Moveable House Keeps Adventures Rolling
by SANDRA KELLY

Artist Suzanne Ross likes to paint outdoors. With the lifestyle she and husband, Bill, have chosen, the entire country has become her studio.

The Rosses live in a 35-foot Winnebago motorhome. They moved into an RV full-time seven years ago. Bill had retired as senior vice president with First Federal Savings & Loan of Roanoke. Suzanne was devoting her time to painting after a career in commercial art followed by 10 years as an elementary art specialist in public schools.

They weren’t tied down by work, and their four children were long since grown.

The only thing holding them back was seven acres of yard that had to be mowed around their home on the Blackwater River in Franklin County.

The couple had camped for recreation all their lives; among their photos is one of them with another couple tent camping in a 1961 Ford. Bill was involved in sports car racing so they would stay in the infield at the track.

Through the years, they progressed from tents to pop-up trailers and then in 1970 to their first motorhome. They found the RV an easy way to take a vacation with four children.
Their first long trip was to Nova Scotia.

With that background, deciding to move completely into an RV wasn’t such a major decision, but the transition didn’t happen immediately.

“It took us about three years to get it all together and get on the road,” Bill said.

First, they sold the home place and moved into a condo at Smith Mountain Lake. Then they traveled for six months in their RV to see if they really did want to do that. They did.

Next, they sold the condo, streamlined their belongings and became nomads of the road. They do own a condo in Canaan Valley, West Virginia, and go there some to ski, but the RV is home.

The Rosses follow their interests on the road, searching out car museums - Bill likes to restore cars - and art galleries so Suzanne can check out the local talent. They tow a PT Cruiser car to run around in when they park the RV at campgrounds.

Between the two vehicles, they’ve driven more than 100,000 miles seeing the country across and back and up and down.

For the past few years, the couple has followed a routine where Suzanne holds art classes at several stops throughout the country, and they settle in for the summer months as National Park hosts at Roanoke Mountain Campground.

The stay in Roanoke gives them time to arrange health checkups, to visit their daughter Michele Walter and family in Blacksburg and to catch up with life-long friends. Bill is a native of Franklin County and a graduate of Ferrum College and the College of William and Mary. Suzanne got her master’s degree in art education at Radford University.

RV dwellers need friends back home, Suzanne says. How else can they get the mail? Friends in Franklin County stockpile the Rosses’ mail. When Bill and Suzanne know they are stopping somewhere for a few days, Suzanne phones the friends with the name of their destination town, and the mail gets sent to them “General Delivery.”

The couple’s sons all live out-of-state; Bob lives in Raleigh, Doug in Knoxville, and Mike in Anderson, S.C., and sometimes the RV trip includes a visit with one of them.

In the six months before they took up residence this year on Roanoke Mountain, they visited Doug in Knoxville, then went to see Elvis’ Graceland in Memphis, drove on through Mississippi and settled into a state park in New Orleans where they paid $6 a night. Three miles away, a free ferry took them across the Mississippi River and landed them at Bourbon Street.

They had planned to go back some day to Two Jacks restaurant they visited 37 years before and couldn’t resist having a bit of fun when they found the place still there. “We’re back,” Bill said to a bewildered waiter.

After New Orleans, Suzanne suggested they “do the coast of Texas.” They were all alone on Padre Island near Corpus Christi. They also stopped in Fredericksburg, Tex., because Southwest Art Magazine had called it a “treasure.” Fredericksburg was the home of Admiral Nimitz’ family and is the site of the National Museum of the Pacific War.

“I got to see the Texas painters. I wanted to see how regional painters painted the scenery,” Suzanne said.

Bill and Suzanne had also been encouraged by other travelers to visit Willie Nelson’s Luckenbach, Tex., and when they got there, they found a post office-general store and a parking lot filled with cars.

“But no people in sight,” Suzanne said. Finally, they opened the right door and found about 75 people gathered around a pot-bellied stove playing and listening to music.

It took them seven weeks to get from Knoxville to Vincent, Ariz., where Suzanne found the headquarters of Loners on Wheels (LOW). Her father had traveled in a motorhome until he was 86 years old and belonged to LOW.

“We spent a couple of nights there,” Suzanne said.

The couple likes to hike everywhere they stop, and they found especially good hiking in Benson, Ariz., in the area near Cochise Terrace RV Park.

Suzanne keeps detailed illustrated daily journals of their travels. Sometimes a page will include a drawing of a special piece of scenery or a photo of a watercolor she did of the area. Always there is a note about what they saw or experienced even the small details such as “hard rain last night.”

Most of the time, weather is the only interruption of an RV’er’s plans, although the aggressiveness of bears in Yosemite did cause the Rosses to cut a visit to that park short, Suzanne said.

Bill does all the driving; Suzanne navigates using maps and RV reference guides, including those from their membership in Passport America and Good Sam Club, to seek out the best campgrounds and also to plan the day. They stop before they are tired. Besides they’re not in a hurry.

RV campgrounds can be quite cushy, complete with hot tubs and cable television hookups. Bill and Suzanne use an antenna for television when they stop and are always able to pick up stations, they say. They also have a CD player and a VCR, but find time goes quickly because there’s so much to see and/or paint.

Bill, who used to design branch banks, has taken a special interest in motorhome design and likes to visit RV shows to give his ideas for change to manufacturers. They listen to owners, he says.

He tinkers; she paints and generally sells her work while she’s creating it. Working outdoors can attract tourists who often like what they see, she says. Once on their annual trip to Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, Canada, Suzanne spied an interesting beach grouping of a man with twin daughters. She painted the scene as the strangers explored on the beach, and as her work neared completion, the man walked up to ask:

“Do you know who you are painting?”

Her subject turned out to be a ballad singer from Nova Scotia. He invited the Rosses to his concert that evening, and his wife asked to buy the painting.

The prices she asks for paintings vary on the road; the ballad singer’s wife had limited resources so the watercolor went for 200 Canadian dollars and 15 tapes of the ballad singer’s work.

“But I hang in Nova Scotia,” Suzanne says.

In the Roanoke area, Suzanne shows work at the Wildfour Restaurant near Hollins and at the Little Gallery at Smith Mountain Lake.

After the Rosses leave Roanoke Mountain at the end of October when the campground closes, they’ll stay around the area until the holidays and then leave for Cedar Key, Fla., another annual post.
In January, Suzanne and the other members of the Virginia Eight artists (Vera Dickerson, Diane Patton, Shirley Johnson, Ruth Frederick, Jane Iten, Ravelle Hamilton and Susan Trotter) will have an exhibit in Cedar Key.

Then as the weather warms in other parts of the country, Bill and Suzanne will hit the road again. Maybe to the West Coast again; maybe even to Alaska.

Bill has decided it’s about time to get rid of the RV they own so he thinks they might fly to Alaska, buy a small RV and tour Alaska, sell that vehicle, come home and sell the Winnebago.

And then, he’ll buy a new motorhome and start a new mileage log.