Archive for May, 2007

>If he’s running on empty, Bill Phillips easily can spend more than $600 to fill the fuel tank of his 45-foot-long Legendary Prevost motor coach.

“It heats up my credit card,” he said.

But Phillips said the high cost of fuel is not about to deter him from seeing the country behind the wheel of his luxury RV, which gets about 6 miles per gallon when he’s towing his Cadillac Escalade. The retired contractor from Clearwater, Fla., was parked recently at the Premier RV Resort in Coburg with his wife, Shaaron, and their three toy poodles, Cory, Cody and Rocky.

“You don’t like the higher prices, but you don’t buy the kind of rigs we drive and stay home because gas is up a quarter a gallon,” he said. “It doesn’t really affect my travel. You just ride and bitch, I guess.”
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>Bernie Hooper stands next to his RV and says, “This is my new home sweet home.”

Hooper used to drive 92 miles a day to work, each way. Now he walks about 20 steps.

A month ago, Hooper, who everyone calls Hoop, moved into the parking lot at his workplace. And he did it to save gas.

He says, “I was filling up three times a week. Compute that over a month. It runs about $732 a month. I can’t afford that.”

Hooper and his wife live in Sierra Vista, AZ. And he works in Tucson as lead instructor at Southwest Truck Driver Training.

He wouldn’t change either. So for more than three years he commuted everyday. He stopped when gas prices hit $3 a gallon.

Now Hooper lives in his RV at work on weekdays and he goes home on weekends.
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>Fort Collins, CO — It’s that time of year again. Whether you pitch a tent or cozy up in a creek-side cabin, campgrounds offer a refresh-ing escape from the mundane and a chance to mellow out with the environment.

But local independent campgrounds often fight to stay in business faced with plentiful and less expensive national park and national forest campgrounds.

Private campground owners rely on the natural beauty of their locations and creature-comforts to lure campers to higher-priced sites.

U.S. Forest Service camp-grounds are in the national forest boundaries, part of the public land system, and run by the Department of Agriculture. A concessionaire runs each campground, on contract with the forest service, said Mary Bollinger, visitor assistant at the Forest Service’s Canyon Lakes Ranger District, part of Arapahoe and Roosevelt national forests and Pawnee National Grassland.

National Park Service camp-grounds are operated by the Department of Interior, though a lot is shared between the two organizations, Bollinger said. Expenses for the camper are relatively low, with many sites available for under $20 per night. That is because the government owns the land, keeping costs down for campers.

G.W. Kippschull and his wife, Theresa, own three area KOA campgrounds, in partnership with his daughter Heidi Sisco and son-in-law, Craig, and his son Byron Kippschull. Kippschull operates the Fort Collins/Poudre Canyon KOA in LaPorte, the original KOA in the area.

“What hurts private camp-grounds the most is property taxes. The land values have gone up so much, but we can’t really charge more because of it,” Kippschull said. “Private campgrounds are known for having more rules than state forest campgrounds, since we have people staying in closer proximity. Private campgrounds need special things to offer, which make it a little more expensive than public campgrounds.
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