Operation Minnie Winnie: Now Arriving in Yuma

$175 dollars in gas to get from the Wallowa Mountains to Yuma, Arizona.

I find Al and Jennifer Bell in the overflow lot at La Mesa RV on Gila Ridge Road. Their new motorhome is parked next to the Minnie Winnie and Jennifer is busy making trips down the steps of the Minnie and up the steps into the new Allegro, moving.

We do some hugs, though I fear I may knock them over as I haven’t showered since leaving home.

Sure enough, I knock them over. Found smelling salts and revived them, then Al showed me around the Minnie Winnie.

I started having questions. You’ve got one battery system for the engine, and one for the living quarters. You can connect the two, or bypass or . . . then the generator plugs into this, which will power that, unless . . .

After explaining it several times, Al says, ‘it’s all in the manual.’

I ask to see this manual. Al does some yoga stretches to loosen up his back, then hoists down from a storage bin a gigantic accordian briefcase.

It looks like a government document, just by it’s sheer size. I’ll have to hire a research assistant to ever find information in there. I ask Al to please put it out of sight. It’s intimidating. He declines, pointing out that it’s my owners manual now. So I borrow his pallet jack and put the thing away.

Al and Jennifer are anxious to get on the road in their new coach . . . ‘coach’ means RV, I think. I’ll have to start a list of this new vocabulary.

The guys at La Mesa RV have kindly agreed to let me stay for a day or two until I get things sorted out, so I begin with looking for a tow bar for my pickup. I think that shouldn’t be too difficult. And I am wrong.

Operation Minnie Winnie: Night One, Boise, ID. Kesey is Cheesed.

(confidential to the state of Idaho: If I was you, I’d name a town ‘Girlsie.’ Then you could use those paper doll cutout pictures of men and women for some of your road signs. Brilliant, I know.)

Stayed the night at Fargo and Cathy Kesey’s in Boise. Their boy, Mac, has this for his full name: Cormac Harrison Jess Kesey. Jess is a family name, recalling the Kesey who trapped golden bears in California for a living back when.

Cormac, Harrison and Kesey could double as a reading list, and that seems to have soaked in with this kid. He’s reading at a fifth-grade level while still in first grade. He’s a machine. Doesn’t seem to sound things out, just looks at a word he’s not familiar with and makes the connection.

Cathy said go ahead and test him, so we picked random labels that were handy on the kitchen table and asked Mac what they said. I pointed to ‘fiesta’ on a salsa jar. He pronounced it right, then asked what that meant. He was a little unsure about ‘vinaigrette’ on the salad dressing label, but I just now had to look up the spelling on that myself, so I won’t hold that against you, Mac.

His dad, Fargo, is writing a story I’m looking forward to seeing in print. Goes like this – he grows weary of hearing “We’re going to end up like Canada,” during conversations about health care reform here in the U.S. In part, he suspects these people don’t know anything about Canadian health care, aside from hearing rumors that it has fangs, eyes like a serpent and steals children in the night. I think Fox did a story on that.

So he goes home and calls people in Canada to ask what they think about their health care situation. Talks to a lumberyard worker, a teacher and the owner of a bed and breakfast. Then calls around to a lumberyard worker, teacher and B&B owner in Boise to compare and contrast what they think about their health care.

It’s good stuff. The title is ‘Cheesed,’ from a comment made by one of the Canadians who is ‘cheesed off’ about . . . well, I’ll put up a link when it gets in print.

Fargo made me some sandwiches in the morning, a bag of Cheez-Its and I hit the road, facing 15 more hours or so of driving until my date with destiny in the form of a 1998 Class C Minnie Winnie in Yuma. I was beginning to be vinaigretted off at myself for not just getting a plane ticket.

Operation Minnie Winnie

So I bought a motorhome.

Sure, I'd had a few beers when the idea came to me. But the next day I had coffee and it still seemed like a good plan. Then I even had some water and it continued to seem like a sound proposition.

I’d learned of an RV being traded in for a sum I considered to be an outrage. So I called up and offered my friends the same outrage. They said OK. But I had to come fetch the thing down in Yuma, Arizona. Pronto.

It turns out depositing cash in someone else’s bank account takes some doing. I had to provide photo ID. Then I was asked to furnish my social security number…uh, this is cash, I mentioned. You'd better ask ol’ Ben Franklin there about his identity, not mine.

My sisters both worked at banks in the long-ago, so I’m aware of reporting procedures for large amounts of C-notes, keeping an eye out for highwaymen and the like. But this wasn’t all that much money, really. It’s not like I was asking to make a deposit in the form of kilos or fenced jewelry. Still, they wanted that SSN and they got it.

Drove home from the bank, winterized my house in four minutes, threw the dog in the truck along with a toothbrush and a sleeping bag, then hit the road.

For the next two days I would try to pass those goddamned RVers going too slow on the freeway, listening to radio commentators poke the corpse that is our national economy. ‘Disappointing indicators’ this, and ‘unemployment crisis’ that. I kept waiting for a report on how the used-RV sector was a bright spot. How that’s where the smart money was being invested. But no.

And that’s how me and a 29-foot Winnebago known as a “Minnie Winnie” started our life together. I’ve got some time, now that I’ve retired early and joined the RV circuit. So I’ll be checking in with updates as Operation Minnie Winnie progresses.

Because if NPR won’t report on second-hand motorhomes as a wise investment strategy, well then, by God, I will.