The Life Lessons Nick Offerman And Megan Mullally Learned On Their First RV Trip

Like many of us, actor and author Nick Offerman spent much of the pandemic thinking about his past trips. His reminiscence of a 2018 hiking trip to Glacier National Park with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy and author George Saunders, as well as a visit to author James Rebanks's farm in England later that year, make up the bulk of his latest travelogue, Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside. But the final part of the book is dedicated to a much more recent trip: a 2020 road trip across the U.S. with his wife, actor Megan Mullally, their dog Clover, and their newly purchased Airstream, Nutmeg. Below, you'll find an excerpt from Nutmeg's first outing and the good, bad, and ugly of spending the night in a “cozy little land submarine.”

In the last few weeks and months, an area of expertise in which Megan had been matriculating was the ins and outs of RV parks. Our first destination was a gorgeous establishment called Catalpa Canyon in Cottonwood, Arizona. Megan had meticulously researched the place and secured us one of their “newer” spaces, with what was truly a spectacular view. We had received a “welcome email” from the park office, with instructions for arrival and whatnot, although I hadn’t looked too closely at the fine print beyond “pick up your welcome packet at the guard house and proceed to your assigned space, and sweet Danny Trejo, have you kids picked an absolute doozy of a site.”

Cut to: Totally forgetting about the time change to the Mountain time zone, we rolled up to the guard shack at about midnight. Once we flagged down the excellent on-duty Dana Carvey character who eventually came coasting silently along in a golf cart, we were duly informed by him—let’s call him “Merv”—that we were intensely shit out of luck.

Lesson 1: The better RV parks have “quiet hours,” usually from like 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. or so. This makes a ton of sense, because you’re basically a temporary village of sometimes dozens of vehicles, all parked within yards of each other, often equipped with an assortment of caterwauling children and their bicycles, scooters, water cannons, video games, and so on. All things of which I’m generally in favor, but then we all want to get to sleep at some point as well.

Lesson 2: “Quiet hours” means you can’t drive your thick-ass Ford Expedition with a turbo V6 pulling a thicker-ass Airstream Globetrotter into the park, where, even if you’re heavily experienced and smooth as butter, getting parked and set up is still a rigmarole that involves some inescapable noise.

Read the full article from Condé Nast Traveler here.