Fiddlers Cove
We traded our spot on the beach for three weeks overlooking San Diego bay. Our new digs are Fiddlers Cove Marina and RV Park, operated by the Navy on the Silver Strand, south of Coronado Island. I’m hoping from the picture of Fiddlers Cove, that you will agree that this is a very special place.
RV dream
We didn’t have an RV dream, but we did have a travel dream. I wanted to go to the show to see some of the smallest RVs available called Conversion Vans. I didn’t figure on buying one, but they seemed to be a good fit for a vacation or a series of vacations and you could go almost anywhere in them.
Trailers
My father had a trailer, and I was not interested. Mostly because the trailer in our family wasn’t used – almost ever, even when we went camping, the trailer sat in the front yard (off to the side of the house) and aged. The weather wasn’t kind to it — winter in Colorado had faded the bright white paint into a dull grey and the bright blue color faded to a dusky grey. The reason the trailer wasn’t used was that my mother hated it. She said that she had to do the same amount of work, all in a space not big enough to turn around. Besides that, we were a big family.
Even while we were young, that small trailer, with one bed, was a huge challenge. I remember one time, sitting in the rain, all day long, playing cards with my two oldest brothers. We were learning how to count to 21. Dad was dealing. Mom stayed home with the youngest two children and we wanted to be outside fishing. I think that this was the last time the trailer ever moved from its location in the front yard. When my father died, Mom gave the trailer away to the first person who was brave enough to drive across the grass.
Tents
I did spend lots of time in tents, and that was my style of camping. When I had kids, backpacking changed to car camping, in slightly bigger tents.
As I got older and my kids got older, tent camping lost its appeal due to the amount of work involved, getting ready, setting up, tearing down, and putting away was just too much work. My daughters weren’t interested and family vacations were driving to go see family, even if it meant me staying in a tent, in the backyard.
RV show
It was a little more than a year ago (the summer of 2016) that we went to an RV show. It wasn’t a real RV show but rather an RV dealer rented space in the stadium parking lot and moved most of their inventory to that location, to pretend to be an RV show and get some interested people to show up and walk through some RVs to promote the RV dream.
Tami didn’t want to go to the RV show, but to humor me, went anyway. I had little interest in “RVs”, Tami had none. I didn’t expect to be impressed with the commercial van conversions but thought I might get some ideas, perhaps to make my own surf van. Everyone knows surf vans are cool and homemade surf vans are way cool. I was turned off by the plastic interiors and cramped space. For me, the show was a bust. Conversion vans were not big enough. They were even smaller than my father’s trailer – Tami however, had a spark that ignited in her imagination.
On the way out of the show, we walked through a couple of RVs with slide-outs. This made the RV much wider when you are camping than when you are driving down the road. With slide-outs on each side of the living room, the RV grew to about twelve feet wide. Two people could live comfortably and travel in an RV with slide-outs.
Here is a link to the google map for the area.
Link to our 2018 Route.
Link to our route: San Diego to Las Vegas.
Our blog page doesn’t allow comments after one month… So much for me controlling it – I am not a coder… Please comment anyway, by filling out the form at the bottom. Be sure to mention which post you are commenting on, I will be glad to manually insert them.
Tough lifestyle.