Adventures with Bucky

Who’s Bucky, you ask? I’ll tell you. Bucky isn’t a person, nor an animal. Bucky is a motorhome. Our motorhome. A 2023 Coachman CrossTrail 20 CB – a twenty-foot Class C coach, as seen below while I boondocked in the Arizona desert recently.

The concept of getting a motorhome started last summer while Linda and I traveled across the West in our SUV. Actually, the concept started years ago. I often floated the idea of buying and traveling in a motorhome by Linda, and she often (as in always) said “no”. I eventually let it go, figuring we’d never get to explore the RV life. Then out of the blue last June, while driving between Death Valley and Bishop, California, Linda looked at me and said, “Maybe we should buy a motorhome”.

We spent the next three months, driving up through the Northwest, across into Montana, up into Canada, back down into Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, and finally back to Arizona, talking about motorhomes. We looked at some while in Edmonton, Alberta and in Boise, Idaho. We arrived back in Mesa near the end of September. We started looking around the plethora of RV sales lots near home. Within a month, we found and bought our first RV together.

It took us quite a while to come up with an appropriate name for our coach. I say appropriate because the first name we came up with was “The Beav”. Most of you may recall that The Beav was the nickname of Theodore Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver. We, however, came up with the name from our growing collection of stuffed beavers we have accumulated on our worldly travels. The collection started last summer in Switzerland. Linda found a yodeling beaver in a store in Lucerne. I held it in my hand and gave it a squeeze, and just like that, he started yodeling.

After Switzerland, Linda and I continued our travels, first back to Canada, and then into Idaho and Colorado. We found and purchased two more stuffed beavers – one in Calgary and one in Breckenridge, Colorado. We had a real beaver motif going. It came to fruition during a trip Linda and I made with our friends Neal and Randa. We flew to Knoxville, Tennessee and spent five days wandering across the Volunteer State. Driving across to Nashville, Neal spotted a billboard for a Buc-ee’s Fuel Plaza in Crossville.

If you’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s, you’re missing out on treat. Buc-ee’s sells gas. And just about everything else you need while on the road. You can get:

  • barbequed pork sandwiches (we did)
  • Buc-ee’s playing cards (I did)
  • Buc-ee’s crayons (I did, for documenting our travels in color)
  • Buc-ee’s ballcap (I did)
  • Buc-ee’s singing stuffed beaver (Linda made me put it back – On The Road Again by Willie Nelson gets old after a while)
  • Saltwater taffy (Neal did – it was delicious)

We (or should I say I) also bought a small Buc-ee Beaver who attaches to the OS bar while driving.

Back to the name. The Beav is out. The Beaver is definitely out. Buc-ee is used already. We decided upon Bucky, a name we could both live with while driving down the road.

As we travel this summer, I’ll often write about and make photographs of our journeys. To follow along with us, click the links below. And please feel free to comment on the posts.

Dream on . . .

Stories to Tell