As any full-time RVer will tell you, what you name your RV is the most important decision you will ever make while on the road.
After purchasing our Forest River Forester, we knew we had to give this issue serious deliberation. We decided to use our shakedown trip to really get to know our new family member. To bond with it. To learn its personality. To connect with it in a way that would result in us less choosing a name, and more learning the sound of its soul. In doing so, we learned its soul’s name is Carl.
Why Carl?
As we were exploring the campground on foot during our shakedown trip we would often yell ‘car!’ to let each other know to keep an eye out for vehicles. At some point one of us thought they heard ‘Carl’ instead and it stuck. The rest of the trip, vehicles were called Carls. It seemed a natural name for the RV.
But ‘Carl’ also seemed a little plain. To really capture the essence of our RV’s soul it needed more. It needed ‘the Tortise’.
Why ‘the Tortoise’?
Tortoise seemed appropriate for three reasons:
- RVs are slow, like tortoises
- Tortoises carry their shelter with them, just like a family in an RV
- Because he will teach us
To explain the last bullet a bit – there is a line said by the mock turtle in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
‘We called him tortoise, because he taught us.’
We expect to learn many things on this trip, thanks to Carl.
The Hare
At 31 ft., Carl is a little big for the drive thru and many other places. We needed a toad. For simplicity we wanted to be able to tow four-down, so we opted to go with a light, manual transmission car. We ended up with a 2010 Hyundai Accent that we’ve decided to call The Hare, for obvious reasons.