moving around the LE.

I pull forward, put the RV in reverse, and cut the wheel again. The two men alternate signals to me—cut to straight again, 10 feet to go, swing a little left—and like that, I’m in.

“Perfect,” says the man in back as he walks toward his family. “Enjoy your evening.”

“Thanks,” I say, wondering who it was that told me RVers would be so ornery.

Early Sunday we backtrack 15 miles up 101 to show Owen the cove and lighthouse at Heceta Head, where Sarah and I would come for day trips years before he was born. Fog hovers until we reach the beach, when it burns off to reveal a majestic blue uninterrupted by clouds. We are the only people here, and we charge the beach as if taking it for our own. We kick off our shoes and socks, roll up our pants, run in the water, splash each other, dance in the sun. We find a dozen perfect sand dollars and a live, beached starfish. Owen and I skip flat stones into the waves until our arms are sore. Today we will drive back to Portland, but after spending so much time in the RV yesterday, we decide to play at Honeyman until midafternoon. Owen and I cruise around Cleawox Lake in a paddleboat while Sarah scouts the Oregon Dunes. Later we join her and hike the dunes, enthralled by the miles of massive, shifting sandhills that sweep toward the ocean. It is a leisurely day full of the melancholy lull of a holiday’s end. As we climb back into the mo-bile unit for the trip home, we’re warm and tired and ready to go.

And we’re happy. Sure, we bickered and sat in silence, argued about what sights to see and skip, commiserated in hunger, like every other family who ever hit the road together. But we also laughed and joked, prodded one another to see breathtaking scenes along the coast, and roasted marshmallows at night within earshot of the ocean. We’re not RVers by nature, but that night as we unpack our belongings and sweep out the LE, I catch Sarah and Owen each looking at our home for the last two days with fondness, and even some longing. We’ve surprised ourselves this weekend. It’s dark, and the lights in the big rig are ablaze so we can clean, but from the outside it has a homey, even inviting glow.

“We should have camped for three nights instead of two,” I say. Owen nods, and says, “Maybe we can do that next time.”