Rolling Condos and Timeshare Camping Lots
It gets cold here at night! We saw on the Weather Channel that it got down to 39 degrees last night. I wasn't expecting that, and had to sleep with my socks on. Yes, we have cable TV here, along with city water and 30 amp electrical service. We would have used the propane furnace, perhaps, but the Pleasureway malfunctioned this morning: We tried to heat up some water, and the propane detector went off deafeningly. We aired the place out and tried it again. Same deal. I had to crank off the propane valve. So no furnace, and no hot water.
Not to sweat. (And we're not sweating, heh.) The Tiger Run Resort has hot showers, a huge heated swimming pool, two hot tubs, tennis courts, and lots of other things. It's camping, but barely. At least half of the RV sites have been converted into little log cabins, some on double lots with enormous half-million-dollar Prevost conversions (basically, Grayhound buses turned into rolling condos) cozied up to the cabins. This is not your typical RV camp. Every site is privately owned, and many owners allow the resort to rent the site or cabin when they're not using them-which is how we got a site for these three nights.
I don't know (and haven't dared ask) what sort of mileage some of these behemoths get, but gas is less an issue than you might think, for the following reason: Most owners move them just a few times per year, often only twice, following seasonable weather between the desert Southwest and more northern climes. An astonishing number of people live in them year-round as their only homes, and spend four or six months in one place, then moving to another for several more months. Some own RV sites at two places like Tiger Run and just oscillate between them as weather demands. Others stay for several months at each site, but never at the same site twice.
Again, this morning we went hiking along the Colorado Trail, which meanders for 500 miles between Denver and Durango and passes right by Tiger Run. There's a lot of dead wood on the ground, which concerns me-if this forest ever goes up, there will be a lot of bone-dry kindling to stoke the inferno. I found it interesting that a lot of the dead logs (all pines of one species or another) seem to have a spiral twist to them. (See photo at left.) Such a twist is not apparent in any of the living trees, and may be hidden by the bark. There are juniper bushes here and there, and hummingbirds zipping around in between trees.
We're coming back home tomorrow afternoon. Tiger Run has Wi-Fi, but the system is still under construction and we're in the far corner of the resort, flirting with a dead spot. I was able to get mail down and a couple of messages sent, but the connection doesn't hold long enough for my bigger images to get through. So I suspect I won't be able to upload this until we get home.
Are we ever going to buy our own RV? I'm still not sure. It's a lot of money and another huge, complicated mechanism to store and take care of. The Pleasureway is too small, and I can't see myself driving something the size of a bus. There are things in the middle, but they're rarely offered for rent, and I really don't want to buy this big a pig in that big a poke. We'll see.