The Growing Popularity of RV Travel

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In the middle of October, my fiancé and I spent the weekend in our small 25-foot RV at the Endless Caverns campgrounds in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Without the noise of traffic or the lights of the suburbs, and surrounded by nothing but rocks and trees, it seemed like we were completely isolated from civilization. The campground is set up on the side of a mountain, and the road has just enough space for RVs to pass through, leaving most of the forest left undisturbed. During the day, we sat outside sitting on our white plastic Ikea folding chairs, basking in the beauty of the fall foliage, and watched the chipmunks and squirrels scurry around. Each day I took our dog, Boh, for a walk on the hiking trails of the campsite to explore the woods. We hiked to the top of the mountain to see the giant letters that spell out “Endless Caverns,” each letter so big that it can be seen from a far distance, at least 30 feet in height. At the base of the letters is an area to sit and look out at the beautiful vast valley below covered in farmland and cows. During the evenings, we spent time with friends, socially distant, around a blazing hot campfire. One of those friends was Mikel Griffith, another Army veteran, who is also new to the RV life. 

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Before this year, I would never have predicted that I’d be the owner of an RV this early in my life. Even though I’ve always loved to travel, the thought of traveling around, in what really is a little house, felt limiting. I thought it would require better planning and more responsibility. RV ownership seemed to be for grandparents and retirees who have fewer obligations and want to spend their time traveling around the country. But this year, instead of hosting a wedding as originally planned, my fiance and I used the money we saved for a reception as a down payment to purchase our RV. For the last few months, we traveled to different spots in Maryland and Virginia. For the Fourth of July we took the RV on our first road trip to North Carolina to celebrate our independence. I am now in love with our RV. As Mikel said, “I’ve seen the world but I want to see the USA, so I’ll hull this camper behind me.”
 
We’re not the only ones interested in seeing our country from the road either. As of 2019, around 40 million Americans go RV camping, and out of that 38% of those are millennials, according to the wandering RV.

 

People have been traveling in RVs since the early 20th century. Brands like Airstream have been around since the 1930s, and Winnebago has been around since the 1950s. Recently, RVs have seen a renewed interest. This year the RV industry is on pace to sell more RVs than 2019 by a significant margin. Sales at the beginning of the year started off average, but began to drop off in March, and then plummeted in April. April’s total number of motorhomes sold dropped 85% to 7,197 when compared to the same time last year when 40,243 had been sold.
 
Since June, sales have exceeded that of past years making up for March and April’s poor sales. The RV Industry Association posted September sales at 31% higher than 2019. RV manufacturing companies expected to struggle. Companies like Airstream predicted a sales drop of 70% in April when the economy was closed down, but surprisingly dropped about 30%, according to Business Insider. For RV rental companies, it was initially even tougher. Outdoorsy, a Texas-based online RV marketplace, had a 90% cancellation rate in March and April, causing the company to take out a loan from the Paycheck Protection Program to survive.

 

When we were shopping for our RV in July, the salesman at Leo’s Vacation Center in Crofton, Maryland, mentioned that this was one of the best times to sell RVs. He told us that Leo’s was struggling to keep RVs on the lot because they were selling more than they were receiving from the factories, proving that the sale of RVs was increasing. We thought it was just his sales pitch to pressure us to buy quickly. It wasn’t though. Business Insider reports that “Airstream is now behind market demand because its factories had to shut down while retailers were still successfully selling builds.” Outdoorsy is now thriving again. 

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It’s not random that the RV industry is doing so well now. It turns out that it has several things going for it. For Mikel, it’s relaxing, “Even on the short trips. What I really didn’t realize is how much I would really enjoy it, me or the wife. Even though it’s kind of work with the stresses of pulling the camper where you are going and stress about hooking everything up right. And is the heater gonna work? But even with all these stresses, it is one of the most relaxing things that I have ever done.”

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For me and my fiance, it provides a way to take a break and relax without having to make the usual sacrifices that come with traveling. We no longer need to try and fit everything into a single suitcase. Instead, we just put our clothes away in the closet and drawers at the back of the RV. Everything else we need is already stocked away in the RV. 

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Traveling in the RV gives us the opportunity to turn off what happened during the work week and get away from (most) technology. Although we were technically camping at Endless Caverns, I was able to wake up and roll out of my own bed without the need to bundle up to stay warm because we had the heat blasting from the furnace of our RV. During our first morning there, as a pot of coffee brewed, I sat in my underwear at the dinette table and watched five campers climb out of their tents all bundled up to just sit around the fire to stay warm. It made me really appreciate this new way of camping.

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COVID is one of the biggest reasons that RVing is so popular right now. The fear of getting sick is causing people to avoid standard ways of travel, such as flying, staying in hotels, using Ubers, and even public bathrooms. According to Premise.com, “Over a third of people think it will be at least a year—or never!—before it will be safe to travel by air.” Also at work right now, anyone that takes a flight has to quarantine for two weeks before being allowed back into the office building. In contrast to that, as Fortune mentions, “RVs are generally seen as a safe way to vacation in nature and visit national parks.” Or as Mikel says, “talk about social distancing, that’s one of the best ways, besides boating. Also I’m looking at hotel rooms and not having to worry about going in there. I got my own hotel room on wheels.”

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As well as being safer, and because more people are able telework, many people are choosing to work remotely from the road. In fact, according to Condor Ferries, there are around one million Americans who live full time in their motorhomes. Close friends of ours recently sold their townhome and moved into their 37-foot RV. They took out their kitchen table and installed desks, giving them the freedom to live and work wherever they park their home for the night. My fiancé and I love the ability to turn our smartphones into mobile hotspots, giving us the ability to work from wherever we want. Just for the fun of it, my fiancé likes to drive the RV to the local library that offers free outside WIFI to work. The library is about two miles away from our home, and about six miles away from the schoolhouse we actually work in. 

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The community of RV travelers is unlike any other that we’ve been a part of. We spent our first night in the RV at Cherry Hill Park in College Park, Maryland. Although we could hear the hustle and bustle of I-495, it felt like we stumbled into a whole new world. People were happy and friendly. Across the park, families were gathered around fires and grills outside of the RVs, while children were riding bikes and playing on the playground. And while everyone kept a reasonable distance, it almost felt that that COVID did not exist in the park.

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The Wandering RV reported that more than 9 million families own RVs with around 16,000 campgrounds and parking locations spread across the country. Traveling can be costly, but there are opportunities to keep expenses down. Many of these campgrounds have spots for work campers, which allows campers the opportunity to stay practically free in exchange for a few hours of work. There are groups like Boondockers Welcome and Harvest Host who connect RVers with people willing to let them stay on their land for free, or for a small fee of $10 per night for the use of utilities. For us, we love parking our RV in our friend’s driveway in Woodbridge, Virginia, for a weekend getaway so that we can spend quality time without the worry of driving through the insane and unpredictable D.C. traffic to get home. 

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While the pandemic continues to run wild, and stay-at-home orders come and go, RVing allows people to do more. As the country continues to grow weary of standard traveling, the RV industry will continue to flourish.