It Started with a Hot Dog

This blog is going to (hopefully) chronicle our new adventures in our new (to us - hence old) RV. It's actually not that old but I liked the way the title sounded so just roll with it.

I toyed with just using the old blog or just posting short notes and pictures to Facebook but both of those options sounded lame. I wanted something specific to the RV - which the other blog isn't, and I wanted a little more depth than a Facebook post.

Like most blogs I think, I'm enthusiastic getting started. We'll see how long I can keep this up.

So let's start back at the beginning.

I was born in a small town... Wait, that's too far back. Okay, how's this. We had purchased our first RV back when the kids were little and we were camping with other couples and their kids. We were tired of tents and didn't want to have a truck to drive around when we weren't towing a trailer. That first RV - a 25 ft. Coachmen Class C - was a blast. The other families called it "The Enterprise" because it looked so big in their rearview mirrors when we were caravaning to a campsite.

That RV served us well but as the years went by, it started to get a little long in the tooth. We fought with the airconditioning (the one in the dash) off and on for several years. I'm pretty sure the mice reworked the ductwork in the engine compartment because when the dash vents weren't blowing mouse hair and who knows what else in our faces, they pretty much didn't work at all. I would take it in, pay some ungodly amount of money for the fix, and then on the next trip, it would stop working again.

The fridge hadn't worked when on propane (like when traveling down the road) for years. We would cool it down on shore power at home before a trip, stuff it full of cold food and drinks, and then not open it until we got to power in the campsite - hoping things would stay cold during the drive.

No, we don't know what the Hell that is.

The sidewalls were bubbling - presumably from water leaking in somewhere. The window in the cab-over section had a gasket that had shrunk somehow and was only going about 90% around the window - and presumably leaking.

Oh, and the brakes would randomly seize up going down the road and pull the wheel to one side or the other. We stopped one time after one episode and the left front wheel was smoking.

Other than that though, it was in good shape...

There is an RV dealer just down the road from us and through the years, we would occasionally go down and just browse the new units and talk about what we liked and what we didn't. I always looked in envy at all the storage the bigger models had. Ours had virtually no outside storage compartments. Okay, there were some but we couldn't even fit our camp stove in any of them. It, like most things we took, had to ride on the bed or the cab-over bunk.

It was fun to look but we were putting kids through college and we always got back to "ours is good enough".

Well, in late January, Deb saw an ad in the paper for an Open House at said dealer. "Free Hot Dogs!" it said. We looked at each other and Deb said "Wanna get a hot dog?" So we hopped in the car and headed down to see what they had.

The pattern for these trips is pretty much always the same. It's fun to step into a new unit and look at all the spiffy stuff and, in the high-end ones, the bling. But, after looking at a few, they start to all look the same. And, since I'm not going to get one anyway, I'm quickly ready to leave.

This time though, the second one we went in, had something different. The layout was perfect. It had a dinette and a couch that was across from it. Others had the dinette and the couch on the same side so you felt separated from the other. The back bedroom had a bed that you could walk around (instead of crawl over like ours) and it was in a slide out with side windows. It also had little shelves at the head for books and iPads and such.

Then it started to get good.

It was a 2006 model with only 3 thousand miles on it. It had a backup camera.

It had auto-leveling jacks!

Sold!

Okay, we didn't jump right then but basically it "spoke to us". We went into the indoor showroom to look at others and to find the promised hot dogs. Nothing else really interested us and the hot dogs we got were still frozen - blech!

We ended up finding a salesman and he offered us a test drive. Why not?

It was eerily like our current one. Same Ford chassis - although a bigger motor - and same dash and overall sound. It drove well and stopped on a dime. It was amazingly quiet too. I'm sure the squeaks will come soon enough but it was blissfully quiet.

At this point, we were tumbling down that slippery slope that seems to surround everything we do.

We talked with the manager and he gave us a crazy good price. He also gave us a price on our trade based on the year and mileage - pending actual inspection (crap). So we raced home and started jettisoning everything out of our beast. Wow, there was a lot of stuff in there! All the time we were unloading things and trying to clean it up as best we could, we were hoping against hope that they would not see all the problems and scuttle the deal.

At one point during the discussion earlier, the salesman had said that we would have to list down all the things that were wrong with it. I thought "I don't have that much ink in all the pens in the house to list all that!" and was wondering what I could "forget about".

We drove it back to the dealer and a guy came out to look it over.  I had made a counter offer since I didn't want to just take their price and our hearts were in our mouths as the guy did the inspection. I was hoping he wouldn't see the hole I had poked in the paper-thin, rotted wall when I was vacuuming it out 10 minutes earlier.

The inspector dude huddled with the salesman and then the salesman came over. "Okay, deal",  he said.

I think Deb peed her pants but I was perfectly stoic.

He never did ask for a list of issues with it and I never offered one.

We couldn't actually drive it home since they had to transfer the registration and do the final prep.

We came back the following week, hoping that they hadn't done a further inspection of our trade-in and  decided to cancel the deal.

We did a walk through with a guy who knew less about it than I did. I wanted to verify the jacks were working but neither he nor I knew how to deploy them. He got another tech to come over and do it and we found that they didn't all deploy correctly. The tech played with some adjustments and finally got all the jacks working. It sounds like a Transformer transforming when those things are deploying. I'm looking forward to arriving at a campground late and sounding like a trash compactor as I deploy my legs.

The salesman was getting antsy to leave so we wrapped it up and Deb followed me home.

This thing is big! It's 31 feet which is about 6 feet longer than our old one and it's a big difference. The good thing though is that it's narrower. Our old one was a "wide-body" to try and make up for not having slide outs. With the slide outs "in", this one is a bit slimmer.

The only downside is that we bought it in February and we won't be able to camp in it until April so it's  going to be a long wait for our first trip.