Price of a Bluebird

[Ryan Wright]

On Jan 19, 2008 6:41 AM, brad barton <bbartonwx@...> wrote:
>
> An interesting thread to start for guys that have enough spare time to
> figure it up would be..."How much has your coach cost you per mile?"

I haven't owned my coach a year yet, but I have a comprehensive
spreadsheet listing all costs involved. So if anyone wants info, I can
get it, just let me know.

> You could certainly stay in nice hotels along the way for a lot less.
> It's the lifestyle.

I'm in agreement here - of course this depends on the length of your
trip in both distance and time. Shorter distance trips with longer
time spent at one location, you can get off a lot cheaper with a coach
- if you ignore the initial cost of purchase. ;-) I just figured my
coach was going to cost me tens of thousands of dollars more than
staying in hotels would. It's worth it to have my own kitchen, bed,
and bathroom with me everywhere I go.

For me, though, there is a secondary element to owning a coach that
makes it well worth the additional expense: It is the perfect
emergency-situation vehicle. We recently had a power outage on a cold,
winter night. When the house began cooling down, we retreated to the
coach, fired up the generator and watched a movie in warmth and
comfort. As a large chunk of the city was out, including all street
lights, I turned on the spotlights and flooded our street with light
throughout the entire night to deter any potential opportunistic
thieves. The neighbors appreciated it as well.

The security of having this resource available to my family is worth
all of the money I've put into it; the vacations are just a bonus.
Most people are not prepared for emergencies - who actually has the
recommended amounts of water and food stocked for their family? Well,
because of this coach, now I do. At any given time I've got a hundred
plus gallons of fresh water, 300 gallons of diesel, and a pantry full
of canned food. We can easily outlast any localized or regional
emergency in comfort. In a more major, widespread emergency, we have
enough fuel, food and water on board to travel halfway across the
country, certainly far enough to get to a place where we could restock
supplies. If we had to, we could live in the coach as long as we
needed.

I'm not paranoid but I am self reliant; I don't like the idea of being
helpless, relying on outside help to survive. We've always been more
prepared than most but having a big coach makes it easy. In my
opinion, you can't put a price on that kind of security.

-Ryan
'86 PT-40 8V92