Go west on a road trip across America
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY: Richard Pickles
Having owned our VW T6 campervan for nearly six years, we have done our fair share of road trips. As former teachers, we got away in our ’van as much as possible, enjoying long-distance European road trips during the summer breaks.
Retiring early in 2022, our time in the ’van since then has only increased. It is at this point that we need to bring you up to date with Jackie’s mum, Iris, and her travel goals.
Iris is an inspiration to us both. She has travelled independently for most of her retired life and has a personal quest to visit all of the 50 states of America. At the age of 78, she is currently has only 10 states to go!
Earlier this year, she had a proposition for us, to join her in a rental RV to visit a range of Rocky Mountain and Midwest states that she had not already bagged. As the travel distances were so large, and we have time on our side in early retirement, a five-week road trip sounded a reasonable proposition – who could refuse?
We flew into Denver, Colorado, which is a 10-hour flight from the UK and this, combined with a seven-hour time difference, did nothing for our energy levels on landing.
We had anticipated this in our planning and had booked a budget hotel close to the RV pick-up site so we could have a valuable night’s sleep before the challenges of getting to grips with a rental RV that would be considerably larger than our little T6 campervan.
After a full-on American buffet breakfast experience, collection day was eventful to say the least. We were frustrated to find out that our RV would only be available for collection after 2pm, which meant that we would be racing to get to our first campground before dark, which was not ideal but something that we had to deal with.
We then realised that our hotel and the RV office were in the middle of nowhere, with no transport links between the two – even Uber let us down! We had no other option but to leave Iris at the hotel and we headed off on a 2½-mile walk up the highway to get the RV – not an ideal start to the trip as Americans are not massive fans of pavements, but an adventure none the less.
The transfer of the ’van went well, with the opportunity to iron out any concerns about the RV operations. Pre-collection, Cruise America was fantastic in providing a whole range of familiarisation materials and videos about the specific RV we were
