She’s not BB, but Phoebe will do: On pivoting and finding solutions

I had just come off the massage table after a blissful treatment at Red Mountain Spa in St. George, Utah, and checked my phone for messages in the locker room. I got this:

My husband Quent was about 4 hours from me, en route in BB the RV to pick me up in St. George to kick off a 17-night RV road trip to Nevada and California, hitting a handful of national parks, Las Vegas, and South Lake Tahoe. I’d started my getaway 3 days earlier at the spa resort with a friend, who’d be driving back home to Colorado on her own.

Or not, if BB’s problems weren’t a quick fix, our road trip plans were thwarted, and we all needed to go back home.

As it turned out, a tow truck was not able to immediately get to my husband and our dead RV in this remote location 40 miles west of Green River, Utah. Quent called his brother Cleve back home to let him know what was going on, and without hesitation, Cleve said he’d drive MORE THAN THREE HOURS to come tow BB 40 miles back to a mechanic in Green River then drive on back home.

OUR HERO!

Coming up with a plan B (or plan C… or plan D)

Getting BB to a mechanic fast meant we could get a diagnosis sooner and make a plan to perhaps salvage our getaway. I started turning over a bunch of ideas for different scenarios:

1. Scrap our multi-week road trip, for which I’d booked 10 different campsites and made reservations for entry and tours at national parks. We could go home, cancel reservations, and try to make a similar trip later this summer — or someday.
2. Kill some time at Lake Powell. A few nights on the water in the place where we got engaged wouldn’t be awful. We could pick up our road trip, maybe, after a few days of R&R in southern Utah.
3. Do a similar trip in our car — canceling campground reservations and trying to get hotel accommodations along the way. (Or just road trip somewhere in our car, which we’d intended to tow behind BB.)
4. Pack our bags and hop on a plane somewhere — anywhere.
5. Buy a new RV and sell it after our trip. (Yes, this was my husband’s wild idea.)
6. Find an RV to rent or borrow STAT.

Turns out, BB’s problem wasn’t an easy, efficient fix. (No big surprise, since Quent described the incident like this: “It sounded like someone took a sledgehammer to the front of the motorhome while I was driving down the highway.” Yes, I’m grateful he was able to pull over safely.)

BB’s cooling fan broke, and when the pieces were flying off they hit the radiator, rendering it kaput. It would take at least a week before the mechanic could get parts and BB would be fixed.

So a short detour wasn’t going to cut it. I didn’t want to road trip for long in our Honda CR-V. As much as I thought jumping on a plane to somewhere sounded cool, we just spent a week in Mexico, so I wasn’t craving a tropical getaway — and I didn’t want to deal with any required COVID-19 testing.

I started scouring the internet for RV rentals near St. George (where I was) and Las Vegas (our intended first stop on our RV trip, 2 hours away). And the pickings were slim. After all, it’s the “summer of the RV” — again!

With limited options, and no real plan in place, Quent pulled all of our food from our motorhome’s fridge and freezer, bought a cooler to put it in, grabbed our clothes and a few other key items from BB, and threw it all in the car and drove down to me in St. George. We figured if I couldn’t secure an RV rental, we’d just backtrack home (or go to some unknown plan C).

After a bunch of phone calls to companies like Cruise America and El Monte RV, and frantic direct messages on peer-rental websites like RVShare, Outdoorsy, and RVezy, I found a 25-foot Class C in St. George that just happened to be available for the 12 nights of our road trip that made sense to salvage!

Meet Phoebe! (Faux BB = Phoebe.)

She’s about 7 feet shorter than our Class A, she drives differently, the kitchen/dining area and the bathroom are much smaller than what we’re used to, but after spending one night in Phoebe, I think she’ll do just fine for nearly 2 weeks of adventure out West.

Scrapping our trip was not a solution

The last thing I wanted to do was scrap our RV road trip. We’re celebrating my birthday, Quent’s retirement from his full-time job, the start of summer, and our happy-empty nester life — and we’re especially carefree now that Grettel the pandemic-adopted dog is living with her rightful owner (my daughter) in New York.

Not that we really need a reason to head out on a multi-night RV trip. Our first 7-week trip as newly minted RVers last fall covering 23 states was magical and romantic (really!). We did it again in late January for 3 weeks, traveling to Utah, Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas, and had a ball. For this trip, I had wanted to drive BB through Nevada, knocking off yet another state.

Alas, we can’t put the Nevada sticker on BB’s “where we’ve been map,” since she didn’t make it there (I just hope she makes it successfully out of the mechanic’s shop at this point…). But Phoebe is a good substitute — and we’re super thankful she was available!

First stop: Vegas!

So far, so good. We already parked her in our planned first overnight: the Circus Circus RV Park, just off the Strip in Vegas. Super random, but cheap and convenient to allow me to indulge my other plan for this trip: a nice meal at Lakeside at the Wynn. (Which was absolutely delicious — the poke appetizer and mahi mahi entrée were divine.)

I also wanted to debut a pantsuit I bought for a planned trip to Vegas in March 2020 – you can guess what happened to that girlfriend getaway… canceled just before the whole country seemed to shut down in mid-March). Yes, you can get glam while camping on a piece of asphalt in the middle of a city! (And yes, those pant legs are too long — they dragged all over the Strip. Will be altered for next time!)

Now we’re in Bakersfield, California, and we’ll eventually explore Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Pinnacles, and Yosemite national parks. We’ve also got a stay at a Harvest Hosts winery thrown in there (my fave!), and we’re not exactly sure how we’re making our way back to St. George to return Phoebe to her owner and pick up our car, but we’ll wing it.

Clearly, winging it is in our wheelhouse.

I’m sure this trip won’t be without its issues. What road trip ever is? But I feel like we’ve weathered the worst of our troubles already (please let that be true), so I’m looking forward to hiking trails, starry nights, good wine, and making memories with my husband who is a living, breathing example of going with the flow; puts up with my crazy ideas (and comes up with crazier ones); and goes above and beyond to keep me well fed and well traveled.

Really, I need little else.