Wally, however, was never satisfied with the basic or the mundane. Point-to-point in the good ole USA just would not do in his greater scheme of things. He had enjoyed many challenging adventures pulling his own unit and was sure that others would enjoy group RV travel.

In the years from about 1950 through the mid 1960s, he conceived, planned, organized and led large groups of trailer tourists on 27 exotic trips to Mexico, Central and South America, Canada, Alaska, Europe, Africa, China, and around the World. All caravan units were car or truck and trailer; no motorized units participated in his caravans.

The early caravans were open to all brands of trailers but the later ones were exclusively for Airstream owners. One thing Wally did recognize early in his caravan career was that RVers visiting foreign lands were not "Good Will Ambassadors" or United Nations representatives -- they were simply tourists and were out to enjoy the sights, sounds, and differences in the people and places they visited while being good neighbors and good citizens. In many cases, the political situation really required that for personal safety they mind their own business very carefully.

Wally developed the concept of pilot trips, advance arrangements, and political expediency that allowed his international trips to go relatively smoothly.

For his 1951 trip from El Paso, Texas, through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, and, of course, return, he led 63 RV units on a journey that required passports, visas, food drops, gas drops, medical arrangements and all manner of special details unlike domestic RV travel.

This trip is generally recognized as the very first international RV caravan. He found that towropes and winches were absolutely essential in many areas where roads and bridges were simply figments of some mapmaker's imagination.

The 25 or so exotic RV adventures that followed over the next 15 years, while quite expensive, were very popular. After about six years of organizing trips that covered all of North and Central America, in 1955 and 56, he organized a trip throughout Europe that included Italy, the French Riviera, Spain, and north through all of Western Europe to Sweden and Norway.

On this trip he learned that trans-Atlantic shipping companies would not transport more than twelve car-trailer units on a given ship because the bulk space in a ship's hold taken up by a car or truck with a trailer did not equal the ballast weight required for that amount of cargo space.

The 35 units on this first overseas caravan thus were relegated to three different ships and arrival schedules. The group departure date had to be delayed until all participants had arrived. This trip, at least, had the advantage of all being traveled on improved and mapped roads with regular service available. Some were not so easy.

The African caravan from Capetown, South Africa, to Cairo, Egypt, took over two years to arrange and set up. Forty-one trailers, all pulled by four-wheel-drive trucks, which were required for participation on this adventure, left Capetown on June 30, 1959, and arrived at Cairo 221 days later on February 19, 1960, having traveled 14,307 miles breaking their own trail and fording bridgeless streams much of the way. Road scouts were sometimes required to go ahead to be sure that civil wars in some areas had not negated the prior arrangements made on the pilot trip. On this trip, the participant's ages ranged from a six-year-old child to an 85-year-old doctor who assisted the group with medical services.

The trailers varied in length from 16 to 30 feet with most being 22 to 24-feet long. On his trips through Africa and the later 1964-65 "Caravan Around the World," it was necessary to arrange with oil companies and large trucks to meet the group with fuel, oil, and mechanical supplies, sometimes hundreds of miles from the closest commercial service station.

Wally Byam passed away in 1962 but his team of exotic caravan developers carried on with his dreams. As if the challenges of a south to north trip through Africa had not been enough, in 1964 and 65 they left the Philippine Islands and traveled west through China, Cambodia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and on into Greece, Italy, and back through France and north again to Scandinavia. The trip closely followed a historic caravan route that Marco Polo had mapped in 1273.

This was listed as the Wally Byam Around-the-World Caravan and was documented in a series of TV shows supported by the National Geographic Society and narrated by movie star Vincent Price. These shows greatly assisted the explosion in RV popularity in the late 1960s.

On his caravans and other travels alike, Wally espoused his Four Freedoms of RV travel:

Freedom from arrangements-reservations, schedules, taxis and tips. "You do not have to worry about your reservations in the next town or where you are going to sleep tonight. You have all of your accommodations right there with you. Home is where you stop."

Freedom from the problems of age-"For some, checkers, clubs, gardening and grandchildren are not enough. Out of this boredom, ailments are born."

Freedom to know-"You meet people on a plane or a train and the next day you separate. When you travel in a trailer, you meet people in their homes and they meet you in yours."

Freedom for fun-"To relax and lose yourself mentally."

Wally Byam's well publicized adventures around the world not only served to expand the imagination of RV owners, but they introduced the RV as a travel concept in parts of the world where automobiles were rarely seen, much less one pulling a small but fully livable house behind it. As the worldwide fame of these adventures grew, the politics of gaining permits to travel through some of the countries became much easier.

Wally Byam's success in building the caravan travel concept added yet another feature to the wonderful world of self-contained travel.

For his many contributions to RVs and the RV lifestyle, Wally Byam was posthumously elected as a member of the first class inducted into the RV/MH Hall of Fame in 1972.