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As you may have guessed from reading previous posts, we’re currently in the middle of a road trip out west. I had all my post topics planned out and scheduled, and even partially written, but I needed to finish writing them and add pictures (most of which still needed to be taken and edited).
Needless to say, I wasn’t able to keep to my posting schedule. I could only write if the road was straight or I’d get carsick. I needed internet access to upload pics, edit them, and add them to posts that also needed to be published. As I mentioned last week, we were without internet access for a week and a half, and that threw me off schedule even more. We were also boondocking the whole time we were without internet access and I could only charge my laptop if we ran the generator, which we weren’t always able to do because of noise restrictions.
Wondering what boondocking is? It’s camping in an RV without water, electric, or sewer hookups. Batteries, solar panels, or generators may be used to provide power, and water is limited to what’s in your tanks or what you haul in.
So now I’m trying to salvage my schedule and catch up on my posts. Here’s one I’d planned on posting a couple weeks ago:
The weekend before we left on our road trip, we headed out to Shenandoah NP for a shakedown of our new RV. We’d purchased it a month earlier, but the weekend we were supposed to do our shakedown trip, Jeremy had to work. The other weekends all had too many other things already scheduled, so we were left waiting until the last minute.
What’d we find out from our shakedown trip?
1. We had some sleeping arrangement issues
We did sleep in the RV in our driveway a couple nights shortly after purchasing it, which gave us a pretty good idea of what we needed to do to be prepared. Despite that, we still had some problems on our first trip away from home.
The mattress that came with our RV is rock hard. “Camping out” in our driveway showed just how bad the mattress is. Jeremy and I could barely move the next morning. So when we went to Shenandoah, we took out the mattress and put our mattress in. That was more comfortable, but our mattress (an incredibly comfortable IntelliGel mattress) isn’t meant to be on a hard, flat surface, so it didn’t feel as good as it could have. It’s supposed to be on a softish foundation, which we’d left at home. In fact, when we returned home, we laid on the foundation and decided it wasn’t much different from the original RV mattress. So we put the mattress back in the RV so it could act as a foundation for our IntelliGel mattress.
The problem with having two mattresses is that the original mattress is meant to fold in when when the slide is in. Putting our IntelliGel mattress on top of that means we have to roll it up like a jelly roll to the head of the bed, and then lean the foot of the RV mattress on top of the mattress roll. The RV mattress rarely stays in place though, so it’s not really a satisfactory solution.
We had intended Sunshine and River to sleep on the bed above the cab, but while River liked the idea, he didn’t actually sleep up there. He slept on the sofa while Sunshine got the bed to herself. Ocean slept in his Phil and Ted’s travel cot (link is to a newer version of what we have) set on the floor in front of the dinette.
2. Our battery wasn’t that great
We had a few hiccups with the RV itself. I woke up very early in the morning to the carbon monoxide alarm beeping. It does this when the battery gets too low, so Jeremy had to get up and turn the engine on to charge the battery. We’d run both Maxx fans all night and had a phone and an ipad plugged in all night as well, which for some reason was too much for the battery.
3. We had some problems with our hot water heater
The other main hiccup was the hot water heater. We couldn’t get the water to run hot. We couldn’t figure out what the deal was when we got home and ran out of time to investigate further. It wasn’t until three days into our road trip that Jeremy remembered that during our walk thru the salesman had showed us how to winterize the hot water heater. After pulling off the access hatch, he found that it was still in winterization mode. A quick change and we finally had hot water for showers and washing dishes.
4. At least we had the gear we needed
We had a travel trailer when Sunshine was little, but outfitting an RV for five people is a bit different than outfitting for three people. We had dishes and silverware from the trailer, but not enough for all of us, so I had to purchase more of both. Overall though, we did pretty good getting the RV kitted out and we didn’t need to purchase anything else after this trip.
Taking a quick camping trip helped get the children excited about our road trip while also working out some bugs before we hit the road, when it would be harder to resolve issues. Issues like how we’d tow our car.
Our big miscalculation
Part of this short trip was also to try out the tow dolly and make sure it would do the job on our road trip. We had planned on towing our CRV on the dolly and putting our bikes and Sunshine’s kayak in the CRV. The evening after we brought the tow dolly home we were checking on something and found out we couldn’t tow the CRV on a tow dolly. We could tow it four down (which we knew), but not with a tow dolly. We already knew we couldn’t tow our Camry Hybrid four down, but we could put it on the tow dolly. The problem with towing the Camry was the lack of space for bikes and a kayak.
We thought about trading the tow dolly in for an auto hauler (trailer), but the increased cost and weight just weren’t worth it. We’d already rejected towing four down as the setup was more expensive than the tow dolly. After trying different configurations with the Camry, we found we could fit Sunshine’s bike, the bike trailer for the boys, and the kayak in it. We quickly ordered a bike rack that attaches to the RV ladder for Jeremy’s and my bikes.
It’s not what we wanted, and it is a little more difficult to load and unload the bikes and kayak, but it works. What problems have you encountered while preparing for a road trip?
