Motor Home

It began as a joke. About a year before retirement I facetiously suggested to my wife, "Wouldn't it be a great idea to buy a motor home and tour the U.S.?" Of course, I knew my wife would ridicule this harebrained idea - after all, she always insisted on first-class accommodations, meals and service whenever we took a trip. Camping out, or its reasonable equivalent, would be the last thing she would want to try. You guessed it. She thought it was a great idea - and the very next day, enthusiastically set out to find a motor-home rental so we could try out the idea over a forthcoming three-day weekend.

Violating basic rules of Robbery 101, a barefoot Brookhaven man allegedly tried to steal a motor home yesterday morning while its owner was sleeping inside it. He didn't get very far. Intoxicated and seemingly confused, John McAndrew apparently had unhooked the home's water line and electrical line and had settled into the driver's seat before the startled owner confronted him. "He was on a mission," said Richard Poole, the motor home's...

As he winds his way through Pennsylvania's hard-coal country or the farmland of Chester County, Ted Nerlinger might look like yet another tourist in a grimy motor home. In fact, he is a man on his way to work. He just takes his office with him. Nerlinger's beige Pace Arrow is a traveling cancer treatment facility designed to make one type of specialized care more accessible to people who live outside of the state's major cities. Later this month, the motor home, which contains a $200,000 machine that zaps cancerous tumors with microwaves, will begin making regular stops at Exton Cancer Center in Oaklands Corporate Center.

The gas hogs are tied up in their pastures, big, bulky and content - their air conditioners humming, their gasoline-powered generators keeping the brewskies of NASCAR Nation cold. Gas crisis? Hmmm. Let's pop a beer and ruminate. All over the country, gasoline prices are at near-record levels: $2.85 a gallon, up 36 percent from last year. Are fans going to let a few hundred bucks in gasoline stop them from driving their eight-miles-per-gallon motor homes to this weekend's NASCAR races in Dover, Del.?

Eddie Murphy has the biggest one in Hollywood. Arnold Schwarzenegger hauls out his 52-footer whenever he's on location. Bruce Willis had his custom-built. It isn't fancy, but it does the job. We're talking the ultimate in star power here. We're talking motor homes. Visit the set of any movie shooting in New York these days and you'll see a sleek trailer with tinted windows idling on some side street. Peek inside, and you'll find your favorite actor relaxing between takes, studying his lines, perhaps, or watching his VCR. It's tough being a star on location.

The last time Arthur Whitman saw the white Ford motor home, it was parked with 40 other recreational vehicles at his dealership in Raynham, Mass. The $54,000 RV was stolen from Whitman's lot June 29, according to police in Raynham. That night, someone cut through a 10-foot-high chain-link and barbed-wire fence, broke into the office, stole the keys to the brand-new RV and drove away, Whitman said. Three weeks and thousands of miles later, the same RV lay mangled in a muddy ditch at the intersection of Broad Street and the Route 611 exit ramp in Doylestown after a burglary and pursuit by police.

Firefighters battled a blaze after an accident yesterday involving a tractor-trailer and a pickup truck pulling a motor home on Interstate 65 near Oakland, Ky. The tractor-trailer rear-ended the pickup as it was stopped in the emergency lane, officials said. No serious injuries were reported.

With few skills and the equivalent of a high school diploma, Harry J. Thomas of Lansdale went shopping for a job this week at a converted motor home at the Montgomery Mall. "It's a lot easier coming here," Thomas, 36, said of the motor home's convenient location. Thomas, who has been out of work for almost two years, boarded the 25-foot mobile office parked outside the John Wanamaker store and, after an hourlong interview, learned that he would be eligible for one of more than 40 job- training programs or for help in finding a job. It was a typical day aboard the mobile office of the Montgomery County Private Industry Council.

For those interested in a classic Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a boat, or even a motor home at a fraction of the retail price, the Bucks County district attorney's sale tomorrow and Saturday offers an array of items seized from drug dealers. A red 1961 Harley, a 1988 Ford motor home, and several boats are among the 184 items seized in the last year that will be sold to the highest bidders. This is the 18th in a series of auctions conducted by the District Attorney's Office since 1987.

Maybe he thought he was driving a Porsche. Maybe he saw Lost In America and identified too closely with the RV-driving Albert Brooks. Maybe he was just born to be wild. On Thursday night a man in a 1980 Dodge Sportsman led police on a chase that started in Falls Township and ended in a collision on Interstate 95 in Philadelphia. The motor home will never see Yellowstone National Park. "He wasn't going very fast, but he did a lot of damage," said Lt. Charles Schaffner of the Falls Township Police.

Walter A. Lamont, 83, of Holland, retired music supervisor for the School District of Philadelphia, died Sunday, Feb. 3, at Abington Hospice at Warminster of end-stage renal disease. Born in Philadelphia, Mr. Lamont graduated from Olney High School. In 1951, he earned his bachelor of science degree in music education from West Chester State University. He served in the Army during the Korean War and was honorably discharged in 1953. Mr. Lamont worked for the Centennial School District for two years before he was hired by the Philadelphia School District in the 1950s.

5 killed in crash on Wyoming road THERMOPOLIS, Wyo. - Authorities say five people were killed and four others were injured when a vehicle returning to Colorado from a Boy Scout camp in northwest Wyoming veered into oncoming traffic and slammed head-on into a motor home. The Wyoming Highway Patrol says a 3-year-old passenger in the motor home and four people in the other vehicle were killed in the crash on Highway 120 in north-central Wyoming on Saturday morning. The Honda Element was one of three vehicles taking a group of Boy Scouts back to the Colorado Springs, Colo., area.

ORVIN BROWN emerged from his comfy home Sunday evening and stepped right into a Wal-Mart parking lot. The retired construction worker walked over to the adjacent Home Depot in search of a metal apparatus for a drawer that no longer slid as it should have. The pesky drawer was inside a 39-foot Fleetwood Discovery recreational vehicle that has almost all the amenities one could ask for in a home: satellite TV, conventional/microwave oven, computers, bathroom and shower. The cozy bedroom expands at the press of a button, as does the RV's center, which holds the kitchen, eating area and living room.

The gas hogs are tied up in their pastures, big, bulky and content - their air conditioners humming, their gasoline-powered generators keeping the brewskies of NASCAR Nation cold. Gas crisis? Hmmm. Let's pop a beer and ruminate. All over the country, gasoline prices are at near-record levels: $2.85 a gallon, up 36 percent from last year. Are fans going to let a few hundred bucks in gasoline stop them from driving their eight-miles-per-gallon motor homes to this weekend's NASCAR races in Dover, Del.?

Ther?se Halscheid doesn't have a doorbell, a cable-TV contract, or a telephone land line. She is, officially, "Not at This Address. " At least, not for long. Halscheid, 47, is a poet, educator and full-time house-sitter who currently resides in a Mount Airy twin. In February, home was a different twin on the same block. She also has tended to an unfurnished log cabin in Medford Lakes, a barn near Vineland, a motor home in the Ozarks, and a guest house in the swamps of the Florida Panhandle.

Been down that road before, Bush says of N. Korea talks Arguing it had been burned before in one-on-one talks with North Korea, the Bush administration yesterday rejected an appeal by Pyongyang for direct discussions on its nuclear weapons program. The White House instead urged resumption of six-nation talks designed to negotiate the elimination of the communist country's nuclear armaments. But with that process stalled, administration officials were beginning to discuss the possibility of referring the issue to the U.N. Security Council as an alternate approach.

In parts of Downingtown Borough yesterday, residents pointed to high-water lines on walls and furniture that now mark three major floods in 15 months. And then they quoted the promises that officials made a year ago, they say, about fixing the problem. In June 2003, heavy rains caused the first flooding. In September 2003, even heavier rains caused water from the swollen Brandywine Creek and several of its tributaries to pour into hundreds of homes in the borough. Officials later dubbed that event a "500-year" flood.

Cottony-soft clouds dotted the Carolina blue sky, and brilliant sunshine created a silvery glint off the 130,000 unoccupied grandstand seats ringing Dover International Speedway yesterday. If Hurricane Isabel had passed this way, it had left no significant calling card. Yes, there were a few telltale signs, from the utility-company workers securing overhead lines on Route 13, across from the track's main entrance, to the occasional pools of rainwater that had collected on the infield grass.

Bert R. Parker Jr. , 88, a builder of more than 500 homes and commercial buildings, died Tuesday from complications of hepatitis at Harlee Manor in Springfield, Delaware County. Mr. Parker was a lifelong resident of Glenolden until 1999, when he moved to Harlee Manor, a retirement community. He was a graduate of Glen-Nor High School and the former Banks Business College in Philadelphia. As a teenager, he took over the family construction business after his father had a serious fall from the roof of a house he was building.