“Allie, my love, “ I said. “I don’t want to fly anymore.” This was a piece of a discussion about going to camp in Maine for the summer. “I worry about my stamina and my stomach. I don’t want to be sick on an airplane.”
Never daunted, Allie grinned at me. Was something funny? Turned out it was. In anticipation of my acknowledgement that flying was getting too hard for me, he had been researching RVs. “Ev,” he said, “we’ll take our home with us.”
“RVs?” I groaned. “I picture us in a huge RV lumbering along with a car attached to it, burning up a gallon of gasoline every five miles. It would be the schlep of all schleps, driving from Florida to Maine.”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s not like that. Let’s go looking.”
So off we went scouting for our home away from home. We looked at the big ones, to be sure, admiring the room and the amenities, and I was even surer we didn’t want that. And then we looked at a 24 foot Unity by Leisure Travel Vans.
We were in our late eighties, he at 88 and I at 87 and our needs were pretty basic:
A super comfortable bed for two, an accessible toilet, a shower, a refrigerator and freezer, a stove, a microwave, a dinette area, a TV and storage areas for clothing and kitchen accessories. We found all of these in the Unity. For the driving area we needed two super comfortable chairs, a great motor, and good gas mileage. In the Mercedes chassis on the Unity we had it all.
Well, you might say, why not just drive a good car and stay at good motels? The answer is that with a RV you don’t need to pack and unpack, you don’t need to accommodate to a new bed every night, you don’t need to find a clean rest room on the road as you have your own, you don’t need to find a good place to eat because you have your own food and only need a rest area to pull into. Your every need is met in your own home on wheels.
Another major issue for the elderly is safety; fear of falling ranking highest among our worries, and rightfully so. Enter the Unity! Just big enough to accommodate our every need, it’s small enough to be safe in. It’s just small enough to be able to walk from the bedroom to the bathroom, to the shower, to the kitchen and dinette, and to the driver’s area, always having a wall or a counter to hold onto. The interior provides safe navigation for all. What a boon for the elderly—assisted living on wheels.
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