Remembering Your First Encounter With An RV

The first RV I saw as a kid was a homemade Teardrop trailer. It was silver, had a door and a window and immediately gripped my five year old attention. To me it looked like something from another planet and it could have been, because it abducted my imagination and lured me onboard. Do you remember when you saw an RV for the first time? There’s something evocative about an RV in the eyes of a child. We've had several kids explore our motorhome always with a sense of wonder and adventure. When our boys were kids they started a piggy-bank account so they could save up and buy an RV. They even drew pictures of how it would look and talked about all the places it would take our family. An RV no matter how large or small draws the attention of the kid within us all. As a child we instinctively knew the promise the RV held. It was fuel for our imagination, a source of inspiration. Maybe that's why old men who drive huge motorhomes, smile and look fondly as they pass by a teardrop trailer or a tear-drop lookalike, like the T@B by Dutchmen pictured here. Though faded with time, a Teardrop trailer or one of the many copy cats still has the power to ignite our imagination once again. Perhaps this RV has become an archetype in our collective conscience, an icon of freedom in the industrial age. Even after all these years when I see a teardrop trailer it still grips my attention. I'm irresistibly drawn to it and I want to see it inside and out. I want to touch it, crawl under it, open the windows and compartments and experience it all over again. In fact, my wife and I recently did just that at a rest stop of all places. We pulled in next to a couple who just purchased a new red Teardrop. The couple was eager to show us as we were to see it. I hope you’ll enjoy this short video essay I put together on Teardrop Trailers:

Jim Twamley, Professor of RVing, Dr. of RVology and ROAD Scholar