Chapter 10: Rainbow's End
A Special Digression, October 29, 1997
For the past four days, we have been staying at Rainbow's End, the park that houses the Escapees national headquarters, and the first RV park built by the Club. As new members, this sort of feels like the end of a pilgrimage to Mecca, and has been a real eye-opener. So I thought it might be useful to pass on some observations and impressions for those of you who may be considering membership.
Note added 2/14/06: A number of details may have changed in the many years since the following was written. See http://www.escapees.com/Wannabes/Home.asp for current information about Escapees and the Rainbow Parks.
This is a truly amazing, multi-dimensional, place that is very hard to capture in a few paragraphs. It is several things, all jumbled in together:
a: It is a membership condominium. There are around 200 individually deeded pieces of property, ranging from one acre down to little plots just barely large enough for a large motorhome, permanent garage, patio, and storage shed. Some of the residents have been here since the first section of the park was built, in 1985. There is some turnover, and about six properties of various sizes are presently for sale. There are no architectural guidelines, and there is an amazing range of architecture. There are several different kinds of building that attempt to integrate an RV with a permanent building under a common roof. Nearly all the larger sites have a covered RV pad for the resident, and also a separate full-hookup pad for friends and relatives to use when visiting.
b: It is a campground. There are about 100 full-hookup sites for transients (not counting a large number of visitors parked on permanent resident's sites). From watching the traffic, I'd guess that the average stay is a week or a little more, and that a dozen or so RV's arrive and leave each day. At the moment (not yet peak season), the park is almost, but not quite, full. The sites vary in size but are comparable to those in commercial RV Parks. Interestingly, there are no picnic tables or fire rings on the sites. These people are not "campers". Most of the rigs are large, but there is also a significant minority of smaller travel trailers and class C rigs. Member's price is $6.50 per night for full hookups, plus metered electricity at $.08/kwh. There is no limit on duration of stay - some stay an entire season. Non-members can stay here on a space-available basis, at a higher price ($14.50 for full hookups, if I remember right). At these prices, our first week's stay has repaid our annual club dues.
There is also "unlimited" dry camping space. The park apparently never turns a member away ("home is where, when you go there, they gotta take you in"). The first night of dry camping is free, and after that it is $2.50 /night. It looks like a few of the dry camping spaces have limited electricity (shared 15 amp extension cords). During crowded periods, a first-in-first-out policy is invoked - the person who has been in a full-hookup site the longest is asked to leave to make room for newcomers. This is invoked fairly rarely and only affects a few people.
c: The Park has an assisted living and Adult Day Care center, called CARE - Continuing Assistance to Retired Escapees. It's incredibly cheap. For $450/month, one gets a full-hookup RV site with storage shed and free propane and electricity. Included is weekly housekeeping and laundry service, services of a registered nurse, and transportation to town. Hot meals in a central dining room are offered at a very modest cost. For people who need supervised, continuing care through the day, this is available for another $100/month. A "typical" user of this service might be a couple where one member has a serious physical or mental problem and the spouse has been going crazy trying to provide 24-hour-per-day care. The day care program gives the healthy spouse some time off to "have a life", and there is a major support program for this "caregiver" spouse. Some people settle in here only for the duration of temporary problems (e.g. recovery from major surgery). Others are here on a long-term basis. A full nursing home capability might be added in the future, if the regulatory problems can be solved. Note added 2/14/06: Since this paragraph was written, prices have increased and other details may have changed as well. See http://www.escapeescare.org/ for up-to-date information.
d: The Park is headquarters for a corporation which directly or indirectly has well over 100 employees. The club has just under 50,000 members, publishes a nice bimonthly magazine, owns four of these "Rainbow Parks", and is an umbrella for 11 member-owned Co-op parks. More parks are in various stages of planning and construction. The club has a stated long-term goal of covering the temperate parts of the country with RV Parks that are "never more than a day's drive away from the next one".
e: This site houses the world's largest mail forwarding service. I toured this operation yesterday, and it is very impressive. This service has 8000 active accounts and handles 6 million pieces of mail per year. As a user of this system, I have found the service to be of high quality and reliability, and the service options to be extremely customizable to individual needs. I can call in the morning and get my accumulated mail packaged and in the hands of Fed Ex by the end of the day, or shipped out via US Postal Service Priority Mail on the next business day. I can call and ask them to locate and open a particular piece of mail and read it to me over the phone. I can ask them to ship me only first class mail and hold the other mail until a later date. They will accept and hold or re-mail packages of all kinds. I can pre-schedule regular mailings to specified addresses. If there is no mail on the scheduled day of mailing, they will send a postcard confirming that there was no mail. While I am here at Rainbow's End, I have a real mailbox and pick up my mail daily. When I called from various obscure places in Canada, they had no problem figuring out the optimum way to deliver my mail and packages across the international border. I got a Fed Ex shipment delivered to a tiny campground in very remote part of Newfoundland. It arrived three days after I called. I call an 800 number to arrange my mail delivery. The cost is around $100/year, or a little more or less than this depending on what level of specialized service is needed. In addition, I pay the actual postage they pay for the shipments, from an account into which I occasionally deposit money. This strikes me as a real bargain. A powerful and flexible voice-mail service is also available at a good price. We haven't tried it.
The hardest part of the club to characterize is the social aspects. Rainbow's End has two large shared buildings that are in constant use by various groups - bingo, poker, Tai Chi classes woodworking classes, a computer club, knitting lessons, aerobic dancing, line dancing, group dinners on special occasions, etc. The schedule of organized activities is very crowded. Yesterday, we toured the national offices with a group of new arrivals, and all of the head people took time to speak to us, tell us about club history, plans for the future, how various aspects of the club work, etc. The campground swarms with volunteers. We were personally led to our campsite. Before we had finished setting up, an official "greeter" came by to give us our first official hug and invite us to various club activities and answer any questions we had.
Even though this is a huge operation, it still has a "family" feeling. When we first arrived, about 4 p.m., we found the campground office locked and a "back at 4:30" sign on the door. At about 4:50, the office manager and several assistants came strolling in, explaining that there had been a going-away party for someone in the activity center. About five minutes later, the four people who were waiting to register were all processed and on our way to campsites, each of us with a personal guide. It's kind of interesting to see these assistants: They are all gray-haired, some appear to be in their 70's, and they are wearing "management trainee" badges. I'm not sure if they get paid in hugs or free campsites or with small salaries.
It is hard to go for a walk through the park without getting drawn into a long conversation somewhere along the way. Literally everyone you see waves or speaks to you, and hugs are a way of life. Someone who looks like they actually *need* a hug could hardly avoid getting hugged to death. This afternoon, while walking down a street in the permanent area, I stopped to talk to a huge Great Dane, restrained in a yard by an invisible electric fence, jumping up and down, spraying saliva all over the yard, and barking furiously in a deep bass voice that could break windows. A little old lady, walking along slowly with the help of a wheeled walker, stopped beside me, gave me a grandmotherly smile, and said "he's just a friendly puppy, trying to talk you into coming into the yard to play". "When I go into that yard, I sit down immediately, because I know he'll knock me down if I don't".
As full-timers, we've felt rather strange in other places we've been. We're *different*, and spend a lot of time explaining ourselves. Our 3/4-ton diesel pickup truck seemed huge to friends and family and looked very out of place at the supermarket or doctor's office. Thus, it feels very strange to now be in a place where we're just like everyone else and don't have to explain anything. On our little campground road spur, with about a dozen RV's there are two big medium-duty custom diesel tow vehicles, several large motorhomes, and the rest are Dodge and Ford 3/4 and 1 ton pickups - mostly diesel. When we go to the grocery store, we're likely to park in a whole row of full-sized pickups.
The club lawyer, a long-time RVer and club member, also has a private practice and is an expert on full-timer's problems. She lives within the park and is available for individual consulting. So now that we have changed our domicile to Texas, we were able to arrange to have our wills and other documents examined for any needed revisions, just by walking a few hundred yards down the street. The process of establishing residency was made very easy by all of the advice and instructions that we have received from club literature.
The club has a very big presence in Livingston Texas. It's a little town (population 5000) and Rainbow's End (population around 700?) therefore is a substantial and visible part of the total. When I went to the Auto License office and asked to register a truck and trailer, the clerk immediately asked "Oh -you're at Rainbow Drive?" A big sign said "no out-of-county checks". I asked about it, and the clerk just said "write your Rainbow Drive address on the check and it's ok". When we filled out our library card applications at the Livingston Public Library, we looked rather blank when we discovered that we needed the name and address of a local person as a reference (we didn't know a soul). The librarian immediately said "I think all the Rainbow people use Cathie". She meant Cathie Carr - the Club Administrator - basically the Chief Operating Officer of a sizeable corporation. So we did.
Sorry to ramble on for so long - but as you can tell I'm impressed and a bit overwhelmed by all this.