Meanders with Mammoth

                                Like their modern relatives, mammoths were quite large.
                                                                                             - the encyclopedia

Mammoth, short for Mammoth Money Eater, is an RV. Parked next to anything normal--like a house--it looks gi-normous.  Parked out by itself, if you're far enough away...it still looks gi-normous. But on the lot next to the other machines, it looked reasonably small. And approachable.

And--more important--affordable.  Borrowing a little from an employee stock fund and cleaning out our savings account pretty much did the trick. And now it's at home, sitting beside our house and dwarfing it by comparison.

The roof is leaking because it's been raining all day. It wasn't leaking when we looked at it and clearly hadn't been leaking before we looked at it or we'd have seen the water damage. So we can only hope that when they re-sealed the roof, they first cleaned off the old seal and then missed a spot with the new one.

But that's not such a big (no pun intended) deal. The big deal is that my husband and I finally decided we were too old and too lazy to haul out the camping gear on any sort of regular basis. In fact, we had been using that as an excuse not to go camping at all. We used to go practically all the time, even after we bought a house and "settled down."  But then we did the childbearing thing, so we were bound by the schedule of the school year--we could only go traveling during spring break, fall break, and the hottest part of summer. Plus, since kids are people two, the places needed to be entertaining, kid friendly, and have a swimming pool. Oh, the sacrifices we made!

After the kids grew up, my husband went back to work but the job he found allowed only a week of vacation per year.  And then, when he finally retired for good, other things hit. Our daughter died and we didn't care much about anything for a while. Our son joined the army and was sent to Hawaii. We really liked Hawaii. But it cost a lot to visit him here--if we went once a year, there went the year's vacation budget. And then our son moved to Korea, where one visit cost us two year's of vacation money.  We were finally starting to have time to start traveling again, but no money.

One day a friend of my husband's started talking about an old RV he wanted to sell. A seed was planted; a tiny spark flamed. No more tents, camp stoves, motels, restaurants, or dog boarding--just wash the sheets, stock the fridge and load in the dog cages. With that kind of convenience, wouldn't we'd start camping again?

But the friend's RV, a 40-footer, was too big and too old. He's a great guy and offered to fix some of its issues, but the one issue he didn't offer to fix was the slide. Whenever he needed to close the slide, he had to take a long metal rod and lift it up. We watched him do it and it worked...but how long would it go on working?

Still, the seed was growing. We starting thinking we'd look around for something newer and shorter and when the time and price were right, we'd buy.

Then came "the vacation from bleah." We took a four day, motel-based road trip to see some wildlife and birds and just about anything different from the same old, same old.  We saw a little wildlife and a couple of birds, but what we mostly saw was our windshield and white lines on pavement. The motel balcony looked out over highway traffic. The restaurants were over priced and under par. The distance from motel to wildlife area meant that we could only go viewing during the hottest, most boring part of the day.

On the drive back home Ed started checking RV resellers.

A journey is supposed to change you, and this was no exception. You've heard the expression, "There's no place like here--there's no time like now"? The place was now here, the time was now now--and the price was now negotiable. The first RV that met most of our criteria was going to become ours.