RVs on the move

What’s your first thought when you learn that 8,300 mammoth recreational vehicles are converging on Brunswick for an RV convention in mid-August. And, worse, that a third of them will head afterward for Bangor, Ellsworth, Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park.

Panic. That’s the way it hit some area officials and campground operators when they first heard about the coming “RV Invasion.” These are not your modest campers or mobile homes hauled behind pickup trucks. These babies are top-of-the-line behemoths. They take up a lot of street space and parking space. Their average cost is $275,000, and some are priced at close to $2 million. People at the first big planning meeting gasped in horror at a home video with aerial views of traffic jams at an earlier RV convention at the Georgia State Fairgrounds.

Bar Harbor, with its narrow streets, couldn’t stand having the big rigs even drive through town, let alone find parking places. Routes 95 and1 and 1A will be something to see around August 20, when the Brunswick conclave has broken up and the RVs fan out to see more of Maine. Some 700 of them plan to drive on to Prince Edward Island for another convention and then probably return to this part of Maine to see the fall foliage.

Panic gave way to planning, however, and a reasonable plan has been devised. Officials have come to see the approaching RV influx more as an opportunity than a threat. After all, Georgia calculates on the basis of sales tax figures that the 1999 convention brought more than $30 million into the state. The estimate for what the coming convention will bring to Maine is $25 million. The problem is where to put 2,500 huge motor homes and how to keep the mostly older drivers and their families happy so that they will want to come again sometime-preferably in the “shoulder” season rather than the middle of August.

Mary Brooks, of the Bangor Convention and Visitors Bureau, says the Winterport Airport can take 500 of the RVs, a runway at Bangor International Airport is being freed up to take 200, and Bass Park, 300.

Private campgounds and parking lots probably can handle another 500. Most of the rigs trail automobiles behind them, and buses can take the RV people to the park if they don’t have their own cars.

The conventioneers will be warned in Brunswick against driving onto Mount Desert Island without a parking reservation. Those who get as far as Mount Desert Island will be stopped at the park entrance, advised about congestion and parking problems, and, if they don’t have reservations, probably advised to turn around and head for Bangor.

The conventions, run by the Family Motor Coach Association, have been held regularly-first annually, now twice a year – ever since the organization was founded in 1963 at Hinckley when some mobile home owners met to observe a lunar eclipse. This is the first time they have come back to Maine. Mary Brooks hopes they will return, and Jane Lincoln of the Maine Transportation Department reports that a feasibility study is in progress to see whether a light rail line and other means could carry future visitors from Bangor to the park.

Whether you are still panicked or whether you want to welcome the RVs, the people to hold responsible are Gov. Angus King and Secretary of Defense William Cohen. King asked Cohen to provide space for the vehicles at Naval Air Station Brunswick, and Cohen made it happen.

And if the RVs come back to Maine, King and Mary Herman may be among them. He has said that when his term as governor ends he will take six months to roam the country in an RV of his own.