truffles over the campfire. If this kind of thing is up your personal alley, get inspired by picking up MaryJane Butters’s Glamping with MaryJane (Gibbs Smith). Girl Camper (https://girlcamper.com) is an online community and resource specifically for women on the road, with a strong emphasis on glamping. And for those who can’t afford to jump in and start such an undertaking themselves, a growing number of high-end campgrounds offer glamper accommodations in vintage trailers.
International tourists
“I will live in Montana. And I will marry a round American woman and raise rabbits, and she will cook them for me. And I will have a pickup truck … maybe even a ‘recreational vehicle.’ And drive from state to state. Do they let you do that?”
—Soviet Captain Vasili Borodin, in The Hunt for Red October
THE GYPSY IN THE SOUL
In the 2021 film Nomadland, van-lifer Fern, on a visit with her family, has her lifestyle defended by her embarrassed sister, who says she’s like one of the pioneers. It’s not a terrible comparison, especially when you’re looking for a road to a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) campground out West, and you feel like a befuddled trail guide who got the whole wagon train lost in Donner Party country. But the far better metaphor is the Rom.
In the 19th century, the Rom were the remarkable Romany people, commonly called “gypsies.” Their roots are uncertain — a mysterious people without a country of their own, almost perpetually on the move. Typically, they hunkered down in winter. They lived in wagons called vardos, famed for their interior woodwork, and if you’ve peeked into one in a museum, the comparison with an RV is too obvious to miss.
One of the best books about them is The Gypsies by Jan Yoors (Waveland Press), a Belgian who ran away to live with the gypsies when he was 12. His academic parents permitted it, and it went on for years, while he came home often enough to keep them from renting out his room. Yoors wrote about the deep family ties of the Rom, but the other building block of life was the kumpania, the people they traveled with. A great prejudice existed against the gypsies, and so, to live on the road, they developed a complex set of signs for one another, to tell their kumpania who followed whether the town they were coming to was safe and what resources they would find when they got there.
But RVers today have the Romany code beat all hollow, with incredible amounts of information and mutual aid, in the form of resources like YouTube and the Internet. You don’t have to be Daniel Boone anymore, chopping down trees with your bare teeth and whittling snow tires out of deposits of snow. The refinement of the Internet and the invention of Wi-Fi has made it possible for improbable people to strike out for parts unknown, with the comfort of their own kumpania, a group of like-minded people who will help and support them.
If you’re walking through a campground as the sun goes down, it’s getting more and more commonplace to hear couples and families speaking a foreign language — Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Romanian, Chinese, German. These international travelers visit the United States to actually see and experience it at ground level. The rise in popularity of renting RVs over the last decade has made it easy for anyone in the world to plan their own uniquely American RV vacation. The American landscape is every bit as alluring to other people around the world, and the romance of Route 66 and the endless highway has been exported nearly everywhere by our pop culture.
The Song of the Open Road
More than anything else, mobility defines the RV lifestyle. RVs are the ideal symbol for so many Americans because they call to mind distant horizons, exploring the unknown, and the eternal, impatient wanderlust to see what lies beyond the next turn in the road. Roads are important to RVers for the same reason planes are important to pilots. But they don’t just carry us where we want to go. Roads define us, and so the famous ones become something tons of RVers want to experience.
“Intrepid autoists”
In 1903, Horatio Nelson Jackson and his co-driver, Sewell Crocker, were the first people to drive an automobile across the United States. It took just over two months. Jackson did it on a bet to prove cars were more than a passing fad, and it made headlines. Their feat made it all too clear that American roads were just plain lousy. They didn’t have it much better than a Conestoga wagon on the Oregon Trail.
In the two decades that followed, cars became an ordinary part of American life, but anyone driving one farther than church on Sunday was considered an “intrepid autoist.” The few highways built were privately funded by consortiums of businessmen, and they were called auto trails. The quality was miserable by our standards, often macadam (a gravel surface) or just plain dirt. A few small, expensive sections were brick.
Those early highways covered some ambitious stretches: the Atlantic Highway, down the eastern seaboard from Maine to Miami; the Lee Highway, from Washington, D.C., to San Diego; and the National Old Trails Road, from Baltimore to San Francisco. The most famous one was the Lincoln Highway, from New York’s Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The promoters who financed them loved romantic or memorable names, like the Dixie Highway, the Yellowstone Trail, and El Camino Real. And those names stuck to those routes, even to the present. But taking a trip on one, particularly the whole way, was a little like climbing Mount Everest.
The big change came in 1919, in the wake of one embarrassing, high-profile trip. The U.S. Army sent out a highly-publicized expedition on the Lincoln Highway to see how long it would take for a convoy of military vehicles to cross the country by road, if the time ever came to defend the West Coast. The answer was a dismal 62 days, just one day shorter than Jackson and Crocker had taken 16 years before. By the end of the journey, none of the men on the convoy had been killed, but there were an almost unimaginable 230 road accidents and many injuries.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING: IT’S A GIFT
For an idea of early 1930s cross-country auto travel, watch one of the funniest of the W.C. Fields comedies, It’s a Gift (1934). The scenes with Fields and his family camping out along the roadside in auto camps are a pretty accurate representation of a trip from New Jersey to Los Angeles on one of the early U.S. routes of the period, where motels and restaurants along the way were a convenience that couldn’t be counted on.
So, the federal government decided to get in the road-building business. A young officer on the trip, Dwight Eisenhower, never forgot his battle to cross “Darkest America.” Later, as a famed general during World War II, he saw firsthand the Autostrade in Italy and the Autobahn in Germany, the great European “superhighways,” and he wanted something similar for the United States.
Getting scientific
Between 1926 and 1956, the United States went on a 30-year road-building binge, creating the United States Numbered Highway System (sometimes referred to as Federal Highways or U.S. Routes). By the end of it, the infamous two months it had taken to cross the country fell to just two weeks.
You’d think people would appreciate all that work. But the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), the