The Great $1-a-Day RV Rental Adventure

I’ve always dreamed of hitting the open road in an RV.

Those dreams were never realistic. You ever looked at the price to buy or even rent one of those things?

That’s why I was so fascinated when I heard about an RV relocation company that needed drivers to move RVs from one city to another, based on a need in one city versus an overabundance in another.

That company, Imoova. com, “rents” RVs to folks for $1 a day to get them moved to where they are needed.

Sounds too good to be true, right? The price was right, so the Wick family found out on spring break this year ...

So I’d been watching the Imoova website for months hoping for something that would fit our family of six.

Regularly they post new offerings, essentially saying we have this size RV, we need it from City A to City B, during this particular time span.

Well, during our kiddos’ spring break, they needed a six-person RV moved from Las Vegas to Denver.

I looked at that route and it appeared to be a 900-mile drive past several national parks we’d never seen before, and through some of the most beautiful desert and mountain scenery in the country.

I told my wife, and she said, “Book it before someone else does.”

And thus our adventure began. But it was tricky logistically. We found some cheap flights ($30 each!) on an evening flight from San Antonio to Vegas but tickets back from Denver to San Antonio were outrageous.

But there were some affordable flights back from Denver to Austin. A kind family member offered to drive us to the San Antonio airport and then drop off our car at the Austin airport before we got back.

On March 12, we flew out, and by 11 p.m. we were in Vegas, walking along The Strip, averting the kids’ eyes from showgirls, watching the Bellagio fountains and excited for our adventure.

While the rest of the family turned in for the night, I went and lost some money in the casino.

The next morning before we picked up the RV, I took my daughter (who turned 21 last November) to the casino for her first-ever gambling experience.

She sat down at the blackjack table and promptly won her first five hands, then wisely quit and got up with a nice little profit.

With our luggage in tow, we took a cab to the RV relocation place, a nondescript parking lot in West Vegas.

At the sign-up desk, a worker quickly told us all we needed to know about the RV – including how much of a financial hold they were putting on our credit card just in case we damaged the thing on our trip.

My wife gave me a dirty look as if to say – ‘you didn’t mention this part of the deal.’

The helpful folks there loaded us down with other freebies we might use on the trip – six lawnchairs and a grill. One woman who was checking in her RV gave us her coffee pot and cast iron skillet.

Then we got a quick tour of the house on four wheels that we would be living in for the next four days.

It was a 2023 Indie Camper, with just 13,000 miles on it, 24-foot, with a bed room, bathroom, kitchen and dining table (that converted into a bed) and another bed above the front seats.

It was a dream. Now in addition to the $1 a day we owed for the RV we did have to pay for gas, which for our 900-mile trip ended up being about $300.

We had only been on the road a minute or two when the side door flew open as we were going down the road at 40 miles an hour.

“Hey kids, you gotta make sure that thing is latched!”

We stopped at a Walmart and stocked up with provisions to fill the pantry and refrigerator, and we were off.

That afternoon we drove through Zion National Park amidst snow flurries – and did an amazing hike among the red rocks to a stunning view of Zion Canyon.

We stopped for the night at an RV park on the east side of Zion – and that night it snowed three inches – but we were cozy in the camper.

I’ve got to give credit to the road crews in Utah (and later Colorado) because even though there was snow all around, the roads were clear.

The next morning we drove to Bryce Canyon and marveled at the amazing canyon and rock formations there, covered in snow. We hiked around as much as we could though much of the park, and the trails, were closed because of the ice.

The rest of the afternoon we drove through some of the most amazing landscapes I’ve ever seen, in and around the Escalante and Capitol Reef areas of Utah’s Scenic Byway 12. That route is one of only 37 routes in the country designated All-American Roads. According to the Federal Highway Administration, to earn that designation, the road or highway must “have one-ofa- kind features that do not exist elsewhere” and be considered a “destination unto itself.”

For hours on end there were colorful canyons, plateaus and rock formations that had to be seen to be believed.

Just before dusk we arrived at Goblin Valley State Park, in central Utah, and with nobody around to pay or sign up with, we parked at a primitive campsite with nobody in view at the base of a big cliff.

We explored, built a fire and made shadow puppets by the light of that fire. With no hookups in sight, we periodically used the RV’s builtin generator to keep us warm through the cold desert night.

The next day’s drive took us into Colorado, where we stopped in Glenwood Springs, soaking in the natural hot spring pool for hours as snow fell upon us.

We grabbed a spot at an RV park that evening and sat around a fire as the snow started falling harder and harder.

I nervously eyed the driving conditions of the roads we were going to have to traverse the next day to get to Denver to turn in the RV. Some of the mountain passes were closed.

I didn’t tell anybody. Why worry them?

The next day was Sunday, we went to Mass and by the time we hit the road, the snow was melting.

But when we hit Vail Pass, elevation 10,000 feet, snow was on the road again.

We crawled along Interstate 70, along with other cars, but things were fine. We made it to Denver in time to have a late lunch with some of my wife’s family there.

We turned the RV in – no damages, full refund! – and took an Uber to the airport.

We were already leaving Denver really late, but flight delays, and dropping off our daughter at her apartment in Austin (where she was beginning a new job the next morning – go say hi to her at the original Kerby Lane Cafe where she’s working as a hostess during her senior year at UT) resulted in us not getting back to La Grange until 3:30 a.m. Monday morning March 17. We let two of our boys go to school late the next day, and the youngest skip altogether.

None of us were fully rested for days.

It was worth it.

Interested in renting an RV for $1 a day? Check out the Imoova.com site. Click on the American flag to see relocations in the US. This really was a great adventure. As I write this there are 50 RVs available. There’s even more in Europe and Australia.