RV Love or Hate?

We’re done RVing. No, not us. At least not yet. The pandemic forced us to hang up the keys for a season. For how long? It seems likely now that the pandemic is going to last for years. Not weeks. Not months. But years.

If that turns out to be the case then I really don’t see much point in keeping a beautiful coach locked up for half the year. With our style of RVing, Canada does not offer much in the way of Class A motorcoach resorts. I haven’t found one in our country.

Where we park our coach in Ontario is the nicest RV campground we have been able to find but it really does not compare to any of the Class A motorcoach resorts we have enjoyed in the United States.

We embraced this lifestyle so that we could travel both sides of the border without having to maintain two properties. Who knew that a pandemic would change all that?

In our province, we are locked down until the end of January. Health officials are gasping at the increase in case counts and debating new restrictions for the population. What more could they restrict?

The list of what is restricted now is so extensive that I can’t really imagine what else could be imposed. If you are curious to know all that we cannot do, the complete list is here.

Vaccines? Perhaps they might help. Right now Canada has vaccinated roughly 50,000 people. At the current pace it will take about 70 years to vaccinate the population. I expect the pace of government will improve somewhat.

The Ontario government is suggesting by fourth quarter of 2021 that roughly 8 million people in Ontario will get jabbed. Not sure if that will be one or two jabs as the individual leading the vaccination charge is already pondering whether the vaccine manufacturers can deploy a single dose vaccine. The current ones require a couple of pokes.

What if a couple of pokes in enough arms doesn’t end the pandemic? What if COVID has staying power for years to come?

This from the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, Dr. Soumya Swaminathan:

I don’t believe we have the evidence on any of the vaccines to be confident that it’s going to prevent people from actually getting the infection and therefore being able to pass it on so I think we need to assume that people who have been vaccinated also need to take the same [public health] precautions.

I’m not optimistic about life getting back to normal any time soon.

In my social media feed, I received this news from Marc and Julie Bennett from RV Love. I had followed them for quite some time before they decided to use their social media activities for profit.

I have nothing against people that decide to monetize their websites or their YouTube videos. Selling stuff to other people happens to everyone all the time. I sold my labour and my time for decades before retirement.

I just didn’t like the direction they took once they started making money from their followers.

They have now abandoned the full-time RV lifestyle. They bought a house. Here is what they had to say:

Many RVers are making changes right now. This news may not even be that surprising to you. After all, many of our fellow full time RVers have also either shifted to part time travel, decided to take a season off and pause their full time RV life, and some have hung up the keys on RV life altogether… we’re not saying we are stopping full time RVing for good! We’re just putting it on hold for the time being. We’ll wait for the world to settle down a bit, which will also give us time to reassess what’s next in our RV and travel adventures.

We are in a similar spot right now. Debating what makes sense for our future. We were forced to put full-time RVing on hold. We are back in a house for the winter.

Like Marc and Julie, we’ll wait for the world to settle down a bit. We really have no choice.

That wait might take a few years.