Del Mar Plays Host to Zen and the Art of Motor Home Mania

Del Mar has become the Woodstock of motor homes.

There they are, row upon row of four-wheeled motor homes--never mobile homes--that carry the emissaries of a special life style.

The motor home life style.

Make that the motor home experience .

Jerome Steck and his wife, Marianne, are denizens of The Experience, have been for 14 years. Steck, 58, is a real estate agent from Madison, Wis. He and his wife are among the aficionados who are currently packed in 4,000 motor homes parked on the grounds of the Del Mar Fair.

The occasion is the 13th annual winter convention of the Family Motor Coach Assn., which numbers 50,000 active members.

Steck and his buddies will be there through Sunday, then it’s back to Wisconsin and Montana and Alaska and Nova Scotia. There’s entertainment every night from the likes of the Lawrence Welk band, and seminars on stabilizers, and rascally down-home chitchat carried out over poker and gin rummy.

And there are more than a few stories to swap.

Steck and his friends love the life style, the juiced-up homes that carry them and the people--giggly fun-lovers, mostly--they happen to meet along the way. They consider this annual powwow a “celebration” of the motor home experience.

At one point, Steck was so excited talking about motor home living that he woke up his wife from a nap so she could regale the visitor.

“She’s just sleepin’ in the bedroom here,” he said, leading the stranger to her bedside. “Wake up, honey, you need to talk to this fella!”

“Well, let me take a shower first,” she said groggily.

Buddies Trudy and Hoyt

The Stecks and their good buddies, Trudy and Hoyt Sessions of Dallas, travel in a Class A motor home. Class relates to body type. Class A is like a Cadillac compared with a Class C “Chevy.” Each of their four-wheelers is about 35 feet long, with shelves of fine cabinetry and lots of accessories, including automatic support systems for balancing, built-in color TVs, bedrooms and living rooms, ice makers, microwave and convection ovens and refrigerators that mean business.

“You can put plenty of beer in there,” Steck said.

“I crave the freedom that these babies represent,” said Hoyt Sessions, a man in his 70s now retired from the merchandising business in Dallas.

“We live in the lap of luxury out here on the road,” said his wife. “It’s our home away from home--and just as nice. We always bring along the silver and fine china.”

The Sessions have motor-homed in most U.S. states and much of Canada and Mexico. Sessions said it’s too hard to travel in Mexico.

“I’m just afraid to go down there,” he said. “The government can do as they please. They could confiscate our home, and where would we be? Naw, it’s too damn dangerous.”

He said he and the Stecks are like wandering gypsies in their caravan life styles--”We just get there faster, and we live like absolute kings.”

“Say, you fly from San Diego to Chicago,” said Steck, looking more like a Texan than Sessions with his Billy Bob cowboy hat. “You see San Diego and you see Chicago but nothin’ in between. Who needs that?”

Likes Impulsiveness

Steck likes the impulsiveness of stopping off in Colorado for skiing, then gambling a fool’s worth of green in Nevada before finally hunkering down by the sea in Del Mar. He can leave anytime he wants, and says he always meets interesting people--some of whom, he admits, are as eccentric as the life styles they relish.

Two of the people at the convention are an 81-year-old man and his 61-year-old son, who is mentally retarded. Steck likes doing what he can for the pair, who he says reap unadulterated joy from the passion of the motor home experience.

Funny stories are as common as flat tires, and those are common.

Mrs. Steck remembers her 35th wedding anniversary, despite attempts to forget it. The van broke down on Interstate 80 between Lincoln, Neb., and Des Moines, Iowa. The temperature was, by her hyperbole, 137 degrees. She and her husband celebrated with sweat and swear words, but cooled off when Mrs. Sessions brought in a bouquet of side-of-the-road wildflowers.

Unavoidable Companion

Mechanical problems are a frequent and unavoidable companion, no matter how much the “big baby” cost. Ronald and Elaine Curtis of Santa Ana are in their 60s. They’ve been motor-homing for more than two decades.

Curtis is a retired executive of an aerospace firm. He likes motor home people most of all. He says they’re naturally outgoing and extroverted and wouldn’t be motor-homers if they weren’t. He detests the mechanical foul-ups, but says they often lead to adventure that gives the experience the stamp of authenticity.

“One time we burned up an alternator in a tiny town in Texas,” he said. “Had maybe a population of 200 people. We spent three days backed into a sheet-metal building. The guy said: ‘Watch your step gettin’ out of the coach--it’s rattlesnake season!’ Thank God we had a tow car with us. We saw parts of Texas we’d have never seen otherwise. We made the most of it.”

Motor homes like the ones ensconced at Del Mar range in price from $40,000 for the 26-foot Class C model--”the Chevy”--to as much as $500,000 for the herd of “black beauties” parked along Jimmy Durante Boulevard at the fairgrounds’ east end. Those might befit the traveling life style of, say, a Bruce Springsteen or a John Madden.

“If you have to ask how much mileage they get,” roared Bill Bowersox of Lemon Grove, “you can’t afford one of these babies! The answer is about seven miles to the gallon.”

Obviously, the experience is not for everyone.

“A lot of our friends think we’re nuts,” said Curtis, the former aerospace executive. “They say, ‘For what you paid for that thing, we could stay in hotels for the next 12 years.’ I spent 25 years travelin’ to other towns, camped in big hotels, chasin’ in and out of airports. Why do I want to do that now? This is for me. This is where I feel free.”

Curtis and his wife are sometimes gone for four or five months at a stretch.

“I love the seminars,” said Walton Thomsen, who, with his wife, Esther, was enjoying a late-afternoon game of gin rummy. “They’re social, educational. . . . We had a very good meetin’ this mornin’ on the virtues of the new motors. We had a study of microwave and convection ovens. I’ve learned a lot on this trip. I can go back to Hemet (the Thomsens’ home) with a head full of new knowledge and say I had a right good time as well.”