Livin' Large

     So I think that I’m actually ready to tell the tale of the infamous MOTORHOME!! It all started the same as most of the shit with me and motorcycles usually starts, with some thoughts thrown around by me and my bro Pete. We have always been plagued with the question of what is the best combo of race truck/sleeping quarters. We tried my full size van with a pop-up trailer. Pete would drive his pick-up and trailer the bikes behind him. He was the race truck, I was the sleeping quarters. Not a bad idea, right? Well that’s what we thought. Now don’t read ahead for a second, OK? Don’t cheat. Do you have ANY idea how F#$%&ing cold it is in New Hampshire in October? Did you answer? OK then read on. It’s F#$%&ing cold. We drove up to Loudon with me, my now ex-girlfriend, Pete, his now ex-fiancé, their daughter, and my two dogs. In a 6 person pop-up. Well it was about 34 degrees and raining the whole weekend! Four adults, one kid, and two canines in a pop-up for just about three days. It was Hell only COLDER. EVERYTHING was wet all weekend. It was still better than work but it really did suck. Then we decided that we really didn't have any other choice by the time the next race came up. So we did it again. Well whadda ya know, it was freezing cold and raining. It rained so bad that we didn't even ride on Saturday. Everybody was REALLY STRESSED OUT with one another. I had packed up the pop-up and was heading home Saturday morning. Then Pete suggested that we stay for the races and maybe rent a garage. We agreed but it was so bad that we had to go get a motel room. Bad weekend but we got through it. I think that was the weekend that Pete crashed, but I'm not sure.

     After that weekend Pete and I did some brain storming. I liked the idea of an old school bus. Take out a few rows of seats put in some sort of heat and paint it black. Perfect right? Well him and his fiancé thought that there was no use to try to go in one vehicle. So that makes a full size school bus too big for me. I thought about a regular pull trailer but I thought it would be too heavy. I didn't want to kill my van pulling that around all of the time. We looked at everything from slide on pop-ups to converted step vans. Nothing seemed to really work for us. Then we came across the deal of a lifetime, (read IMPULSE!). We saw a '79 Ford box truck for sale for $2,000. We looked at it and the guy who owned it was in Florida. So we asked the guy who answered the door if he could get in touch with him for us. When he said he could we did what any bottom feeders like us would do: Offer the guy $1,000 for it. 1/2 of what he was asking! We told our contact that if the owner could tell him where the title was we could buy it the next day. Imagine our glee when the owner excepted our offer. Whoo Hoo! He found the title. We jumped it to get it running and I drove it home. That was our test drive. After it was paid for and everything. Cleaned it up, changed the fluids, did a tune up, got a trailer hitch put on it, bolted on the pop-up and Pete, my two dogs, and myself were on the way to Loudon again. I drove it around town for a couple of days and it was pretty cool. Well on the way up it was making a funny noise (like funny peculiar not funny HA HA!) at around 70 MPH. But we made it up with no real problems.

This page was last updated on:

05/03/2006