Tag: travel

The Vote of RV Culture: What it means to future elections

A year ago, my wife and I were at the pool store getting items to open our pool when she convinced me to stop by an RV store to look at RVs, which she secretly hoped to persuade me to buy.  I reported on how many Trump supporters I met at the RV store both in front and behind the sales counter and I learned really quick that due to Covid, election fraud, and a general hatred of liberalism, the RV market was my kind of place.  The people buying them, the campgrounds all over the country, and even the roadside pull-offs where RVs parked together to catch a break were like Trump political rallies everywhere there were RVs.  Now, 10,000 miles later, I can report that I understand the RV culture well, really well.  I have since been to most states in the country and have learned a lot about the Trump voter and the anger behind the movement that transcends President Trump himself.  On one of our very first trips just before the election of 2020 in Ashville, North Carolina, I was a little shocked to see Trump flags on many of the RVs parked at the KOA there and wondered if they might offend others at the campground.  The answer was that very few RVers supported anybody but President Trump.  If there were Biden supporters, they were a very quiet bunch because I would see the same behavior over the next year in nearly every state.  If there were 80 million people who voted for Joe Biden as they say he had in the last election, those votes did not come from Americans.  They came from made-up cheated ballots of dead people, Chinese infiltration, and scandalous schemes of passing out the free crack to voters down and out who didn’t even know there was an election going on. 

Yet I just returned from a massive multistate trip out west from Deadwood to Vernal, Utah, and all kinds of places in between before cutting back across Denver, Kansas City, then back to Cincinnati.  Gas prices were escalating by the day due to Joe Biden’s incompetency or deliberate malice.  And I have seen more RVs on the road than I ever have in my life.  Reporting from the road, I have yet to see a single supporter of Joe Biden anywhere, yet along the nation’s highways, there are many Trump signs, including one just outside of St. Louis saying in big letters, TRUMP WON.  At the start of 2020, after the depressing election theft we saw, after the January 6th debacle where Mike Pence failed to kick the election back to the states and the trouble that ensued due to hurt feelings, and the constant reminder that a Civil War could break out at any moment, my wife and I took to the road to sort things out. I can say after all those mentioned miles; I get what’s going on.  All too well.  I see it clearly, and it all started when we bought our RV with many thousands of other Trump supporters who were preparing for a cold winter in America that would last an entire election cycle.  And this war wasn’t with guns or even protests.  It was with people taking to the road to get away from government in their own little hotel rooms that were out of touch from the infrastructure of the travel industry which government so greatly influenced intrusively. 

As we took these big trips across the nation, gas prices have steadily increased as the Biden administration did its intentional damage.  Those who don’t know RVs get about 6 miles per gallon, where a super-efficient SUV like what we drive gets about 11 miles per gallon.  I had a guy in Texas nearly faint as he pulled up next to me at the gas pump to report he was getting 5 miles per gallon.  I told him that I had the wind to our back at that moment, and I was being pushed along a bit at 70 miles per hour, and we were getting 15 MPG.  With gas prices out West in Utah and Idaho currently at $3.35 and traveling 5,400 miles on just this last trip, you can do the math.  It’s expensive to travel by RV.  Add to that the campgrounds cost about a third of what a local hotel room would cost and the cost between flying and using lodging with rental cars is about the same as driving an RV everywhere.  However, with the RV, you can get to specific places that you can’t get to with airplanes, like the National Parks, and you can take your room with you.  We had the same bedroom in Idaho as we do in our driveway, and there is the sense of always having your home with you that you get with a profoundly satisfying RV.  

Now for our clan, the cost of a trip like that was about $500 per day.  It was worth every penny because the experiences were so unusual.  But what did shock me is that we were nowhere near alone.  I had thought that with the gas prices, fewer people would be with us on the road.  Instead, there were crowds of people in RVs everywhere we went.  Whether it was the World’s Largest Truck Stop in Iowa or Wall Drug in South Dakota, there were RVs around and people willing to spend the high costs of driving them despite the gas prices.  I thought of government manipulators like Cass Sunstein. They have shown that the government says it can change behavior among human beings in the same way that mice are led through a maze in pursuit of cheese, with financial incentives that steered the mind where the government wanted people to go through rules, regulations, and cost.  But after what I saw, I don’t think people would stop using RVs even with gas prices up over $5 per gallon.  The experience of taking an RV on a trip wasn’t about the cost for most people; it was purely about freedom, which is why we had bought ours last year with the Covid lockdowns at the height of their power.   The government had let down so many people that the trust was gone forever, and gone too was the travel infrastructure which had changed politically over the last few years into something nobody seems to have foreseen.

Personally, buying an RV was one of the smartest things my wife and I have ever done.  We didn’t plan when we bought it to take it all over the United States within a year of the purchase—but having it has inspired us to take those long, less apparent trips to places that aren’t so easy to get to by air travel.  The independence from the grid of travel that RVs provide is more than worth the cost.  But more than anything is the sense that we can function away from government regulation as much as possible. In contrast, a hotel room and air travel are just too heavily regulated.  If costs are similar, and by the time you go through the TSA lines, you could drive to most places in America, then the independence of the RV makes them very attractive to the type of people who voted for Trump.  People who value free will and a lack of government oversight.  This, to me, says a lot about what Americans are about, which is not picked up in any poll or survey.  The political left doesn’t understand what is about to happen to them.  That much is clear. 

Rich Hoffman

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We Bought an RV: Finding Trump’s “Silent Majority” where government isn’t

Its always been a thing for me, mobile living. For as long as I can remember, which is well back to 1 and 2 years of age, I have been attracted to the idea of a home on wheels. But life is what it is, and until recently, it just didn’t fit my lifestyle. I’ve either been too busy, or it was just not financially practical to even think about getting an RV. I’ve been all over the world and stayed in some of the very best hotels that anybody has ever made and that has left me hungry to see more of my own country, especially after the terrible way that Democrats have treated it during the 2020 elections. Presently, I don’t know if I ever want to travel out of the country again and yearn to see all the great things that are in America that I haven’t yet seen. And for many of those opportunities I now have grandchildren that I want to give those opportunities to so that has had me thinking of buying an RV for a while now. First on my mind was to save up and get a large Class A, which is more the way I like to live. The trailer RVs just didn’t have the kind of space inside that I expect. So that put the project off for a few years, until my wife and I recently went to Disney World.

That trip was a bit of a scouting trip and after doing the hotel experience there we quickly figured out that if we ever want to bring our larger family along, that the hotels just weren’t the way to go, it was not only too expensive, but getting food and a decent place to sleep just wasn’t’ practical. The hotels in Disney were just too busy for a large family and we came back from that trip looking for options. It was fun for the two of us, but coordinating a large family just wasn’t good for that kind of travel. Then a few months later Covid-19 came along. Regardless of the political motive the government mandated masks and rules of the house at a hotel were suddenly extremely unattractive so that opened my mind up to buying a smaller RV now and using it to get to some of the harder to reach places in the country, places that the larger Class As had a hard time getting to. But for my lifestyle, I need an office where I can work and communicate professionally, so I had to solve that problem as well.

I went through a similar process about a decade ago when I bought a big cruiser motorcycle and started riding it all over the country packing a tent on the back and camping wherever I felt like when I got tired. It was a good way to see things and I enjoyed it and learned a lot about the motorcycle culture and what kind of Americans they really were. A few years ago while I was off to a very important meeting and couldn’t be late, I was hit by another driver and it totaled my beautiful motorcycle which disappointed me greatly. (I still made it to my meeting even with a broken wrist and a lot of blood on my clothes by the way) And I haven’t yet replaced that motorcycle but now my life is a lot more complicated. My family is a lot bigger and you can’t pack all of them on a motorcycle and ride around. So that drove me to return to that camping life again, but this time with air conditioning, refrigerators and all the comforts of home without the heat of humid nights and no way to lock up a tent. As my wife and I started shopping for RVs we quickly found out where all those silent majority Trump people were hiding. They were camping and buying RVs. And much to my surprise, I learned some new things about people in this process, and I found a much stronger heartbeat to America than I thought was possible.

The RV we ended up getting was perfect for us, the floorplan was great. It had all the big room of the Class A I wanted in the kitchen and dining area, but it was small enough to get down the sharpest switchback roads and most remote campsites. And it sleeps 8, which is something I personally need with my crew. We bought it at the end of May and much to my surprise, there was an all summer long backorder because a lot of people were thinking the same thing I was, they were tired of the overregulation of hotel travel and government mandates and they wanted free of them. So this year has been a record sales year for the RV market and I certainly understand it. We were going to buy one anyway but the timing of all the Covid nonsense certainly sealed the deal for us. I want to be off the grid, I want to see my country, but I don’t want to do it by a lot of stupid rules. I want the fewest burdens possible and I want to share all that with my family. With all that said, the people at Couch’s RV Nation in Trenton were great. I enjoyed working with them and I found more Trump supporters in this process than even I thought were out there. I was amazed at how many actually, not a statistic they are publishing on the news.

What I learned this summer as Covid-19 was used politically to ruin peoples lives and try to keep them from enjoying life was that people did what they always do, what I do especially, they find a way around the problem and that will destroy much of the travel industry as a result—due to government intrusion. But RV sales are way up, travel money will still be spent, just not where it traditionally was and that is the lesson that government should reach as a result of 2020. While much of the world is still shut down I was able to go to Wal-Mart and buy a very unique 30 amp converter because the free market still operates in spite of government efforts, and my life will go on without the government regulated structure of hotels, restaurants or even amusement parks. There are a lot of other things to do, and people are finding their way to them. People will go where the government isn’t, which is the story of the suburbs isn’t it? Protesters trying to attack Trump voters are trying to move out into the suburbs because people are just leaving the cities, and they are finding that the world is a lot bigger than Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. And that’s where you find the Trump voters, in RVs, in boats, at shooting ranges, rodeos—wherever the stench of progressive socialists aren’t. And that experience has calmed my mind down a lot about the nature of human beings. I have met some really good people in our RV buying experience and can see clearly that life on the road will be much of the same, which gives me a lot of optimism for the future.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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