How Not to Retire

The inspiration for writing this how-not-to instructional essay came to me while I sat on a picnic table outside of the dumbest purchase I’ve made in 65 years, my cursed Volkswagen-powered Winnebago Rialta, listening to Motion City Soundtrack’s “LGFUAD” for the nth time on New Year’s Day 2014. I was cold, frustrated, and stranded and had been all three of those for more than six weeks. If I had imagined retirement would be such unrewarding, complicated, stressful, expensive work, I’d have stuck with my job till I dropped dead from boredom. At work, at least I got paid to be bored. Retirement in an RV is all outgoing cash flow and the only satisfaction I can look forward to is the knowledge that this damn life has a limited warranty. That is, in a nutshell, how not to retire.

For three weeks of our internment in New Mexico, we’ve been doing our best to enjoy the moderate and sunny New Mexico weather. The first three weeks were spent struggling with Albuquerque area “mechanics” and mooching off of friends.  Once we gave up on finding someone who could fix a Volkswagen in Albuquerque and made a desperate dive south for sun and warmth, some of the misery moderated into resignation. The dramatic scenery around Truth or Consequences kept us partially distracted while I struggled with the various incompetent and manufacturer-unsupported power-train problems VW designed into the universally-detested but precisely named “Eurovan.” (Think “Eurotrash” and you’ll know why VW accidentally tagged this heap of junk with a near-truth-in-advertising nickname.)

I handed in my resignation notice and applied for Social Security in July. I spent most of the summer wrapping up my education employment, selling as much of the artifice of my professional audio career as I could find buyers for, and trying to convince my wife that we own way too much junk and should pay someone to empty our house and haul it all to a trash dump. Two out of three ain’t bad, right?

We’ve been on the road since a few days before Halloween and, we enjoyed slightly less than a month where our misnamed “recreational vehicle” served as both transportation and a residence. For the rest of the time, we’ve been living in this thing in the same way hobos live in refrigerator packing cartons or prisoners live in their cells. Our RV is an overweight travel trailer without a hitch or a tow vehicle. The good news is that we managed to limp across eastern New Mexico to Truth or Consequences (TorC), where we have shuffled from Elephant Butte Lake to TorC, trying not to overstay in the park or overspend in town. For the moment, the rolling pile of junk rolls well enough to travel a few miles before self-destructing. That may be as much as can be expected from a German vehicle, based on the comments I’ve heard from New Mexico mechanics regarding all things Hessian. They may be the “Master Race” in their own minds, but the rest of the world rates German vehicles somewhere below cheap Chinese toys.

Being stranded in New Mexico wasn’t our plan. When we laid out our first year of retirement, we imagined ourselves travelling from Minnesota to Texas to California and Oregon through. “Best laid plans” and all that. We planned to completely avoid winter for the first month, but we drove right into a “storm of the century” just west of Dallas. By the time we straggled into Carlsbad, New Mexico, our vehicle had acquired a one-inch layer of ice and our VW’s electronics demonstrated an allergy to moisture and the electronically-controlled transmission developed a “genuine people personality.” From that point on, our recreational vehicle was not that recreational and rarely qualified as a vehicle. Two months later, we’re looking at renting a house or apartment in Truth or Consequences so we can hand our VW over to someone until they can bring it back to life or set it on fire.  This is not what the AAA and ARP travel magazines are talking about when they jabber about the joys of being retired.

However, from conversations we’ve had with other travelers, it turns out that our experience is not unusual. Repeatedly, when we meet other RV-owners, we are regaled with tales of near-bankruptcy, being stranded in awful places, and the trauma of having to abandon the family home (the mobile home, that is) because it died in a place where it was unrepairable. There is no shortage of such places, either. Depending on the vehicle you own, even the most urban locations might be a ghost town when it comes to finding a mechanic who can service a rolling house full of cobbled-together parts and mediocre engineering.

None of this experience comes without emotional costs, either. My wife and I have had next-to-no problems with living in close quarters, but the division of responsibility has been cause for communication breakdown. If yours’ is a typical relationship, where one partner carries 90% of the family responsibilities, and the other is along for the ride, don’t expect that to improve in an RV. Driving an RV is dozens of times more complicated than driving a car and if you are the family driver, you better like driving because you’re going to be doing all of it. If you paid the bills and dealt with “the big problems” when your household was stationary, you are not going to be seeing that division of labor improve on the road. An RV is just a house with the added reliability issues of a vehicle and, usually, the vehicle problems are going to be multiples of what you’re used to from a more purely single-purpose automobile.

The painful fact is that RV’s are second-rate vehicles, at best. Let’s face it, nothing good comes from the territory where most RVs and travel trailers are designed and built; Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, and other seriously economically and socially depressed states. RVs come from the Rust Belt backwoods where there are lots of disposable low-skilled, low-paid temporary laborers, but where no self-respecting manufacturing or design engineer would be caught dead. Nobody goes through four or six years of painful engineering classes thinking, “Boy, I can’t wait to build trailers and motorhomes when I graduate.” This is a career of last resort and only the worst of the worst get stuck with a last resort (Think “nuclear power plant engineers.”)  All of that combines to make the perfect storm of unreliable, low-quality, poorly engineered products.

The little-known-fact about motorhomes, RVs if you will, is that they are nothing more than motorized trailers and, once you’re living in one, you become trailer-trash. By that I mean, you are living in a pile of junk that will need constant maintenance because the morons who design and build this crap think hot glue is the ultimate assembly tool. Everything in your RV will have to be disassembled, cleaned, and reassembled with proper fasteners and adhesives after you have lived in it for less than a year. If you think roving the country in a motorhome is going to be a vacation, you’re clueless. If you are going to stay on the road, you are going to have to be, or become, an expert mechanic, a welder, a mechanic, an electrician, a long-haul trucker, a finish carpenter, and very, very patient. You will probably have to redesign several of your vehicle’s systems, so you need some serious engineering skills or a whole bag full of one-hundred dollar bills.

With that in mind, it’s important to consider how many of any of those skills you are willing to develop and exercise. If you are on the extreme end of the DIY world, it’s probably reasonable to consider poorly supported and unfamiliar power trains from Volkswagen, Mercedes, Renault, and other brands and models that only you will be able to service. If you want to have any hope of getting outside assistance when your vehicle breaks—and it will—you better play it safe and buy something every shade tree mechanic can cobble back together. In the USofA,That means Ford, Dodge, and GM and you better think twice about opting for the diesel offerings even from those car companies because competent diesel mechanics are almost as rare as unicorns.

There is a breed of, mostly retired, people who proudly call themselves “full-timers.” That, in un-obscured English, means “homeless.” These folks live in a variety of RVs, from beat-up old pickup toppers to sixty-foot behemoths lugging more luxury than most mansions, 365 days a year. There is something odd about the “pride in a patch” attitude full timers exhibit. If they lived in trailer courts, many of these people would be embarrassed to describe their homes. Since they hobo across the country, pretending to be “camp hosts” to obtain free campsites and, sometimes fuel and a pittance, they elevate their status to the “full timer” label. Calling them “janitor” would be insulting, but doing janitorial work for sub-minimum wages and the honor of parking in a “camp host” space seems to be some kind of status symbol among the full timers.