Bret Michaels, lead singer of the 80s hair metal band Poison, has a new television show called Rock My RV. The show follows the formula established by Pimp My Ride and copied by other shows such as Overhaulin’ and Trick My Truck in which people with run down vehicles appear on these shows to have their vehicles “upgraded”. Some of these upgrades are practical (new paint, new engine) and some of them are not so practical (flat screen televisions installed in the floorboards).

About a month ago, Rock My RV announced a contest. To enter, all you had to do was make a video no longer than two minutes in length explaining what you would do with a new rocked out RV.

In case you missed it on Facebook, here was our entry:

(Full disclosure: the pop-up is not in as bad of shape as we made it out to be. The wooden supports work just fine and I think I’ve figured out what the problem with the taillights is.)

Filming outside is hard. Natural light is nice and bright, but if you record late in the afternoon/early in the evening you either end up with everybody squinting (from looking in to the sun) or having everyone back lit. Also, recording audio in the Oklahoma wind is also difficult. I actually used a second audio source for the video and it sounded worse than the original audio on the Flip cam did so I just ended up using that.

When Susan told me the video could be no longer than 2 minutes in length, I said “no problem.” We then recorded what I thought would be the first half of the video, and after editing it ended up being 2 and a half minutes in length! I was able to cut that footage down to the two-minute video you see above, but not only did we have to cut out a lot of things we filmed, we also weren’t able to include everything we wanted to. If I had a month to work on the project I would have deleted everything we recorded and started over from scratch, but I didn’t.

Once the deadline for entries passed, all the entries became publicly viewable. You can view them all at this URL: http://my.travelchannel.com/rock-my-rv-epic-rv-giveaway/gallery.esi?sortOrder=2

Based on the ones I watched, all of the entries fall into one of the following categories:

01. “I’m dying.” Okay, so not everybody in this category is dying, but they all have physical ailments. “My husband has diabetes and we haven’t been on vacation in 25 years. Please give us an RV.”

02. “I’m a weirdo.” Not my bag, but whatever. “I will wear a funny wig and play the guitar poorly. Give me an RV!” Not my cup of tea, but apparently it’s a lot of people’s. Enough that I gave it its own category.

03. “Our family would really enjoy and use an RV.” Our entry fell under this umbrella, and there were a lot of similar entries. This is what I thought the spirit of the contest was.

Unfortunately after skimming through the videos I found a fourth category: “We run a non-profit business and could use the RV to make the world a better place.”

Well, crap.

In one video a woman states that if she wins the RV, she will drive around the country handing out clothing to homeless people. Another woman says that if she wins it, she will expand her pet spaying and neutering business.

Finalists were to be notified within 48 hours of the entry deadline. After seeing some of those videos I knew we would not be one of the three finalists, and I was right.

In our video we talked about some of our past vacations — how in 2013 we drove from Oklahoma City to Niagara Falls and Maine and back, in 2012 we drove to Seattle and back, and in 2011 we drove to Las Vegas and back. Winning an RV would have been nice, but even without one we will continue taking road trips, towing our pop-up camper around, and having as many adventures as we can stand.