RV Owners Have Palace, Will Travel

Still think John Madden is sort of a flake for insisting on taking the bus instead of flying? About as flaky as stainless steel. After visiting the Sports, Vacation and RV Show at the Anaheim Convention Center (it runs through Sunday), I’m now convinced that Madden is a scam artist.

Madden, the voluble TV football analyst and hardware store pitchman, claims to have a debilitating fear of flying. Airplanes so unhinge him, he says, that he has dedicated his life to staying out of them and traveling around the country from stadium to stadium by bus.

But not just any bus.

Madden’s TV contract stipulates that he crisscross the nation in the Maddencruiser. The Maddencruiser is a converted Greyhound bus fitted with all sorts of custom goodies that one might expect to see attached to Air Force One or Hugh Hefner’s late, lamented--and really big--corporate jet, the Big Bunny. The Maddencruiser is the ol’ coach’s rolling home, office and refuge from anything that sounds like a jet turbine spooling up.

People chuckle. Poor John Madden. Doomed to poke along the blue highways while the rest of us are rocketing through the thin air, securely strapped into our ergonomically designed seats, dining on succulent airline cuisine and watching “Ishtar.”

Meanwhile Madden is in bed, surrounded by fine furnishings, reading a good book while the scenery glides by, secure in the knowledge that his luggage is in the closet and not on its way to Beirut.

The more top-end RVs I poked my head into at the show, the more I came to realize that John Madden is about as worthy of pity as the Emir of Kuwait. If these rolling palaces are examples of what the Maddencruiser is like, I thought, the airlines have lost my business forever.

How could one resist, for instance, two or three days of gliding across the country in something like the Crown Royale Signature Series model by the RV builder Monaco Coach Corp.? As opposed, for instance, to flying standby coach on Thanksgiving? Never mind that the thing is the size of a tour bus--40 feet long--and never mind that it has an engine big enough to tow another 10,000 pounds worth of vehicle. This is a luxury condo with tires.

The floor model at the show has a marble floor in the kitchen. And gray leather couches and chairs. And walnut cabinetry. And the crystal service in the glass display case? It’s standard.

That’s what you see at first look. But it doesn’t have to be. Kevin Atkinson, Western regional manager for Beaver Coaches, another luxury RV builder, said that high-end customers can order just about any interior design feature they want--upholstery, cabinetry, carpet, trim, fixtures, appliances--”if they get this out,” he said, producing his wallet.

If Lucy and Desi had been driving one of these in “The Long, Long Trailer,” they’d still be going. Central heating and air conditioning. Corian surfaces on the kitchen counters. Cut glass mirrors, sliding mirrored doors on the closets and queen-size beds in the bedrooms. Large glass-enclosed showers in the bathrooms (whirlpools and hand-laid tile are options), oversized gas burners, ice makers and microwave/convection ovens in the kitchen. Built-in vacuums, custom safes set in the floor, louvered opera windows with trim to match the adjoining love seat. Space for a washer and dryer. Wiring for solar panels and a satellite dish. And in the Crown Royale--count ‘em--five remote control devices: one for the stereo, one each for the two TVs, one for the CD player and one for the VCR.

How big is big? The Crown Royale model at the show weighs 29,000 pounds, measures 8.5 by 40 feet, gets 11 miles per gallon on diesel fuel and costs $311,420. Builders say that the most opulent custom models can top out at around $600,000.

That’s the high end. The least expensive RV, which is a folding trailer that converts into a kind of tent on wheels, runs about $3,000. And in between are a dizzying mix of sizes, shapes and prices, but many of the interior amenities are close cousins: well-appointed and efficient kitchens, optimum use of space (some models have a “slide-out” feature that allows the width of a room to expand to 12 feet with the push of a button), and colors, fabrics, textures and materials that one might see in any home.

All the comforts of a weekend at La Costa with the option of getting out of town quick if the check doesn’t clear.

I can see it: Madden and Charles Kuralt, meeting once a month in a roadside barbecue diner parking lot outside Kansas City, sitting in their custom leather living rooms, sipping Perrier Jouet out of their standard-issue crystal flutes, watching the planes circling overhead in holding patterns and grinning like they’ve just drawn the fourth ace.

Then they put an airplane disaster movie on the VCR and laugh themselves to sleep. Just a couple of flakes with RV clauses in their contracts.