Figuring the cost of a membership campground system? Check this out...2 weeks spent traveling for less than 100 bucks for lodging or space rental! Not bad, huh? Actually, the cost of our travel within our particular system was $0! If we had to pay the average rate for camping ($20 to $25 per night), we probably couldn,t afford to do it. The 100 bucks was spent for about 4 nights at other places in which we elected to stay. You gotta face it, not all locations have parks that are in your system. Fortunately, Alice & I belong to more than one system, which makes it much easier to find suitable RV sites.

We took a short vacation to visit our grandkids in Texas. Now, that's a big state and has 8 parks which are in one of our systems. When you add up all the costs (dues) of our memberships, our costs break down to approximately $2.86 per night (for camping). Of course, the more you camp, the lower the cost per night. When you consider the fact that our camper has all the amenities of home , dishwasher, washer/dryer, microwave convection oven, etc., you begin to realize that our costs were, in fact, dirt cheap! If you can live less expensively than this anywhere else but Mexico, please let us know.

With taxes and the prices of services, products, and everything else spiraling continually upward, living full-time in an RV makes a whole lot of sense. If you still own your house, you're probably spending around $19 per day just for taxes and utilities [NOT counting your phone bill]. Let's see now...$19 minus $2.86 figures out to be $16.14 saved daily by full-timing. Crunch those numbers a bit further...over the period of one year, the savings would be approximately $5891, which would pay for a lot of maintenance, repair, and fuel for whatever rigs you have. Get my drift?

Now, what were our accommodations like? Try this...five nights in a beautifully wooded park, not another RV within view, full hook-ups, paved roads, level sites, pool, lake, recreation facilities, hot water restrooms, 24-hour security, deer knocking on our door for handouts (or is that "hoofouts?). Believe it or not, we actually saw nursing does with their fawns in the open in BROAD daylight! Now, that's a first for us. Or this...three nights on a river with all the above including a terrific fireworks display courtesy of Mother Nature. How about this one? Four nights in a lush green park (my favorite) with everything mentioned above, all within an easy day's drive of the lights and sights of the big city.

Toss in the satellite dish and we've got all the comforts of home. Why on earth would we want to spend a couple hundred bucks a day at some hotel and have to rent a car on top of it? We're traveling in a membership system and we've got it all.

When we first decided to explore this lifestyle, we were thinking in terms of "Let's go live somewhere else for a while. Keep in mind that we're both still working. In the last four years, we've explored the West coast, Arizona, the highlights of Texas, Tennessee, three Canadian provinces, and a good portion of the country in between. We've done the bike run at Sturgis, SD, spent a summer at Disneyland, and roamed the hill country of Texas. We've toured the Icefields Parkway in the Canadian Rockies, taken the Harley on the Highway to the Sun at Glacier, and assisted starving squirrels in their weight-gain plan the entire length of Highway 101. (Remember folks, squirrels like peanuts, but chipmunks like chocolate chip cookies with nuts.)

If all this sounds too good to be true, we've got pictures. More importantly, we've got the memories. Not to mention friends. We've done 90% of all the above within our membership campground systems.

As always, drive safely...and we'll see ya' down th' road...

Bob Muessig is a frequent contributor to RVers Online, and authors one of our favorite online columns, "From the Wheelhouse", which is accessible from our links page...

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