Greg Jerrett’s column on giant campers and other ways rich people waste their money caused me to ruminate.

Before motor homes became the size of Greyhound buses, I thought of them more romantically. Then, one summer I hit a massive traffic jam caused by one of these highway behemoths, I started to rethink the whole concept.

Mobile mansions can cost $100,000 and their mileage is measured in single digits.

Some might say this is the price of a care-free lifestyle. But you mess up the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bed, and when you pull back out onto the highway, it’s following right over your shoulder!

I can get a job making up rooms at a Motel 6 for that kind of freedom, and get minimum wage to boot.

For $25,000, you can buy a comfortable, full-sized car that gets 25-35 mpg, stuff it with more luggage than you need, and then drive around the continent, hitting motels and restaurants, never once doing a dish, pot, sheet, or cleaning hairy slime out of the shower drain.

Even if you went traipsing about for 3-4 months out of the year, you’d still come out way ahead of the highway yachtsmen crowd.

Given the old adage, “A fool and his money are soon parted,” how did these people come up with that $100,000 in the first place?

I’ll also go so far as to say that the decision to buy these things are most often made by a husband, who was blissfully sheltered from the knowledge of hairy shower drain slime all his life.

Perhaps these motor home conventions are held each year because misery loves company.

Rich Scharf

Columbia, SC