Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

It gets cold here at night! We saw on the Weather Channel that it got down to 39 degrees last night. I wasn't expecting that, and had to sleep with my socks on. Yes, we have cable TV here, along with city water and 30 amp electrical service. We would have used the propane furnace, perhaps, but the Pleasureway malfunctioned this morning: We tried to heat up some water, and the propane detector went off deafeningly. We aired the place out and tried it again. Same deal. I had to crank off the propane valve. So no furnace, and no hot water.

Not to sweat. (And we're not sweating, heh.) The Tiger Run Resort has hot showers, a huge heated swimming pool, two hot tubs, tennis courts, and lots of other things. It's camping, but barely. At least half of the RV sites have been converted into little log cabins, some on double lots with enormous half-million-dollar Prevost conversions (basically, Grayhound buses turned into rolling condos) cozied up to the cabins. This is not your typical RV camp. Every site is privately owned, and many owners allow the resort to rent the site or cabin when they're not using them—which is how we got a site for these three nights.

I don't know (and haven't dared ask) what sort of mileage some of these behemoths get, but gas is less an issue than you might think, for the following reason: Most owners move them just a few times per year, often only twice, following seasonable weather between the desert Southwest and more northern climes. An astonishing number of people live in them year-round as their only homes, and spend four or six months in one place, then moving to another for several more months. Some own RV sites at two places like Tiger Run and just oscillate between them as weather demands. Others stay for several months at each site, but never at the same site twice.

Again, this morning we went hiking along the Colorado Trail, which meanders for 500 miles between Denver and Durango and passes right by Tiger Run. There's a lot of dead wood on the ground, which concerns me—if this forest ever goes up, there will be a lot of bone-dry kindling to stoke the inferno. I found it interesting that a lot of the dead logs (all pines of one species or another) seem to have a spiral twist to them. (See photo at left.) Such a twist is not apparent in any of the living trees, and may be hidden by the bark. There are juniper bushes here and there, and hummingbirds zipping around in between trees.

We're coming back home tomorrow afternoon. Tiger Run has Wi-Fi, but the system is still under construction and we're in the far corner of the resort, flirting with a dead spot. I was able to get mail down and a couple of messages sent, but the connection doesn't hold long enough for my bigger images to get through. So I suspect I won't be able to upload this until we get home.

Are we ever going to buy our own RV? I'm still not sure. It's a lot of money and another huge, complicated mechanism to store and take care of. The Pleasureway is too small, and I can't see myself driving something the size of a bus. There are things in the middle, but they're rarely offered for rent, and I really don't want to buy this big a pig in that big a poke. We'll see.

Boy, this is...different. My most brilliant spouse just called the Pleasureway Excel RV "an invitation to mindfulness." She nailed it: If you don't pay attention to everything you do (and try to live as you do at home) you will end up black and blue.

The problem is that the Pleasureway is small. It's a big van with some very clever appliances, but it's still just a big van. If you don't stoop and bow your head a little when you climb in the coach door, you clobber year head. If you get up too quickly from the bed/couch, you whack your head on the air conditioner. If you don't consciously pick up your foot before entering the bathroom, you will whack one or more toes and yell so loudly the neighbors will hear.

On the other hand, when lived in mindfully, the Pleasureway is comfortable and quite cozy. I think people who have overnighted on sailboats will know precisely what I mean. (The toilet is in fact identical to several I've seen below decks on cruise-boat excursion catamarans.) Every cubic inch of room inside the van body is put to use, but it's very much living in miniature. The bed is moderately comfortable, but it's a jackknife bed, built in three separate slabs that don't precisely line up to the same level, and there are cracks to drift into during the night.

That said, our first night here was fun in a young-marrieds sort of way. We used to tent camp a lot when we lived in Rochester and Baltimore, and this is a little like tent camping: You're always knee-deep in your stuff, with damp towels and swimsuits lying around draped over things, and coolers full of icemelt to dump regularly.

It's worth it. The photo above was taken from right behind the RV. Our site is on the bank of the Blue River maybe ten yards from a little waterfall, and we listened to the sounds of the water over the stones all night long. This morning we walked up an ancient jeep trail for a mile or so, huffing and puffing only a little. (Living for three years at 6,500 feet is excellent training for hiking at 9,100 feet.) The wildflowers were in exuberant bloom, including exquisite little wild roses, along with trail favorites like phlox, and many things we couldn't identify. A tiny snowmelt stream wandered along the old trail, burbling as it worked its way over logs and stones.

Even in mid-June, the surrounding peaks are all snow-covered, and I can only wonder what they look like in winter. We don't ski but we will probably come back to Breckenridge during ski season, just to see what it's about. I'm not sure I want to ski, but I always enjoyed sledding, and maybe somewhere they have a sledding hill that a 54-year-old kid could handle. We'll see.

Our recent Chicago trip wasn't the best (and trips to Chicago rarely qualify as "vacation") so Carol and I rented another RV, dropped QBit off at Camp Bow-Wow, and drove up past Denver and over the Loveland Pass to Breckenridge, Colorado. It's ski country and thus quieter in the summer (which is technically the "off season"!) but gorgeous year-round, and one of all too many places in this country where neither of us has ever been.

I'll bet you've never seen an RV like this: It's one of the uncommon "class B" motorhomes, which are (usually) full-size van conversions. (There is something called a "B+" motorhome, which is actually a smaller Class C, like the RV we rented last October.)

It's a Pleasureway Excel RD, and one of the smallest completely self-contained RVs out there. It has a sofa that electrically jackknifes down into a double bed, a stove, a furnace (they're made in Canada) a refrigerator, a hot water heater, a built-in 17" LCD TV with DVD player, and a bathroom that incorporates a toilet and a sink into a space half the size of a bathroom in a commercial airliner. There is actually a shower, but the shower is in fact...the entire bathroom. It's all waterproofed, and there's a curtain you pull around yourself while you sit on the potty. Then you can hand-spray yourself as much as you need to, and it all goes down the drain in the middle of the bathroom floor to the graywater holding tank.

Yes, it sounds dicey, but given the space they had to work in that might have been the only solution to the shower challenge. We just got in to the Tiger Run RV Resort between Frisco and Breckenridge, and will be staying here until Thursday morning. I'm anxious to look around a little, and very glad for the change in climate: It was to be in the 90s in the Springs today, but up here at 9,100 feet, it's a delicious 70 degrees. I don't know when I'll be able to post this, so expect possible delays until Thursday.