I'm finding some things interesting about the combination of our perspectives...*snip*
There are a few differences. As you noted, you have high tolerance for changes to the plan. A change to the plan for my flying meant a disruption to anything from 10-50 other people. While I only had to inform usually one or two contacts on either end, it's still a pain and has ripple effects. Nevermind the fact that I was also generally trying to get back home at some point. No, my flying was never about stopping and smelling the roses. If you have a high tolerance for changes to plan, that's one thing. That was never the case for me.
Also, your flying in the TBM was closer to what I did, but you're still talking about a different order of magnitude. Having 10-12 hours of hobbs time in one day was not uncommon, rather it was the norm. My legs often took me 2,000 nm from where I woke up. Or I'd do trips like Houston to the northeast and back home to Kansas. It's hard to do trips that long without encountering weather somewhere along the way, or at least having to plan for it. Sometimes weather would include 50-100 kt headwinds which, even in the MU-2, slowed things down a good bit (although it was rare to see <200 KTS GS in the MU-2). Now, I actually do enjoy the feeling of accomplishment in successfully navigating bad weather, an approach to minimums, etc. But it adds stress while you're doing it, especially when you're over the Bermuda Triangle at night in a 414 with no radar and you start to see the flashes of lightning in the distance, getting closer and more frequent (stay tuned to the publication of my book for more on this and other stories!
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The equivalent is closer to how you drove the semi truck. I did lots of drives like that in college, but it wasn't every day for years on end like it was for you.
Incidentally, I think not moving to a 340 was a smart decision. Aside from the MX headaches (still nursing my wounds from those), the cabin class Twin Cessnas just aren't much fun to fly. Mooneys are great fun to fly, especially with a 550.
Your comment about going and seeing *snip*
And when you do those unplanned diversions in an airplane, then you're having to do something about ground transport to go check it out, and when all of that is done, you end up probably not saving much time vs. driving. Not a problem if you don't care about saving time and you want to have the journey about seeing things from the air (and then checking them out on the ground). For us, part of the benefit of family air travel was the time savings for going places further away. Cabo for Christmas was something that wouldn't happen with the RV.
The view when driving going down the road is completely different, as you know. While my kids are taking turns sitting up front looking out the window, just driving down the Kansas roads and seeing farms, watching the weather or the wide open plains (even wider and more open than our house), seeing the mountains that go hundreds of feet up above us through Colorado on the Eisenhower Pass or Wolf Creek Pass, it's just a completely different level of appreciation. My kids love aviation and they miss the MU-2, but they really thrive on the RV trips.
As for strapped in and unable to move... *snip*
After the first couple of trips, Laurie said "I knew we'd enjoy this, but I didn't think we'd enjoy it this much." We both had concerns about the longer time periods associated with the trips. We also have a running joke of Laurie "doing the woman thing and making me a sandwich" since 1) I've never in our relationship asked her to make me anything (and I'm always appreciative when she does) 2) She ain't exactly your typical girly girl.
Interesting. The unpleasant parts of the trip, to me, *snip*
Well, local fun flights are different from XCs altogether and you can't compare the two. But after a few RV trips, I realized that flying trips had a lot of inherent stress involved because of all the steps. It goes like this.
1) Pack bags
2) Load bags into car
3) Drive car to airport (might be two cars, as I often went ahead to pre-flight the plane and pull it out of the hangar)
4) Move stuff (including car seats) from car to plane (kids are being disruptive and a pain during all of this)
5) Park cars, close hangar
6) Get clearance, take off, negotiate ATC (ok, that part wasn't hard)
7) Listen to kids complaining wanting to get a turn sitting up front with daddy and never understanding "Be quiet when ATC is talking" plus not paying attention to where their feet are and suddenly they move the rudder trim enough that the MU-2 feels sideways
8) Finally let kids up front, complain that I won't let them hand fly the MU-2 at FL250. Get where we're going fast so the sitting up front with dad is always rushed and interrupted by Delta saying "Light chop" and ATC giving me a new frequency.
9) Land (we'll assume no fuel stop), check in with FBO, move stuff (including car seats) out of plane and into rental car
10) Drive to hotel, unload stuff yet again and get to hotel
RV:
1) Pack bags
2) Load bags into RV
3) Hook up Land Rover to RV (note that all of these can be done the day before departing on the trip, and usually are)
4) Drive. Eat sandwiches, do school work, take turns sitting up front, etc. all during this time
5) Get to destination, put out slides and hook up water/electric, play
The real keys are that we aren't moving car seats a bunch of times, we aren't moving our stuff a bunch of times. When we get where we're going, we already have our house/hotel room/whatever and there's no moving bags around, settling in a hotel room, things like that.
Also, and admittedly this is more of a personal thing just because of how my brain works, but the long amount of time an RV trip takes just doesn't bother me while it's happening. Neither does being on the interstate, although the backroads are more fun. We do tend to plan our days to be shorter with the RV since the kids do need time to get out and play/stretch/etc. so that's part of it, but 400-500 mile days back-to-back aren't uncommon.
Yeah, if I were going to be driving. *snip*
I agree that travel trailers make sense for a lot of situations, the biggest one being if you're not going too far with them or don't have kids. The biggest negative for me in buying the RV was that I also had to buy another vehicle as a "toad". But we all really love the Land Rover so that hasn't been a bad thing, even if it needs an engine swap.
I think realistically your autonomous Tesla towing and self-charging going ahead is still likely far enough off in the future that the memory making time with your kids may be past if you wait that long. Or it may cost too much to be a viable option, compared with the used RV pricing.
But to your point about renting out west, most of the bigger places only rent Class Cs. RVshare does have individuals renting their Class As, depending on area. Personally I think the Class As are the way to go, but there is a premium you pay for them. We'd had a similar thought about flying out west (when we could fly a plane to do so) and renting from there. As the kids get older and more tolerant of the road travel, we may be able to change how we do that as we'd love to RV through Alaska and the like. Plus realistically at some point we do expect we'll upgrade from this 40' RV to a 45'er with bunks that will improve the sleeping arrangements and make longer trips more feasible.
Admittedly, the biggest problem with RV trips is that things that are far away are still far away, and time is a limited commodity (although I'm hopeful the future of WFH/WFanywhere dynamics change that some). We want to make a trip out west this summer, but San Francisco and Seattle are both an 1800 mile drive one-way. You really need a 3 week block of time (or more) to make a trip out those directions and properly see things. For Alaska, Juneau is about 3k miles just to get there.
We've thought a lot about how to do some of those trips, especially with Laurie's current (although constantly in flux) schedule and my limited time off from the day job. Some of it's just hard to do, but one of the cool things about our RV is that I could literally pick up Laurie from the airport when she flies home from work and we could get going right from there. With an on-board washer/dryer, she can even wash her work clothes first thing while we're heading down the road. The kids can legitimately sleep while we're driving somewhere (although at this point I'm the only one who drives the bus, so there's still limits on how far we go at once and the headlights are still not fantastic for night driving even after some upgrades... more work is required there... I may do some fiberglass work at some point and try to retrofit some better OEM headlights in the future).
When we upgrade to a bigger RV on a better platform (the Freightliner XC is good but it is lighter duty than some of the other platforms) and a bigger engine than a 3126B (C15 is my preference -
@NealRomeoGolf will be proud) then it's also feasible to go faster when we're trying to burn down the miles faster to get somewhere further away. With the 3126B's 330 HP and the Freightliner XC's suspension (although I'm told much of this has to do with the steering box, which I can upgrade and may do at some point), 70-75 is normally about as fast as you can comfortably go and there are windy days where 62 is about it.
We'll ignore fuel economy because frankly, I just don't care about it.
