Going to a College Reunion? Might I Suggest a Big-Ass RV
Engine: 6.7-liter Cummins inline-6, 360 hp and 800 lb-ft of torque / Transmission: Allison 3000 MH six-speed automatic / Gross vehicle weight rating: 29,000 pounds / Height: 13 feet, 1 inch / Brakes: air brakes / Sleeping capacity: Nine / Base price: $255,293.00
A 20-year college reunion presents a dilemma: You’re young enough to want to stay up late playing flip cups, but old enough—or maybe wise enough—to dread the prospect of staying in a dorm. And in my case, my class dorm was one that I lived in when I was a junior and was last renovated some years before that.
You know the trope of a grizzled cop declaring, “I’m too old for this?” Well, I’m too old to walk down a hallway to go share a bathroom with 40 other people. When the appointed weekend finally rolled around, one of my classmates walked into his assigned room, took a look at the prison-issue mattress, and promptly booked a room at the nearest Hampton Inn.
I, however, stayed on campus. I had a king bed, my own bathroom, and a fully stocked kitchen. Hell, I even had a fireplace, in the event my dual-zone central AC made things too chilly.
How did I realize this feat of transcendent on-campus accommodation? By bringing an RV—the Jayco Seneca 37.
Driving an RV to my college reunion is probably the best idea I’ve had this year, if not this decade. Some months before the event, I was ruminating on the lodging conundrum and remembered that back in the day, one of my classmate’s parents would roll onto campus in an enormous RV. It looked like a converted Greyhound bus and the rear window was emblazoned with the words, “E-Z Liv-Inn”.
Easy living indeed, if you have your own bathroom. So… why not do that?
Now, I’ve rented RVs on my own before, both from dedicated rental outfits and peer-to-peer through Outdoorsy, but in this case I wanted some professional advice. Because once I raised the idea of campus glamping, the reunion attendance rate spiked. Friends who weren’t planning to go declared that they’d be in, provided there was a spot in the RV. So I got in touch with the people at GoRVing.com, a vast repository of RV knowledge, and described a vehicle that would be ideal but that might not even exist: big, but not too big. Fancy, but reasonable. And lots of beds.
That part isn’t a given, even on huge RVs, because floor plans depend on the buyer’s mission. A retired couple driving around the country doesn’t need six beds—but I did.
Enter the Seneca. Built on a Freightliner S2RV chassis, the Seneca is what’s known as a Super C—front-engine, but definitely not a van. At just over 39 feet long, the Seneca is objectively huge, but it’s still more wieldy than the pusher behemoths. The 6.7-liter, 360-hp Cummins under the hood is a cousin of the one you find in Ram trucks, which goes to show how insane heavy-duty pickups have become, given that the Seneca’s gross combined vehicle weight rating is 41,000 pounds. That’s if you’re towing a trailer. All loaded up with nothing in tow, the Seneca is rated at 29,000 pounds.
Step inside and you see why. There are three power slide-outs that transform the living area from its road-going width (about eight and a half feet) into what feels like double that. There’s a king bedroom in back, twin bunks, a dinette that converts to a bed, a sofa that converts to a bed, and a bed over the cab. The kitchen has a residential-size fridge. The bathroom has a roomy shower and the onboard tank stores 100 gallons of water. And yes, there’s a fireplace. It’s electric, but man, it throws some heat.
You’d expect all of that to be a handful going down the road, but the Freightliner chassis was legitimately sedate on I-95, en route to Colby College in Waterville, Maine. The Seneca uses a chassis system that Jayco calls J-Ride—among other things, it includes rear air springs, a beefy rear stabilizer bar, and computer-balanced driveshafts, which surprisingly aren’t an industry-wide standard.
Sometimes, RVs can feel like they’re way more optimized for the R than the V, but the Seneca would be happy to go cover a thousand miles a day, if that’s your plan. Even lane changes are a calm affair thanks to cameras on the flanks that activate when you hit the turn signal. Of course, I still take my time, particularly when inching up to the window at toll booths. “That’s beautiful,” says one of the toll-takers. “And the nice thing is, you know you’re not going to get pushed around by a Fiat.”
True. The Seneca is big enough that on the way to the highway, one guy on his porch pumped his arm in the big-rig air-horn gesture. I was a little disappointed to find that the Freightliner just has a normal-sounding horn.
Ahead of the reunion, I’d emailed someone at Colby to ask where one might park an RV, and the answer was basically “far away, please.” So I ignored that and just pulled up to a beautiful spot adjacent to a central parking lot, orienting the passenger side of the vehicle (which is the hang-out side) toward a vast lawn.
I didn’t exactly have permission to park there, but once the self-leveling hydraulic stabilizer jacks were down, I’m not sure who could make me move. “You’d need a pretty big tow truck,” observed my friend, Dave.
The routine for transforming the Seneca from highway cruiser to one-bedroom apartment is pretty simple. You deploy the jacks to level the body and take the weight off the suspension. Then, via a touchscreen on the wall, you power out the slide-outs, which is scary the first time you do it because you’re not sure if you’re going to screw it up and somehow cause the wall to fall out (you won’t). Then you level it again and deploy the power awning.
And that’s about it. Since we were boondocking, the RV term of art for parking without power, water or sewer hookups, I ran the onboard diesel generator when we wanted air conditioning or to make sure the batteries were charged.
The only thing we had to mind was the status of the tanks—with six guys sleeping onboard, there’s no way we’d have enough water to shower all weekend. So on Saturday morning, I showered in the dorm, which helped affirm my decision to sleep elsewhere.
Over the course of the weekend, the Seneca was a hero. It was the best of all worlds—central location on campus, a hangout spot in its own right, yet far enough away that I could escape when I decided to call it a night. The tanks were fine over a weekend, even with a few showers, though I was paranoid because the fresh-water gauge only ever read 67 percent, even when I knew it was full (it’s a peculiarity of RVs that even when they have a slick touchscreen interface, the sensors they rely on are still pretty crude).
And the outdoor stereo system doesn’t have Bluetooth, which I didn’t even know was a possibility anymore—the Bluetooth receiver I installed in my Bronco cost $18 from Wal-Mart. Finally, the guys in the bunks reported that maybe the bunks are better suited for children. Okay, fair enough. But I didn’t see anybody moving out and going to the dorm for what it's worth.
My next reunion is the 25th. I’m planning to go, and I’m definitely bringing an RV again. And, given the number of envious alumni who checked out the Seneca over the weekend, I’ll bet next time I won’t be the only one.
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