About Our Rig...

We live in a 2004 Lazy Daze 30'TB model. It's a class C motorhome and is built on a Ford E-450 chassis. It has a gas engine (the Triton V-10) with enough power to get us up the steepest of grades. Unfortunately, with that big engine pulling about 14,000 pounds, we only get about 8 mpg and filling up a 50 gallon gas tank almost induces a heart attack -- especially when the price of gas topped $4.50/gal.

We tow a Honda CR-V and use it to tour around once we get parked in a campground. It's also become our "garage" -- a place to stow the heavier, bulky items that won't fit in the motorhome. Our biggest challenge has been trying to keep the weight of the RV under it's gross limit of 14,050 pounds. We have to be very careful of everything that we bring in and we get our rig weighed about every six months just to make sure we haven't crept up into the danger zone.

Our RV is about 31' long and does not have any slide out rooms. If you take away the cab area, we are actually living in a box that's about 8' x 25' -- roughly 200 sq. ft. and smaller than the bedroom in our former "sticks and bricks" house. Fitting our stuff into a miniature version of a house, was a certainly a challenge, but we did it and really don't miss too many of our former belongings. Our living room has a comfy couch and chair, bookshelves, a 20" Sharp LCD tv and two laptop stands for our computers. We took out the fold-up dining room table that came with the RV since we rarely used it and instead we put in more shelving. We use our laptop stands like tv trays and either use them or eat outside on the picnic table. All our music is recorded on our laptops and we listen to it using Bose speakers connected wirelessly through our Airport Express. We watch DVDs on our laptops. We have a Datastorm satellite internet system and a DISH satellite tv system complete with a dual tv DVR.

We have just about everything we need to live very comfortably in a small and very efficient space. I do miss having a dishwasher and washer/dryer, but the trade-off is worth it. The best part of living in an RV is that a thorough house cleaning is a one hour task instead of a two day chore and yard work is a thing of the past giving us much more time to enjoy doing the things we like.

We chose a Lazy Daze because it is one of the highest quality class C motorhomes available. Their reputation for high standards both in quality and safety are well known throughout the industry. They are a family owned company that has been in business for 50 years and have excellent customer service. We worked directly with the owner when we ordered our rig and he helped us decide on several options based on the fact that we were going to live in it. The few, very minor problems we've had have all been addressed promptly and at no cost to us.

There are three other reasons we opted for a Lazy Daze -- they are windows, windows and windows! For such a small space, lots of windows were a necessity for us and most other RVs we considered just didn't have enough windows to suit us. We figured that we could get by with a much smaller RV (and thus get into smaller national park camping sites) if we had a lot of windows to keep us from feeling claustrophobic.

One of our favorite features in the motorhome (and unique to Lazy Daze) is the panoramic view out the three, large windows in the back. We've been camped in so many lovely places where the view out the back has been absolutely gorgeous. This photo was taken at Yellowstone Park -- the view out to the lake was so pretty and we got an extra bonus in our view when when the herd of bison roamed through.