If you've read this far, by which I mean past the letters R and V, you and I need to talk. It may well be that a deeply repressed aspect of your personality is calling out to you. How do I know? Let's just say I'm in touch with my inner RVer. He used to speak to me whenever some majestic Winnebago passed my cramped station wagon on the highway. If you had one of those, he would ask, would your wife use the nifty onboard bathroom instead of making us pull over every 15 minutes? Would the kids finally stop asking, "Are we there yet?" Would a family road trip actually be relaxing? Friends, if you haven't moved on to the next article, perhaps you've had that same conversation.

And perhaps I can help you. For seven days last summer, my family--my wife, Sarah, six-year-old Nick, four-year-old Alex and I--gave in to that strange inner man's siren song. With the help of a state-of-the-art motor home, we set out to experience an RV from the perspective of the first-time renter, the family willing to shell out anywhere between $550 and $1,300 (not including gas, food, any mileage charges and campground fees) for a week of vehicular liberation. As personally meaningful as this mission was for me, it also had a serious journalistic purpose: to find out what's behind the recent upsurge in RV popularity (rentals were up nearly 30 percent in 1997), to explore the RV's potential for families and--no less important--to know what it feels like to drive something nearly as big as the house we live in.

For a week in July, we roamed upstate New York and Massachusetts, cooking, eating, playing, reading, bathing, dressing and sleeping in our 29-foot-long Jayco Type C recreational vehicle. We spent the nights in campgrounds, RV parks and relatives' yards. We learned to operate battery-charging generators and water-saving toilets. We opened our wallets to buy tanks of gas ($55 a pop) and held our noses to empty tanks of blackwater (what RVers call sewage). By the week's end, we had found answers to those nagging questions that you and I--and our inner RVers--have long pondered. You know the ones I mean...



Jonathan Adolph is the Features Editor of FAMILYFUN magazine.

Please keep in mind that phone numbers, addresses, and prices are subject to change. Updated July 2005.