PANDEMIC VACATION

The RV business is booming and shows no sign of slowing down. To find out why, our correspondent dragged his reluctant family to the RV capital of the world— the cutest city in north central Indiana!—and hit the road

- Patrick Clark

Forest River’s Sunseeker Classic motor home is built on a Ford E-450 chassis, framed with vacuum-bonded laminate, and crammed with features the armchair outdoorsman would never consider. On the 31-foot model I piloted recently, those included a propane furnace to keep the cabin toasty in freezing temperatures, two refrigerators (one for the indoor kitchen and one for the outdoor one), three sleeping areas, and dozens of cabinets, drawers, and compartments to conceal disorder.

All that engineering was pretty satisfying at the campsite. On the road it was noisy, adding clatter and a little bit of mystery—honey, did you hear that?—to the task of keeping a 14,500-pound motor home upright going over winding mountain roads and through crowded interchanges. At least that’s how I saw it. Like a real RV dad, I was doing my best to ignore the complaints of the unhappy campers with whom I was sharing the cabin. My kids had been slugging each other periodically, and when the iPad ran out of juice they tossed markers in my direction. My wife, Eleanor, had a premonition somewhere in the Allegheny Mountains and was now certain our brakes were about to give out. And that was before I opened an artery in my hand with a hatchet and wound up riding an ambulance from an obscure state park to an emergency room, asking myself how, exactly, I’d come to believe this would be a relaxing vacation.

It had started some months earlier, when I’d convinced the editors of Bloomberg Businessweek that we should visit Elkhart, Ind., where the world’s largest RV companies are based. Elkhart, which is about halfway between Ohio and Illinois and just south of the Michigan state line, may not be known as a tourist destination. But, as I’d insisted to Eleanor, it’s a surprisingly bucolic place, where Amish farms mix with factories.