Once upon a time in an RV rolling westward on I-20 there lived a hobbit. Not a brand, spanky new fully caparisoned RV, but an arthritic, incontinent old warhorse who had seen one too many campaigns. Our super special “Rolling into Arizona” rental deal was billed as returning the beast to its home pastures for “refurbishing”. But although the engine still beat strong and true, no amount of refurbishing is likely to restore the myriad of cracks, dings, stress fractures and unidentifiable stains covering its aging, abused body.

I knew this was going be an interesting adventure when we got to the RV rental location in Charlotte, NC to find it was a dingy auto repair shop circa 1950 complete with an overweight, grizzled proprietor with a Carolina accent so thick you could spread it across a dozen corn muffins, and his young, overworked and underpaid world-weary lackey. We were late because of torrential rain on Saturday, and the lackey gave us an overview of the beast that we were going to trek across country in that was cursory at best. Among other things, he assured us there was no need for concern that the LP gas detector was hanging off the wall and inoperative, because “they put something in propane to make it smell and you’ll know if there’s a problem”.

By the time I had driven the beast home from Charlotte, I wanted to paint “Serenity” on the side (I’m switching metaphoric movie genres here, so keep up). The thing flung every interior piece not recently bolted down hither and yon with every turbulent patch of acne pockmarked road I hit. The thermostat cover popped off, the circuit breaker cover flopped open onto the floor, the shower door slid open, the bathroom door slammed open and shut repeatedly, and the window screens, bent by some previous frustrated and furious renter, rattled incessantly. I will say that it wasn’t quite so noisy when laden down with my precious possessions, but we still needed to set the music volume at max to hear anything above the noise of the cabin.

We left Atlanta about 2pm on Monday, after I watched the car carrier guy (my name is STEVE, he told me in heavily Russian-accented English) light up a cigar as he drove off with my Mustang as the first car on his rig. Goodbye, I waved wistfully, wondering if I would ever see it again. What with the dog shaking and the cats yowling and rush hour in Birmingham, we rolled into our planned first stop in a small RV park outside Meridian MS about 8:30pm. We managed to get the electric line plugged in, but then after opening every compartment I could open (we were given 3 keys for the rig, and a few locks resisted all of them) and making unwilling friends with a local wolf spider, I abandoned all hope that we had a water hose for the “city” water hook-up as illustrated in the cheerful 30 minute online orientation video we had watched before setting out. Fortunately, we had packed lots of bottled water, since we were explicitly warned in advance not to drink or use the “fresh water tank” for cooking purposes. The toilet was slightly roomier than an airline counterpart, and marginally cleaner than a concert port-a-potty, but gave off the queasy sensation of both, so with one emergency exception, we diligently used rest area and campground bathrooms throughout the trip.

We used the propane cooktop to heat water for breakfast Tuesday morning, and were pleasantly surprised to find that at least one burner worked. We made soup for lunch at a rest area across the Louisiana state line, and I was beginning to feel like an actual RV camper. We got to a very nice RV campground in Canton TX before dark on Wednesday, where I was able to buy a water hose in the campground store, and we congratulated ourselves on getting electric, water, and sewer lines hooked up like the pros we thought we were becoming. I took the dog for a walk around “Walden Pond” while Vanessa made a phone call… and I returned to find her waving her arms frantically and pointing at the small lake of water pooling beneath the RV. She had the foresight to shut off the city water but the undercarriage of the old girl still seemed to be dripping steadily. Checking further, we found that the toilet had overflowed (fortunately, since we had been so fastidious, with fresh water). We got that under control with turning off the “city” water, and promptly called the 24/7 customer service hotline. We were told by the very pleasant after-hours customer service rep (who only takes notes until other people can arrange for repairs in the morning) that it was just a “weak” valve and not to use the city water hook-up any more. Poor old girl. After 140,000 miles she should have been on hormone therapy. I guess the lackey “forgot” to include the water hose for a reason. Sneaky.

At that point, I looked at the document I had signed upon registering at the campground office that declared we had chosen to stop in a dry Texas county where open alcoholic beverages were not allowed, and just shook my head. I guess I picked the wrong week to stop drinking.

I was sure of it when we awoke Wednesday morning to find the refrigerator had passed away quietly during the night. We called the 24/7 customer service hotline again, and were told that we would get a call back after they had located a repair shop along our planned route, and that our expenses for ice and a cooler chest would be reimbursed at journey’s end. With that, we set off across the endless state of Texas.

The RV rental company called us back a little before noon to tell us what we were discovering for ourselves, namely that there is NOTHING between Dallas and Van Horn but sand, scrub, mindlessly churning oil rigs, abandoned mobile homes, and the eerily rusted frames of missing signs rocking above dry and deserted gas stations. Not even zombies want to live in west Texas. We fought a head wind from hell all the way across the Lone Star state, and the “10 mile to the gallon” prophesied to us by the old geezer in NC became 10 gallons to the mile. We damn near ran out of gas. But 5 miles east of Van Horn, visible for a good ten miles across the black Texas night, a sign blinking D I E S E L in 20 foot high red neon letters lured us in like a moth to a flame.

“Honey, are you sure it will take all that?” I was asked when I requested $75 of gas from pump 1. “And then some,” I replied. One thing we had learned by this point was that most gas stations cut you off after pumping $75 worth of gas, and send you packing to another establishment like some hopeless drunk. Even Love’s truck stops max out at $125. The only gas station willing to let the old warhorse drink her fill was the one in NC where we began our journey. There, the lackey pumped $149 worth of unleaded into the beast, only to be asked by the proprietor, “Ya mean ya couldn’t ‘ve squeezed one more dolla’ into it?”

Weary and relieved, we rolled quietly into a KOA outside Van Horn, following 3 jack rabbits in the headlights who appeared to want to show us to our pull-through. We awoke Thursday morning to the sight of the Guadalupe mountains in the distance, registered with the nicest couple of campground proprietors you could want to meet, and had a breakfast of eggs, sausage and biscuits in the campground coffee shop that tasted like pure heaven. That breakfast fueled us (if not the warhorse) past the crazy construction in El Paso and across the vast open spaces of New Mexico, all the way home to Tucson.

The last leg of the journey was returning the warhorse to Mesa. My second day in the desert, and it rained. When we finally pulled into the rental parking lot, next to a fleet of younger models outside the bright, clean and modern RV showroom, I had the feeling our beast might be headed for the glue factory. And after the rental agent went out to look her over I was sure of it. The agent came back with a look on her face that said: “You came in that thing? You’re braver than I thought.”