| BY
MARK COATNEY
So they're
all Beavers, every last one of them. Thirteen to a barge,
and angle-parked in neat rows on what is billed as the only
floating RV campground in the world.
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| DIANA WALKER FOR TIME |
| They're all "Beavers": RV's set sail up the Mississippi. |
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The owners
call themselves Beavers too, because they drive Beaver RV's
made in Bend, Ore., enormous 40-footers with side expansion
units that make them bigger than your average two-bedroom
apartment (and a whole lot better equipped). They start
at an entirely reasonable $300,000 per and can run you much
higher than that; the big rig on the boat is a million-dollar
bus that could very well be doing duty on the Shania Twain
tour.
And so
when I see the whole mess of them parked very close to the
U.S.S. Kidd on the Baton Rouge waterfront — right by
where we've tied up for the night — I have to know
more. The barge they're traveling on is the only one of
its kind in the U.S. It's run by RV River Charters, which
was born of the consolidation of the barge industry 10 years
ago. It was then that Ray Gaines and Eddie Conrad of Compass
Marine decided to tap into the growing RV boom. Their idea:
Drive the monster motor homes onto three of the flat-topped
barges the company had sitting around and push the whole
thing up the river from New Orleans to St. Louis. That first
trip sold out, and it's been smooth sailing from there,
to the point that the company is booked solid through 2002,
and will for the first time next summer begin running trips
year-round (they used to take the hot months of July and
August off).
Their
first setup was little more than a series of floating slabs;
passengers had to supply their own water, electricity and
sewage systems. The current models are much nicer, with,
as they say in the RV business, full hookups. This year's
innovation has been the Party Barge, a building set on the
middle barge of the three that is a sort of senior citizen
Porky's where the campers can share meals and hang out.
The question
that comes up — well, OK, one of the questions
— when you watch a 200-foot barge with campers sitting
on top slide slowly up the river is, why do this? Why, after
spending all that money on a fabulously appointed home that
can also do 85 mph in the straightaway, would you then spring
for $2,300 more to park it on a concrete slab to sail up
the Mississippi?
Call
it the Campfire Syndrome. Though it may seem like they're
lonely wanderers of the open road, RV-ers are actually quite
a social bunch. Even on dry land, they hold rallies where
they will stay for a week or more parked in the same place.
On this
morning, everyone's dragging a bit because the group was
out late dancing (or watching dancing) at New Lots, La.,
and they had to get up early for a trip to Baton Rouge.
Creative World, a tour group, is in charge of booking the
social calendar for the cruise, and they have the campers
doing something different every day.
In the
end, though, they like to return to something familiar.
Charlotte Chase and her husband have been on the road for
six months and are starting to miss Lodi, Calif., where
they have 18 acres of grapes. "I want to see Georgia,"
she says, "and then go home for a while."
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