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Kathy and Joe Handerhan wheel a shopping cart through the Cental Park Wal-Mart's parking lot
Jim Pollard indulges Bailey in a round of ball outside the RV. Jim and his wife, Cathy, make sure Bailey gets exercise during their long days on the road.
Just beyond the neon Wal-Mart sign in Fredericksburg, Jim Pollard and Bailey wait for Jim's wife to join them for dinner in their RV.
Joe Handerhan gets a haircut in Wal-Mart after parking his RV for the night.
Kathy Handerhan sits next to her tabletop 'garden' inside her recreational vehicle. Since she and her husband sold their home to move into their RV, small plants work.
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The first two RVs roll into the parking lot about 3:30 on a fall afternoon. The occupants get out, chat with each other and take a bloodhound for a walk.
A few minutes later, another RV shows up, a 37-footer with popout kitchen.
By dusk, three more RVs arrive, pick spots in the spacious outer row of the parking lot, and expell people and dogs for a little leg-stretching after a long day's drive.
This night, they'll call the parking lot of Fredericksburg's Central Park Wal-Mart home.
Jim Pollard and a toy poodle named Bailey emerge from the 37-footer with a tennis ball, which Bailey chases and drools on tirelessly.
Bailey is a conversational ice-breaker, so Pollard is never surprised when someone comes up to chat when he parks his RV--even on this day, when it is a reporter and photographer doing a story about RVing in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Pollard, wife Cathy and Bailey are heading from their home in Ontario, Canada, to Myrtle Beach, S.C., where they vacation for a month each fall.
It is their second full day of driving, and the Pollards have only just survived the rush-hour crawl from Washington to Fredericksburg.
This morning, they awakened at their first overnight stop, a Wal-Mart parking lot in Erie, Pa. Four hundred miles later, here they are.
They're contented partakers of what Jim Pollard calls "the Wal-Mart RV culture," an informal community of travelers who take advantage of the chain store's ample, lighted parking lots instead of paying to park overnight in commercial RV campgrounds.
Wal-Marts across the country generally allow overnight RV stays except where local ordinances prohibit it, company spokeswoman Jami Arms said via e-mail.
The parking lots offer no water or electrical hookups, of course, but the Pollards and other RVers say pretty much everything else they might want is close at hand when they're parked at a Wal-Mart.
In turn, the RVers make cash registers beep.
At the Wal-Mart stop in Erie, Cathy Pollard says, she spent about $75 on groceries and other necessities for the trip.
She plans to spend another $30 or so at the Fredericksburg Supercenter; Jim Pollard figures he'll buy a couple hundred dollars' worth of gas.
Not every Wal-Mart allows RV parking overnight, the Pollards say. When they pull into a lot and see a "no overnight parking" sign, they pull right back out.
"We don't want to be seen as an intruder that drives away business," Jim Pollard says. "We don't want to ruin a good thing by staying somewhere we're not welcome."
But the Central Park Wal-Mart had no such signs, and the Pollards didn't tempt fate by asking permission.
If they had, a local store spokesman said, they'd have been given the go-ahead.
Wal-Mart doesn't want its parking lot to be anybody's vacation destination, but through-travelers are welcome to a patch of asphalt for the night.
And at dawn pretty much every day, an RV or two can be found on the edge of the lot, next to Carl D. Silver Parkway. The spot is especially popular when there's a NASCAR race going on in Richmond, said the local store spokesman.
The Pollards say they try to time their trips so they'll hit Fredericksburg in the late afternoon. It's an easy on-off from Interstate 95, and they consider Fredericksburg a friendly place.
They've never toured its historical sites, though--that would require the big production of unhitching their car from the back of the RV.
This evening, after wearing Bailey out with a tennis ball, the Pollards pop out one side of the RV to create a dining area, pour a couple of glasses of Jim Pollard's homemade red wine, and sit down to a dinner of mussels, shrimp, crackers and cheese.
Jim Pollard is a retired Toronto police officer; Cathy Pollard is a real estate broker in Georgetown, Ontario.
In many ways, the Pollards mirror their U.S. counterparts who have contributed to a boom in RVing over the past five years.
Since 2001, U.S. ownership of RVs has increased 15 percent, according to a study released by the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association, a trade group.
The RVIA said baby boomers are driving the market as they reach retirement age and start to travel more.
Gas prices that peaked at over $3 a gallon this summer didn't seem to deter RV travelers, said Chris Miller, a sales associate for King RV in southern Stafford County. He speculated that after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, North Americans have been less willing to undertake overseas travel and instead are looking to vacation on their own continent.
The Pollards got their first RV after renting one a few years ago to take their children and grandchildren to Myrtle Beach, the couple's favorite destination for the past 40 years or so.
That trip in the rental was such a success they bought a 23-foot RV. It was too small. They traded for a 34-footer, and finally traded that for the 37-foot house on wheels.
They lived full time in that RV while they were having a home built, they said, and they enjoy having homelike comforts while traveling.
They've driven their RV as far as the panhandle of Florida. And when Cathy Pollard retires, they plan to travel west, to Texas and California.
While both Pollards said they feel comfortable behind the wheel, the expense of such a trip "is not for the faint-hearted," Jim Pollard said. The trip to Florida cost $1,325 in gas alone.
Once the Pollards reach their vacation destinations, they stay at campgrounds specifically designed for RVs, offering water, electricity, environmentally safe waste dump stations and space outdoors to barbecue and picnic. But those sites can cost $30 or more a night, further adding to the cost of a trip.
"People have the misapprehension that RV is cheaper" than other kinds of travel, Jim Pollard says. "It isn't."
And that's a big reason why, when they can, the Pollards spend nights on the road in Wal-Mart parking lots.
Nobody bothers them. They feel safe. And it's free.
To reach LAURA MOYER:
Email: lmoyer@freelancestar.com
