Columnist Susan Snyder: Taking a second look at RV world

Thursday, March 3, 2005 | 8:19 a.m.

Andy Wheeler doesn't own a recreational vehicle himself, but it's not for want of love.

On the contrary, Nevada's most famous RV dealer loves them all. Seems it would be hard for Wheeler to settle on just one, considering he can see the vast possibilities each one can offer.

"When you can pull up beside the river and just sit ..." Wheeler said, letting imagination finish the sentence as he sank into the sofa of a mid-range RV equipped with everything a person could possibly want in a vacation home.

"You don't have to unload the car or unload the tent," he added.

By the time I left Nevada's largest RV dealership Tuesday afternoon, I was ready to do it in something that had a microwave, satellite TV and woodwork handcrafted by Amish people in Indiana.

I was invited to visit his lot because a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a local RV show and was, um, less than complimentary about the luxury travel option.

Wheeler could have (but didn't) rub my nose in the fact that I'd paid $8 (two lattes) for the privilege of looking at a fraction of the RVs I could see for free at his place every day.

Wheeler sells dreams and the RVs that go with them better than most dealers in the United States. So who better to open the closed mind of a dyed-in-the-wilderness tent-toter (who does, however, demand a shower every day)?

Besides, the guy is 6-foot-5. What's an afternoon among friends?

"Now, this one you could just back it out over the lake, and I could just sit here all day looking out the windows," he said, sitting in the living room of a fifth-wheel trailer.

Wheeler could buy the fifth wheel, the truck to tow it and the lake to sit beside. He started selling RVs in Las Vegas proper back in 1977, and in 1992 moved to the current 30-acre site on Las Vegas Boulevard South. And business continues to grow.

"(Manufacturers) fight for us to handle their products. But it wasn't always that way," he said, driving us toward the smaller rigs and travel trailers.

"We don't sell tent-campers," he said. "Those are awful."

Well, I always thought so. But I figured it was mostly because of that trip to Colorado when I was 10, my brother was 16 and Mom broke her ankle coming back from the bathroom in the dark. After 15 days, two Winnebagos wouldn't have been big enough.

(My folks would have given away my brother and I for a trailer that leveled itself automatically like today's RVs. People camped around us likely would have chipped in.)

Wheeler walks through a new RV the same way all of us do -- opening cabinets, sitting in the driver's seat, sinking into the sofa, standing in the shower.

"This is the one that movie stars use," he said as we stepped into a $400,000 model with a swivel leather "Euro recliner."

But it wasn't his favorite. That, it seemed, depended on the dream. He could picture a Nascar driver enjoying a $500,000 luxury RV as easily as a retired couple happily hitting the road in one that costs less than a Las Vegas condo.

Wheeler envies them all, he said, steering the golf cart among rows of American dream machines.

"I wish," he said, "I had the huevos to just go."