Curious about what our home on wheels is like?
Come along for a quick tour.
Our motorhome is an Itasca Solei. Drawing on my high-school Latin, I figured Solei must have something to do with sun, probably in French. So I went to that worthy academic source, Google Translate, and gave it a try. No go. Sun in French is soleil—close, but no cigare. Unwilling to concede that our new home sports a giant typo front, side, and back, I googled "What language is solei?"Good news! Solei is not a typo; it is a German word.
So I proudly present to you our new Solei—or, translated, Pickled Egg.
(Yes, really. Solei in German means pickled egg.)
(True, it does mean sunshine in Catalan, but do you know anyone who speaks Catalan? I'm sticking with Pickled Egg.)
What sold us on the Solei was the layout. Besides being under 36', which is the maximum length most national parks will take, the Solei seems like a vehicle we can call home. Take a look.
Let me walk you through it.
Do you see where the entry is? It takes you right into the "living room." (Seriously—they call that little space a living room.) Most of the RVs we saw have you enter through the passenger-seat door up at the front—meaning you have to scramble over/past the passenger seat to get into the living space—and back again to get out. In our opinion, this is a lot nicer—and check out the fun awnings over the door and the . . . what? Patio? Front yard? (If you look closely, you can see the row of little lights above the door; there's another set under the other awning too.)
Now we're in the living room.
Straight ahead you'll see a U-shaped couch. It's pretty big, because it doubles as dining-room chairs when you put the movable table in front of it. Maybe it sounds trailer-trashy to eat on the couch, but we like it much better than the models that squeeze a smaller couch and a dinette in the same amount of space.
When you don't want the table out (like when you're rolling down the road), you just drop the leaves and store the table under that cabinet that you see behind Steve and in the shot below.
The couch can also open into a guest bed with the kind of comfort that will probably keep guests from staying more than a few nights.
If you have more overnight guests, you can also lower a bunk from above the driver's and passenger's seats.
Speaking of the driver's and passenger's seats, they can turn around to face the living area for more seating.
The tray table can slide out of the way, but I expect to use when I'm writing my next book. Or when Steve is planning where to go next. Or when drinking a glass of wine and enjoying the fireplace.
Yes, fireplace. At first we thought it was a silly idea and a waste of potential storage space, but our friends who RV tell us that it's just right for taking an early-morning chill out of the air when you don't want to run your furnace. (And did you notice: we haven't even moved in yet and we're already having trouble controlling the clutter caused by remotes.)
If you walk toward the back of the coach, you come to the kitchen.
It's not big.
But it has a double (very small) sink, a combination microwave/convection oven, a gas stove, and a full-sized refrigerator. And a backsplash that is almost identical to the one we picked when we redid our bathroom; we feel at home already. (Both the sink and the stovetop are covered in this shot; apparently one covers them when traveling, but I haven't figured out why yet.)
It's not glamping without a bathroom . . .
. . . but I didn't get any shots of ours except this one I took to remind myself of the amount of storage available. The bathroom is only slightly larger than you'd find on an airplane and isn't quite as luxurious as the one in our land-locked home (no soaker tub, for instance), but it does have one of the few motorhome showers that Steve can stand up straight in. His head is in the skylight, but at least he's standing.
Let's look at the bedroom.
On the way, we can throw a load in the washer or dryer located behind closed doors just outside the bedroom. Yes, I did say glamping!
In the bedroom there's not an inch of space wasted on non-essentials like walking space, and I'll be the first (but probably not the last) to say that the current bedspread and pillows are butt-ugly. But the mattress is one of those sleep-number things, and the wardrobe boasts 80 inches of closet rod (conveniently accessible by his-and-hers sets of door to clearly delineate personal territory, not unlike the imaginary line my brother and I used to draw down the middle of the back seat on family road trips) plus four decent-sized drawers. There's also storage under the bed; over the bed; and on, under, and above bedside tables. Also reading lights and triangular bookshelves (re the odd shape: see previous comment about not an inch of wasted space). Steve has already claimed his side of the bed.
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| That's the butt-ugly bedspread in the foreground, the wardrobe doors, and the louvered doors that hide the washer and dryer. |
That's about it.
Except that since the woodwork is so pretty, I took a closeup of it. Feel free to say, "Ooh" and "Ahh!"
~ Jane
