I’m leaving soon for a two-week vacation in an RV (recreational vehicle), to tour the region and reconnect with the Earth. I foresee a great moment in the history of caravanning!
You will obviously have to learn to drive and train the beast. Take shelter! repeat some of my dirty-tongued friends, who consider me a danger to your outdoor furniture. Frankly !
It’s been tickling me for a while now, vacations in VR. I’ve always been hesitant because I think of myself as some kind of luxury hen (I know, girls, I wrote ‘luxury chicken’, but that sounded ridiculous, a break there. Please!)
My safe space requires a certain level of comfort. My little things, ritual tics and daily katas. A perfect little mononcle on the base game.
My only stability, to face my life which has generally been a whirlwind. I need the first and last hour of my day to be predictable.
Thus, the idea of living in VR destabilizes me. Lost in Space, Star Trek…
I don’t really know anything about VR, apart from a couple of experiences with friends, for sports trips in the USA.
One of those is a trip my friends gave me for my 50th birthday: a New York Yankees game at old Yankee Stadium.
On the way, we had decided to live the ultimate caravanner experience, to understand: a night in a Walmart parking lot.
Surreal!
I see us, very late alone, having supper, like the first humans landed on an uninhabited planet, amazed at the delirious decor. In fact, in front of nothing, an infinite panorama of asphalt. America ! ” Drill baby drill! The great Donald’s mantra.
The highlight of the stay was the next day, when one of us, an early bird breakfast steward, mingled incognito with the store employees, and participated in the famous motivational incantations and work out early morning Walmart tribals. We laugh it again!
When we got to the game, we savored everything, including the voice of the house announcer, the legendary Bob Sheppard. He held this role for 56 years, and for more than 4,500 games. When we visited, he was already 95 years old, and the whole thing sounded like a rattle from beyond the grave: batting firsttt, the shooortstop, numbeeer two, Derek Jeterrr!
But suddenly I hear, in fact I detect that Sheppard wishes Happy Birthday to Riiigiiis Labôôômm ! And simultaneously appears the same message on the giant screen at the bottom of center field, where we reveal to All-New York my great age!
Nooonn! It’s not true ! I dream ?
And I receive a standing ovation from the very friendly spectators in my section. On the ass! Publicly celebrating my birthday in the Mecca of baseball on Earth! The buddies had been limitless, and incredibly generous.
Other event: Loudon, New Hampshire, for a weekend of NASCAR car racing.
Loudon, a bled remote by thunder, where each dwelling scattered on the territory seems disturbing and could have been the real place of the existence of the exorcist.
But at the end of a road, boom! There is a racing oval that can accommodate 88,000 people. And all around, pitches that can also accommodate thousands of campers and other VRists. In the middle of nowhere, but huge, probably only detectable by satellite.
I tell you about it because there was a strange atmosphere there, because almost half of the residents present wore clothes, mainly tank tops, in the colors of the National Rifle Association (NRA).
The typical clientele to be invited to a biennale of sacred music.
The number of firearms at the site must have been staggering.
For us, anti-guns absolute, the feeling there was quite indescribable. No need to tell you that I avoided saying out loud that I was a lologue, social democrat, and old boyfriend of Bill Clinton!
Coming back home, my other little anxiety as a traveling camper is the idea of socializing. I love chatting with the citizen, but on vacation I take time off to get along, it does me terrible good, but it makes me a little wild. People think I’m not in the mood.
We can greet each other politely: yes, health is fine, my retirement is ecstatic and thank you for informing you. And no, it’s not my first visit to the area, I’ve already been there when I was 15 months old.
And there are all the monster stuff to manipulate. Buttons here and there, propane or electricity, I don’t know, water and… draining! The emptying, which has literally been freaking me out for weeks, just thinking about it! And there are even the sides of the box that protrude outwards to widen the place. A haunted house !
Especially since the person accompanying me has already given me the diagnosis of the most clumsy human being she has met in her life.
That’s tough for a mechanic’s son. Vile, very low. Fortunately, my level of self-esteem is quite high, otherwise I would dive. But I have 14 years of politics on the clock, I’ve seen it snow and I know how to recognize when someone tries to play me in the head.
To counter this slander, a friend who knows about it will shoot me a homemade video in which he will explain to me how all the widgets work. I will thus make myself cinema to operate.
What also bothers me with the RV is that I am used to ranting about following on the road these steamers driven by too many retirees – I am one, by the way – who have a mania for respecting the speed limits and follow the Highway Code.
Come on ! We love it, grandpa! We would like to arrive at our destination this month! But they don’t give a damn, slugs. They have their lives ahead of them, in fact what is left to them, and they don’t give a damn about the 47 vehicles on average that follow them closely.
It won’t happen to me! Indeed, shelter!
Between us
Tell me, is there WiFi in the campsites?