Sharing the motorhome love

My wife and I have had some lengthy discussions recently about possibly selling our motorhome due to lack of use.

Unlike a house boat which is typically moored out of sight when not in use, there’s no missing a 24 foot white elephant when it’s parked in your front yard.

The first month or so into a period of motorhome disuse passes without comment but after a while, those glimpses of motorhome as you reverse out the drive become much more calculating, more evaluative.

You start to add up how many dollars are sitting there doing nothing and resentment starts to creep in. It's like that feeling you get when friends visit and they overstay their welcome. You love them but you can’t help thinking…

And like almost every relationship in trouble, money is usually at the root of it. In my household, sacrifices have been made to allow an RV to share our life; 1980s green still adorns our kitchen bench tops with zero budget for redecorating any time soon.  

We’ve just finally got rid of Liberace’s curtains from our living room. Lion mane yellow, striped and as patterned as a gazelle, the curtains were so loud even the neighbours complained!

So instead of loving glances towards our motorhome parked proudly on the front lawn and visions of our next big escape, we are focusing instead on the dying grass under each oversized wheel. It’s starting to cast a big black shadow over our lives… well, the side porch anyway.

So when I caught my wife looking dreamily at ‘The Beast’ the other day, hoping for inspiration, I said “Whatcha thinking about?”

“Caesarstone bench tops,” she replied.

I too would love to see the back of those grass green kitchen surfaces but I’m not so keen on our next summer holidays being spent in a tent and my wife fantasizing about a new kitchen is not something you want to let run on unchecked.

So I told her I’d think more about it and then genius that I am, came up with a way to keep the van and perhaps get the kitchen too.  

So we’re now a couple of months into a new phase of motorhome ownership I’m calling ‘blended use’.

In the past, we used our van exclusively for travel and completely overlooked the fact a motorhome is also a tiny house when stationary. So rather than wait until we have a clear run at getting a trip away, we have been parking our RV in advance at places where we would like to spend some more time and then either flying or driving to join it.

For the past few weeks, our motorhome has been parked up in Sydney. We do quite a bit of business in Sydney and also have family and friends here, so parking our van there for five weeks has made a much deeper Sydney experience possible and it has been truly fabulous.

Meanwhile, during the last school holidays, we had the idea of parking our van back home then inviting our Sydney ‘host’ friends to come try the RV experience in our back yard. They loved it, and we really enjoyed sharing our RV too.

So now we’re thinking of sharing with people we don’t know. Yep, it turns out not everyone has an RV and quite a few people are willing to pay a small sum to experience one (hello ‘kitchen bench top’ money).

With almost no research, you’ll find several websites where you can list your motorhome for rent when you’re not using it but the thought of added maintenance costs on our delicate older van puts this out of consideration for us.  

After slightly more research however, I discovered accommodation websites that let you list not only a room for short term rent or your whole house if you like, but a more interesting space like a tree house, Yurt or static RV.

A quick profile and nice photo and our ‘Classic RV Accommodation Experience’ was listed on a well-known accommodation sharing website.  In no time at all, I had four separate enquiries from as far away as Canada, all interested in staying in our self-contained old motorhome in a lovely space we created in our rambling back garden.

Unfortunately our motorhome was at the time buried in a foot of hailstones with a river of run-off water passing beneath it in ‘not so sunny Sydney’. Which meant it couldn’t be made available on the requested dates and I reluctantly paused the listing after my wife wisely suggested I wait until our motorhome is actually, well... available.

So back to present day and we are again reunited with our beloved motorhome and I truly am glad we didn’t sell the old girl.

The hail doesn’t appear to have cracked her shell and I am going to buy a new mattress for our paying guests and iron out a few other minor details (insurance?). Then, you never know…

We might just see an end to ‘green’ in the McCann family kitchen and if so, it will be all thanks to our mighty motorhome.