This is part of my month-long Road Trip! HackerChick style…
Finally! Drove 1200 miles down to Atlanta to pick up this beauty…
2013 Winnebago View Profile. 25 foot Mercedes with Winnebago’s design foo for optimizing every square inch of a vehicle into comfortable living and including nifty little perks like — see those steps on the left below the side door? Every time you open the door, they automatically unroll for you like the red-carpet RV royalty that you are.
It’s small for an RV (think: really big van), so you can drive it most places you could drive a car. BUT, along with your car’s creature comforts, add on a full size queen bed, a kitchen with refrigerator/freezer/sink/stove/oven/microwave, couch to chill out on, 2 TVs, a closet for your clothes (this is important), a shower and – obvs – toilet. All you need for self-sustainable weeks of adventure on the road.
SO psyched to pick it up. Except… we get there to pick it up and it’s all opened up…
“I’m just trying to get the right level of oil into the generator – tricky thing,” says the guy we’re renting it from. Then… (and I’m sorry, I was too stunned to have my wits about me to grab a camera for this) – he turns on the generator and smoke starts rolling out. Like, LOTS of smoke. Like, fills up that whole big backyard he’s got the RV parked in and we feel a little like we’re in the middle of the zombie apocolapyse.
Yikes!
We stick around for 4 hours watching him spray what appears to be an entire can of starter fluid into the engine in the hopes of getting it to start again and all I can picture, as I’m watching him try again and again to start it, is that the next press of the On button while spraying highly flammable liquid at it is going to result in a gigantic explosion that takes all of us out.
After much discussion, we finally settle upon starting our RV trip a day late in exchange for a free night in Atlanta and – ya know – staying alive.
So, in a weird twist of events – instead of living in our vehicle with it’s own toilet – we end up in a totally swank hotel in downtown Atlanta.
It’s got it’s own toilet too! And kitchen, couch, tv… this thing is bigger than most Boston apartments.
And did I mention we have our own balcony?
It’s almost as good as being on the open road.