The following is an excerpt from an article from RV Lifestyle by Mike Wendland highlighting Dolly Parton’s time spent RVing.
Everybody has a Dolly Parton memory this week. Mine involves a Class B camper van, a plane ticket I never used, and a case of the flu I have been mad about for more than ten years.
Here is something most of the tributes will not tell you. Dolly Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, were RVers. Not tour bus people, though she logged more miles on one of those than most of us will ever drive. I mean actual RVers, the kind who load up a small van and disappear into the hills for a couple of days.
I found out about it by accident. This was back around 2014 or 2015, and I was writing a blog called Roadtreking.com, which years later grew into what you are reading now, RV Lifestyle. Roadtreks were my thing. Small Class B vans, built on a van chassis, no towed car, no leveling jacks, nothing to set up. Word reached me from somebody in the industry that Dolly owned two of them.
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What I did learn, secondhand, is the part I have thought about most since. I was told that Dolly and Carl would slip away for a weekend or two every few months, and sometimes in the middle of the week when the calendar opened up. She spent a huge share of her life on a tour bus, but that was work. The van was different. That was theirs.
Carl drove. They stayed close to home most of the time, poking around Tennessee, and here is the detail I love: without the wigs and the rhinestones and the nails, nobody recognized her. One of the most famous women on the planet could pull into a campground, sit outside a van in a lawn chair, and just be a wife on a trip with her husband.
If you have ever wondered why so many of us end up in a small van after years of chasing bigger and bigger rigs, that right there is the answer. A Class B is not about luxury. It is about being able to go, and about being nobody in particular when you get there. Dolly Parton could have bought any coach ever built, any one of them, custom, six figures, whatever she wanted. She kept two little vans instead.
Click here to read the full article from RV Lifestyle.
