My wife and I have a great appreciation for the RV life. With our fast-moving lifestyle, it is the method that works best for us, and it’s uniquely American in that we have as part of our lifestyle an expectation of freedom that is certainly dominant with RV travel. We like taking part of our house with us when traveling, which we do extensively throughout the year. It is great to have your own bathroom, your own refrigerator, tools, and storage. And as far as camping, I prefer it to the static existence of hotel life where you depend on everyone else for everything, from food to rest. My camper has my own pillows and sheets that my wife keeps very clean. It makes travel much less stressful when you have your own stuff while staying in places far away. And that’s how we found ourselves up near Put-in-Bay, Ohio. I was at a competitive fast draw competition near that area, so my wife and I camped in our RV for a few days to participate. Then in our downtime, we went over to South Bass Island, where Put-in-Bay is, to look around. I wanted to go to the Perry Museum because I love the Oliver Hazard Perry story of stopping the English during the War of 1812, so because we were camping, we had the flexibility to do that kind of thing while in the area. Plus, there was a really nice campground over on South Bass Island that we have been thinking about as a family trip, as a way to explore all the area islands in the near future, so we wanted to see how the ferry system worked for taking RVs over to the island.
Of course, Put-in-Bay is very nice, they call it the Key West of the North, and as everyone knows, I like Key West for the audacious independence that it expects, as related to other island lifestyles elsewhere in the world. What’s astonishing about Put-in-Bay is that it’s so close to the border of another country, yet it’s in Ohio, and it has all the island vibes of Hilton Head Island and Key West all wrapped up into a kind of Charleston presentation. It’s a very unique place, and my wife and I enjoyed our visit after doing well in the competitions. For me, it was a rare down day that I greatly appreciated. But what was most impressive to me was the Miller Ferry system itself. I have had the benefit of traveling worldwide and have seen many ferries, many of them creatively stuffing as many people as possible onto their boats to make as much money as they can. But the Miller Ferry had the added complication of maintaining a high American lifestyle. South Bass Island has cars and, as I said, RVs. There is a really nice campground where you can RV camp, and people take their big rigs over to the island routinely. While going over and coming back, I watched the Miller Ferry crew completely load up one of their craft with many millions of dollars in personal RVs, and I couldn’t help but think of the complexity of insurance risk. Most places in the world, especially communist countries, would discourage such travel, where people expect to haul their own personal property over to a tiny island with such an expectation of freedom. That expectation is a particular trait that you find at RV campsites all over the United States and is very consistent as opposed to the type of people who stay at hotels and are dependent on that type of entertainment structure.
Those elements came together nicely on the Miller’s Ferry, where dozens of RVs, many of them over 53 feet long, loaded onto the ferry quickly and traveled across the lake as casually as people ride an elevator up a skyscraper. It was astonishingly competent to watch the ferry crew, which are all very good, load and unload the many millions of dollars of personal equipment so casually. Most organizations and countries that govern them would be much slower and more regulatory-bound. But within moments of landing, the ramp came down, and giant RVs of great worth were leaving the ferry to resume their journeys wherever they intended to go. I found it an astonishing display of competence driven by high personal expectations of customer service based on a lifestyle of freedom. It was audacious to have the ability to take your house to an island to stay for an extended period. Most places in the world would have a lot of regulatory burdens to overcome, and by the time they did, the option would have just been thrown out the window. Why do all that just so people could take their RVs over to a little bitty island? Why couldn’t people just rent a hotel room or stay in a condo? Why did people have to haul their RVs over to a place for such audacious expectations of freedom that were clearly the core of the lifestyle? The island is so tiny, only a few miles across in any direction, that golf carts are the most dominant form of travel. People do drive their cars around, but golf carts are the way to go. The exhibition displayed the difference between government-run facilities and private ones.
The Miller Ferry organization, a private one that has grown to meet the market demand, had no trouble handling even the most complicated loads they did all day without incident. People loaded onto the ferry without crashing and causing other people any trouble, and they did it day in, day out all day, well into the evening. The crew wasn’t overly regulatory and panicked, as you see in many government facilities when they have to deal with crowd management. With the Miller Ferry and the culture of South Bass Island, the expectation is to take care of the customer experience as well as possible, which certainly is not the case with any government-run endeavor. The market serves the consumer and doesn’t seek to control the consumer. If the consumer wants something, then the market finds a way to satisfy that market need, even if it’s as audacious as taking your own home over to a remote island for a day or two so that the traveler can enjoy the comforts of home in their own private way. The amount of cost and investment needed for that experience to happen is ostentatious. Yet they facilitate that life at South Bass Island with the option of the Miller Ferry. As we were experiencing all this, I had to think of where in the world such a display was shown in this way, the level of competence, the expectation of delivery with such a large payload, and people’s private homes. Europe and Asia do not facilitate lifestyles that even have those options as tangible. Their roads aren’t big enough for our RV lifestyle in America. Let alone have a ferry that can take those big vehicles over to an island for vacation. And if the governments were in charge of the ferry, it would take all day to just run through all their regulatory checklists. But at the Miller Ferry, everyone loads up in minutes. They are off just as fast. Nobody crashes. Nobody fights. Nobody worries. People just do what they do and enjoy doing it, which is a wonderful example of how it should be everywhere in the world if only free market capitalism were as vital as it is at South Bass Island.
Rich Hoffman