It’s a year-and-a-half since I last posted on this blog, and that post was about my then-new Mennonite heritage blog, 500 Years of Migration. It’s about 6 years since we’ve posted anything about travel here, when Sande uploaded photos from our Dec 2015 trip to Florida with grandchild Mackenzie, sister Char, and her family.
It’s not that we haven’t done any travelling since 2015. We went to France in 2017 (not much road-tripping or camping there, though); on separate trips to Texas and to Victoria, BC (via Yellowstone, Wounded Knee, Mt Rushmore, the Sunshine Coast, and most of the northern states) in 2018; and back to Victoria (a flight this time) and Texas (via the Natchez Trace from Nashville to Natchez, Mississippi) in 2019. I don’t know why we didn’t write anything here about those trips: there were some adventures.
But Sande inherited her family’s cottage on Lake Huron in 2015, and we’ve spent most of our summers there, not only enjoying that Great Lake, but doing a lot of renovations and general maintenance of the property. I retired in 2017 and, that fall, took up my age-old obsession with bicycles—riding them, repairing them (volunteering with several bike-related community organizations), and collecting them.
In late September 2018, my friend Alan and I did a 10-day, 900-km bike ride around southwestern Ontario (a tour of towns and cities named after world capitals) and along the lakeshore east of Toronto as far Napanee, then up into the Kawartha Highlands, ending up with paddling to Alan’s brother’s cabin on a remote lake north of Havelock.
So, yeah, there are things we could have written about over the last 6 years, but, alas, we didn’t. COVID, of course, has put a serious crimp on travel in the last two years. Now, however, I am thinking that we might just have more content to post on this blog. And that’s partly down to COVID.
In one of our first posts on this site (“The Story to Date,” posted Dec 24, 2011), I mentioned that in the fall of 2009, when we first started to plan for our great south-western adventure, we were seriously considering getting a camper van for the journey. In my investigations of small motorhomes, I quickly homed in on Roadtreks, the most popular brand of camper van in North America, which happened to be built in Kitchener. Eventually, we rejected that idea and decided to do the trip in our intrepid 2001 Volvo V40 wagon.
But off and on over the intervening years, we’ve talked again about getting a camper van, and I’ve again looked at what was available on kijiji and AutoTrader. It seems we just couldn’t get the idea out of our heads, though there was always a reason not to pursue one seriously. Then COVID hit. We were supposed to fly to Victoria again for Easter 2020 (two of our children and their partners now live there, and Kieran and Liz had just bought and moved into their first house), but, of course, that trip was postponed and finally cancelled completely.
In the fall of 2020, it started to look like we might be able to travel again in the summer of 2021. Sande decided that a motorhome would be just the ticket (if the borders were opened to inter-provincial travel), as it would keep us pretty self-contained in our journey across the country and even during our stay in Victoria if necessary. When I started looking into it, however, I found that camper vans were in very short supply and very expensive. It seems that every young person/couple who couldn’t work at the office anymore decided it was time to go off-grid.
I spent at least a month last winter watching YouTube videos and reading blogs about converting Transit vans into motorhomes and living in them. I came up with a design that I thought would work for us and compiled a spreadsheet listing all of the components that would be required (electrical, plumbing, and propane systems, and so on). But when I started looking for a suitable used van, I ran into the same wall I’d hit with camper vans: there were very few available, and they were listed for at least $10,000 more than they had been a few months previously. I realized it would cost us at least $80,000 to build the van we wanted, and we weren’t willing to do that.
We started planning a trip west in our Volvo for the summer of 2021, but then learned that three of our children were planning to come to Ontario. A couple of them wanted to throw a 65th birthday party here for Sande. It therefore made less and less sense and became increasingly hard to schedule a trip west for ourselves.
In the meantime, I was still keeping an eye on camper vans, and I noticed that there were more and more for sale, and prices were dropping some. As things opened up and people were getting back to normal routines, including working more in the office, many were getting rid of their COVID campers. I set up an automatic notification on kijiji so that I would hear about every new listing for a Class B motorhome.
Two weeks ago, as soon as the notification email came in, I checked out an ad for a 1998 Roadtrek 190 Popular. Located in Etobicoke, it had only 127,000 km on it, and it was precisely the model I’d been most interested in back in 2009 (indeed, I think this exact van was one of the ones I looked at back then, for sale by a guy in Putnam, Ontario). It was a few thousand dollars less than similar vehicles that had been listed over the last month, and it had a $4500 solar system, a set of new Michelin tires, and a bunch of suspension work and other upgrades done in the past year. It was being sold by a young couple who had it for just over a year (it was, indeed, a COVID alternative workplace), but they were expecting their first baby imminently and needed to unload it.
I sent a message immediately and made an appointment to see it on Friday morning. The next day, I got a message saying that the baby had arrived, so we’d have to postpone until Saturday. When we got there first thing Saturday morning, Paul spent an hour-and-a-half with us, explaining and demonstrating all the features and quirks, taking us for a long test drive. We offered his asking price, but he wanted to show it to the 3 or 4 others who had asked to see it. He agreed, however, that if someone else offered more, we would be given a chance to up our offer.
As it turned out, the one couple that matched our offer on Saturday had second thoughts and pulled out, so, by Sunday evening, we had a firm purchase agreement. Paul delivered the van to us on Tuesday afternoon, we handed over a cheque and he a receipt and the transfer document, and I drove him home in the Volvo. Finally, after 12 years, we actually owned a Roadtrek class B motorhome, the camper van of our dreams, and it was parked in our driveway.
The next day, I organized insurance and made appointments to get a safety inspection at a local garage and to transfer the ownership and get a temporary permit at Service Ontario. I ordered a driver’s side electric window regulator and motor to repair the only big thing that seemed to be wrong with the vehicle: that window would go down, but not back up again.
The second night we had it, I plugged in to “shore” power, turned on the propane, and fired up the gas furnace. We brought out sleeping bags, pillows, and my CPAP machine. We had a very comfortable and rather longer than usual sleep in our new camper. Yes, we were in our driveway, but it felt like an adventure. The next day, our neighbour said we could park it and sleep in his driveway if we really wanted to get a feel for the way it travelled.
I spent a lot of time over the next week reading the manuals, figuring out all of the systems, and fixing little things that I wasn’t happy with. I realized that the 12-volt “house” battery was pretty weak and wouldn’t hold a charge to power lights for long at all, so I bought a new one at Canadian Tire. I online-ordered a new latch for the water heater’s exterior vent cover and repaired the broken closet door latch. We drove up to the cottage and back early this week to see how it runs in real conditions, and were very happy with the way it handles.
Yesterday, our Roadtrek passed the safety inspection, after the mechanic installed the new window regulator: they couldn’t find anything else wrong with it. On Monday, I’ll get the permanent permit, and we’ll be ready to go. I’ve started moving some of our camping equipment into the cupboards and cubby-holes. I’ve got a list of other things we still need to buy (a bike rack is near the top) and things we still need to fix. We’ve started blue-skying travel ideas.
You should be hearing more from us in the not-too-distant future.
Travels without Pinot 
Thanks Rick for sharing this. I love to read yours and Sandi’s posts. Congratulations on your camper van purchase. Happy trails!
Had to go back and get up to speed…