Thoughts After 4 Months Full Time

We’ve been on the road about 4 months now. So what are my thoughts!?

Well first, this is FUN! After our mad dash to Vegas to meet up with our pool friends for a week, we’ve settled into a cadence of moving every week and it’s been working well. To be able to stay in the network of RV resorts we joined and be able to stay for virtually free, we can’t stay at any park for more than 7 days. (Talking about that whole system and how it works is probably worthy of it’s own post.) We moved a couple of times during the week but quickly discovered that trying to work while Morgan drove was a challenge. Occasionally, we would pass through areas with no cell service, but even bigger than that was trying to type while bouncing down the road. HAHA! Most of my work is done either at the Linux command line or in some kind of text editor writing code. Doing either of those while on the road was less than ideal, so now we change locations each weekend.

It didn’t take Morgan very long at all to adjust to cooking with a gas stove and a gas oven. She had never had a gas stove before, but you’d never know it now.

We have developed a system for hooking up to leave our old spot and for getting set up and unhooked when we get to our new spot. We each have our own “duties” that we take care of. Tearing everything down takes a bit more time because the tanks have to be dumped and flushed, but we can usually get set up in about 15 minutes.

We thought before we started this that we would eventually want a backup camera to put on the back of the camper. After a few months of doing this, we have decided that it isn’t necessary. We have a system for getting backed in to our site too. It usually involves picking exactly where on the pad we want the trailer to be then Morgan standing in a spot and me backing whichever back corner of the trailer I can see directly toward her. LOL Sounds silly, but it works for us.

We’ve also learned that Morgan is much better at backing the truck up to the trailer to get hooked up than I am so she always does that.

Working full time and spending a good chunk of one day of the weekend driving makes seeing all the sights we want to see a challenge. Especially when we’re in a location where there is a lot to do. Branson, Missouri and Colorado Springs were prime examples of that. That just means we’ll have to wander back through those locations at some point!

Learning how everything works in our trailer didn’t take as long as we expected. Some things run on 12V DC battery power, some things on 120V AC “shore” power. Some systems work on both, it just depends on if you’re plugged in or not. Still other systems work on propane. We’ve had to learn a few things on the fly. Once, our slide would not go out when we got to our new location. The motor would try, but the slide was stuck. YouTube to the rescue! We learned how to manually get it started so it could un-stick, then the motor was able to take over.

Being in the Coast to Coast RV network has spoiled us. All of these parks and resorts have “full” hookups, which means they have a hookup for water, electric, and sewer. Pretty much all parks have water and electric, but the sewer hookup isn’t always available, especially in state parks. Having the sewer hookup is especially nice because we don’t have to conserve water when washing dishes or taking a shower. When the grey tank for the sinks and shower gets full, we just go out and pull the lever to dump it. Without the sewer hookup, we would either have to hook up the trailer and pull it to a dump station then bring it back and set back up, or dump the tank into a tote and take that to the dump station. The black tank (for the toilet) doesn’t fill up as quickly as the grey tank. We can usually go the full week without having to dump it. The grey tank, we always have to dump at least once during the week and sometimes twice. We always dump both the black and grey tanks on the weekend before we leave.

Speaking of the black tank, we were initially worried about it because of horror stories we had read in some of the RV Facebook groups. Turns out, it’s not necessarily rocket science. Never leave the drain open. Always let it get full before you empty it. Use the black tank flush system to flush it out every time you empty it. Add 3 – 4 gallons of water to it with a scoop of Happy Camper treatment every time you empty it. Doing it this way works very well. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Seems like the biggest mistake people make is leaving the drain open all the time. If you do that, the liquids go down the drain, the solids pile up on the bottom of the tank, and eventually, you have a very stinky situation.

We quickly learned that having a reliable internet connection so I can work, requires more than one carrier. We got an account with Visible Wireless as a backup to our normal AT&T account. Visible runs on Verizon’s network, they just don’t charge as much. There have been a couple of places where AT&T had no signal and we had to use the Visible SIM.

We’ve learned that most of the STUFF we had all over the house was completely unnecessary. We haven’t really missed any of it. We also had way more clothes than we needed. We brought all the clothes that would fit in our closets with us, but we still don’t even use all of them. That’s after we donated NINE trash bags full of clothes before we left. We have 3 totes full of STUFF that we kept because we thought we might need it. I think we’ve taken 1 thing out of 2 of the totes. I’m not even sure what’s in the third tote any more.

We’ve learned that, for us, a big house with a big yard is totally unnecessary. The amount of space we have here is plenty. We’ve talked about it and we don’t even want a bigger trailer. The one we have is perfect for us. It might seem crazy to some people because it’s only about 240 square feet of living space, but for us, it’s perfect.

This has gotten long and I’ve probably still forgotten some things, but I think that’s probably enough for one post.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!