2022 #1: The road taken

By way of introduction:

I'm Dudley and Steph is my wife. We've been RVing since 1999. Our son grew up camping with us. We did the usual: started with a small travel trailer, then got bigger and bigger rigs. Our first RV was a 27' Sunline. We took that trailer across the country and back, visiting most of the lower 48 states. Our next trailer was a fifth wheel, a small Titanium with an unusual over-the-truck-cab bedroom. That one didn't get around like the Sunline did, mostly hanging out in the Northeast. And now we have our largest RV (which is still pretty small), a 32' Rockwood fifth wheel.

We've taken it on a few long-ish trips from Connecticut to the Midwest but our camping style has evolved into mostly weekends and one- or two-week trips to nearby commercial campgrounds. Now we're thinking it's time for a change. A big change (well, actually a little change). More about that in a bit.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2023 #4: Stretching the Tanks

Image
We returned to one of our favorite places, Hammonassett State Park, for our longest run of dry camping yet. Hammonassett has lots of decent bathhouses in the campground. We always try to book a site close to one of them. The question was, how long could we stretch our black and grey tanks before we had to dump? The plan was to use the bathhouses as much as possible, saving our black tank for mostly middle-of-the-night liquid deposits, and only showering in the trailer rarely. We booked 12 nights but Steph had to return to our house on 2 of those days because of severe weather and doctor appointments. We never dumped. When we left the campground on the 13th day our tank readings were: Black 69%, Grey 75%, and Fresh 25%. Based on this, I think we can go a max of 15-16 days before having to dump in this situation.  There were definitely compromises we had to make. We either used the campground showers or used medical body cleansing wipes we found on Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod
Read more

2023 #3: One Year In and a Lithium Challenge

Image
Happy Fourth of July! We just spent a week (6 nights/7 days) camping in full shade on mostly rainy/cloudy days. We were at one of our favorite oceanside campgrounds in Connecticut and we scored a site in a wooded section next to the tidal marsh. The clouds and 2 huge trees overhead mostly took our solar panels out of the picture. Mostly. More about that later.  We figured this would be a good test of our Lithium Platinum Package with its 640 AH batteries. We left home fully charged and used the fridge on 12v power for the hour drive to the beach. Since it was cloudy, that used 4% of our charge before we even set up camp. We proceeded to dry-camp for the week pretty much the way we had with our other trailers. We ran the fridge on propane, pumped water from our tank, used minimum interior lighting, and remembered to turn off lights we weren't using. In the end, that wasn't really necessary. Unlike our other trailers, we also ran the inverter to make coffee and run the microwave.
Read more

2023 #1: Mothership

Image
First trip of the season. We took Eggcelsior back down to Hohenwald, TN for some warranty work at the Oliver Trailers service center. On the punchlist: check some drawer glides, replace some interior trim (the silver strip around the belly joint) that fell off, and (top priority) replace a faulty jack mounting plate that had a hole too big for its carriage bolt. This would be our first big trip with the Oliver after we brought it home, and the first real Oliver trip where Steph was feeling well. We ran short hops - 4 to 4.5 hour drive times according to Google Maps. Our days of 8 hour drives are in the past. Our first stop was Locust Lake State Park in Pennsylvania. We had advance reservations and chose a site right next to a bathhouse, (which we didn't really need because we were able to dewinterize before we left). A little unlevel, as you can see, but OK otherwise if you have a smaller RV. Wouldn't recommend for larger rigs. The next day took us to a commercial campground, W
Read more