Tips for the traveler: don’t pack up cares and woes

The big news out of the Recreational Vehicles Industry Association trade show this week in Louisville, Ky., was that sales of RVs jumped a whopping 18 percent in 2002. The 300,000 units of self-contained transport sold smashes the old record, set back when Conestogas were all the rage and land in Oklahoma was free. The year 2003 looks even better.

The industry’s explanation for this land yacht boom is twofold. Americans – a wanderlustful bunch if ever there was one – love to move around but are wary of air travel (terrorists, airport hassles) and cruises (especially since the organized activities were expanded to include group vomiting); we want a safer way to see the sights. Americans also are more family oriented these days and demonstrate this admirable trend by living together for two weeks at a stretch in an 8-by-40-foot box.

I’m not looking to pick a fight with the RVIA, but the association may have overlooked another reason. We are nation hooked on ever-larger SUVs and we know how addicts always seek the greater rush. When getting in your daily ride requires a stepladder, what bigger thrill can there be come vacation time than to steer 15 tons of cheap upholstery and imitation wood paneling down the road? Like I said, I’m not looking to pick a fight.

The people of Maine need not be told that RVs are hot and not just because we spend much of our summers staring at their rear ends on those narrow strips of asphalt much of Maine has in lieu of highways. We know this because, having read and watched the many farewell interviews given lately by Gov. King, that the nearly former first family of Maine is about to join the hookups and dump station crowd.

The gubernatorial RV, we learned in a TV interview the other night, is not merely bought, it is all packed up and ready to go, parked in the gubernatorial mom’s driveway down in Virginia. By the time the next governor brings down the gavel for the first time, the current governor told his interviewer, the King family will be passing through Saco, on their way to spending five and a half months in a six-miles-per-gallon home.

My family once took such a trip – three months, the summer and fall of ’86, VW camper from Texas through the Midwest, Eastern Canada, New England, the Southeast. Perhaps the lessons learned from our experience can be of value to the governor.

Perhaps, given the governor’s knack for being ahead of the curve, not. I was going to offer this as Lesson 1: Don’t overpack. Anything you need can be picked up along the way, excess baggage just makes finding something you really need all the more difficult and often turns out to be the very cares and woes you wanted to ditch. The governor clearly has figured this out already – leaving at home a billion-dollar deficit and his collection of budget-balancing gimmicks will leave lots of room for souvenirs.

Lesson 2 would have been this: Don’t overdo a good thing. That is, just because a little of something is good does not mean a lot will be great. One of our favorite places was the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota and Ontario; rugged, wild, gorgeous scenery. Our mistake was to keep heading north, up to someplace with a name like White Fang where it was sleeting in late July and where the truck stop that was the only restaurant in town served nothing but lunchmeat sandwiches on Wonder bread. The governor is unlikely to make this mistake – his reluctance to direct anything northward has been amply demonstrated during the last eight years.

(Incidentally, in reading through the news archives of this administration the other day, I came upon something Gov. King said at the time of his first inauguration: The added costs of living in Brunswick and commuting daily to Augusta would be offset by the savings that would accrue from the many days he’d be working in Portland. Seems more significant now than it did then.)

Travel, of course, is about more than shopping and sightseeing. It’s about people, all the new and interesting friends you make along the way. Lesson 3: Mingle.

There are two ways to do this. The hard way is to bone up on all the various local cultures you’ll pass through so you can chat knowingly about hockey in Halifax and NASCAR in Asheville and soybean price supports in Keokuk. The shallowness of this knowledge, however, is often exposed and can lead to embarrassment, even animosity.

The better way is to develop a line of patter that works anywhere; universal, obvious, even banal truths that will have native heads nodding in diners, gas stations and laundromats across the hemisphere. Gov. King has said repeatedly in his exit interviews that the main thing he’s learned during the last eight years is that budgeting is hard because everybody wants lower taxes but nobody wants their favorite government program cut. Perfect.

Finally: Timing. Migratory birds know its importance, so should the RV traveler. The RVIA even warns that, although efficient central heating has made their vehicles quite comfy in cold climates, there are cases in which the larger models have become quite stuck when venturing too far down narrow country roads made even more narrow by snow banks.

The King itinerary is a model of adroit timing. The return to Maine is scheduled for late June. This coincides nicely with the end of the Maine school year for the motor home-schooled kids. Another glorious Maine summer will be in full bloom. The Maine Legislature will have adjourned, the wrenching decisions about tax increases and program cuts will have been made, the legislative acrimony and public ire should have subsided. Like I said, ahead of the curve.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.