Monaco Dynasty - Our New Digs by V. Rains

Shell shocked new owners in Tuscon

I kept trying to get Roger to write this blog but he just kept putting it off, saying that he was too embarrassed about having purchased this gigantic rig we didn't really need.  When he saw me taking pictures of our motorhome interior, which I was intending to post on my Facebook page, he decided I should write the Monaco post if I wanted one.  

Separate washer and dryer instead of a combined unit

When asked why we got this monster, Roger’s answer is that we don’t know and he's sticking by that statement but these are my thoughts as to why it happened.  Unlike our usual plan of attack for getting something new and expensive, we didn’t think this through at all ahead of time.  Our Allegro Open Road was only 3 years old and this one is 5 so it wasn’t that we wanted something newer.  However, the Allegro started falling apart just after the warranty was up at one year.  By getting a used RV supposedly the major kinks have been worked out. 

My excuse is that when we took our son Chris and his dog with us last summer the Allegro was very cramped and that cramped feeling never went away.    You see, the Monaco is 45 feet long with 4 slide outs.  The Allegro was 37 feet long and only had 2 slide outs.  The Allegro could only hold about 3000 pounds of cargo weight, including the two of us which is not negligable.  The Monaco is a diesel pusher and can carry about 10,000 pounds of cargo, although where we could stuff another 7,000 pounds I don’t have a clue.  The Monaco has more living space up top but less storage space in the basement. 

One of the two couches

The Monaco is more upscale than the Allegro and it feels more like “home.”  The Monaco has lots of carved wood, about the color of our antiques back in Redlands.  The 2 couches, the 2 cab seats and dinette are covered in leather, almost the color of the leather couch and loveseat in the front room in our Redlands house (now in our Lead, SD house.)  We lost a TV (which we didn’t watch anyway) and our fake fireplace.  I kind of miss the fireplace.  And while the couches in the Monaco are pretty nice, they don't really replace the La-Z-Boy recliners we had installed in the Allegro.

Giant shower (for an RV anyway)

So you are asking, if we don’t know why it happened, we should at least know how it happened.  I don’t really know the answer to that either, but I can more or less recall what occurred.  We were at the Escapade in Tucson, AZ, the Escapees yearly RV club convention, and we ended up parked right next to the RV show.  One day when we were finished early I asked Roger if he wanted to go look at the RVs.  He said "yeah, sure" and that’s how it started.  I remember saying to the salesman that we didn’t like any of the new RVs because we like the Allegro floor plan with 1 ½ bathrooms and a large shower in the bathroom in back.  The rest is a blur.  Yes, the Monaco has sort of the same floor plan, the “rooms” are just bigger.  Way bigger.

Do we like it?  Yes.  The ride is much smoother, quieter and more stable than the Allegro.  It has a lot more bells and whistles that mostly work.  It has a 500 horsepower engine so it takes a 6% grade up a hill towing our car at 50 miles an hour.  It has electrical strips under the tiles that heat the floor and, to some extent, the room.  It also has three air conditioner/heat pumps on the roof if you want to pay for the electricity to run them all. 

Full fridge and china cabinet

No measly 6 gallon hot water heater for this baby.  It has an Aquahot system that will provide hot water for as long as you want to leave the spigot open, as well as heating the interior of the coach when it is too cold for the heat pumps to work and the system will run using either electricity or diesel fuel.  The other nice feature is the residential refrigerator which holds about three times as much food as the one in the Allegro.  It can't run on propane, but this thing has an inverter and a huge battery capacity which should provide that fridge with AC current for about three days in a pinch, although we have no current plans to test that assumption.  If the batteries run low it will also supposedly start the generator on its own and recharge them, but that's another theory we don't particularly want to test out.

So is it worth the money we paid for it?  You'll never know because we aint sayin' how much we spent.  But it certainly seems like upscale living for the time being.  We'll have to wait and see what major disasters happen between now and  when we return to Jojoba in November.