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A typical Alberta summer isn't marked by the Friday-afternoon pilgrimage to cottage country. In fact, Alberta doesn't really have cottage country — here, cottages are called cabins.

And cabins don't come cheap. According to a recent poll conducted by Maritz Research for real-estate company Royal LePage, the most popular destinations in Western Canada for summer retreats are Cranbrook, Kelowna, Vernon, Fernie and the Okanagan — all in the British Columbia interior. The report also found that the average price for waterfront property in Alberta is now $900,000, and is $996,900 in B.C. — both more than double the national average.

The report pegged a standard waterfront cottage in Sylvan Lake, which is halfway between Calgary and Edmonton, at a staggering $900,000 (the year before, the same property rang in an average price in the range of $500,000 to $750,000).

What's driving cabin prices in Alberta? Simple economics of supply and demand in a place where oil wells outnumber beaches. The energy boom has inflated real-estate prices across the board in Alberta, a trend that is more pronounced in vacation properties since lakes here are either small and very busy, or on protected parkland and glacier-cold.

Little wonder Albertans tend to camp. And as dozens of couples sipped wine and nibbled on crackers at a recent party for customers of a Calgary-area RV dealership, something became apparent: Camping in booming Alberta isn't all about pup tents and Coleman stoves any more.

Sure, there were plenty of retirees in the room — the stereotypical RV jockeys — but there were also babies cooing in their removable car seats and young professionals dressed in their came-straight-from-work suits.

"We don't look like RV owners, do we?" said a laughing Ian Sanchez, 35. Sanchez and his wife, Michelle, 33, love to camp. But when children Hailey, 5, and Hunter, 3, came along, they needed more room, and started vacationing in a tent trailer, which itself soon became too cramped.

The active, outdoorsy couple hope to one day own their own little place in the wilderness, but for now, they took the plunge and bought the KZ Outdoorsman, a 23-foot trailer complete with loads of storage space and luxuries such as a shower and a microwave.

"It's the natural evolution of RVing," said Sanchez, who added that their home away from home was also a "little" more affordable than a million-dollar place on a lake.

"It used to be the farmers and the blue-collar people that would go RVing, and now it's definitely becoming more mainstream," said Kyle Redmond, general manager of Bucars, the 47-year-old dealership hosting the party — and $5,000 giveaway — for its first 100 customers of this year. "In Calgary, there are a lot of well-to-do people that are just getting into [RVing], and they're buying something that's worth close to what a house used to be worth in Calgary."

Simple trailers start in the mid-teens, but opulent RVs equipped with gadgets such as satellite TVs and massager-seats can soar past $500,000.

According to the industry group Go RVing Canada, there is the potential to save 70 per cent during an RV holiday, compared with a traditional vacation (the figure was calculated before gas prices began soaring this spring). Still, there are more than one million RVs on the road, and the number of RV-owning households in Canada has jumped to about 10 per cent this year from 7 per cent the year before, according to the group.

When friends first lent Dawne Gordon and her family an RV not long ago, the 38-year-old Calgary woman said she recalled thinking, "These are for old people."

But Gordon, her husband and their two teenaged sons soon became hooked. They just bought a 25-foot fifth-wheel trailer with an eye to vacationing all over Alberta and B.C. this year. Now, the former Torontonian has turned up her nose at cottage life.

"I like to be mobile. I don't like to be stationary," she said.