Launching into an RV Life

Saturday night, Candy and I did something we had never done before: we spent the night in a state park in our travel trailer.

We are the proud owners of a new-to-us 2020 KZ Sportsmen LE. It has recliners, a kitchen big enough to cook real meals, and air conditioning (a must-have in Missouri!). It also has a king size bed and a bathroom with a shower. And we also have a truck to haul it with.

So how did this come to be?

Deciding to Buy a Travel Trailer

I tent camped about half of the nights during my bicycle tour to Atlanta. Many of those nights were in state parks and my neighbors were folks in travel trailers or motor homes. All of them looked to be having a ton o’ fun (except one toddler who had had more than enough fishing and loudly wanted to do something else). The notion of a travel trailer was familiar, since Candy and I had a pop-up trailer when Kevin and David were boys. The four of us saw much of the country in that trailer, from Missouri parks to the Rocky Mountains to New Hampshire and northern Michigan. I have always wanted to travel and, with the airplane sold, there was room in our lives for another recreational vehicle.

As I pedaled through Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, I had a lot of time to cogitate on what traveling with an RV could be like for Candy and me. We would get to spend time in less populated places, such as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah and the Garden of the Gods in Illinois. I would be able to hike and bike from our campsite instead of starting from a hotel in a nearby town. Candy would have a comfortable place to crochet, either outside under an awning or inside with AC. We could also head for RV parks and visit towns with museums that we want to see.

I seriously considered a motor home, either class B (built from a large van such as a Ford Sprinter) or a class C (built on a small truck chassis, like a Ford E-350). I ruled out the smaller class B motor homes because they lack real showers and do not have enough space to take our parrots along. The class C motor homes would be perfect size-wise but have one big disadvantage over a travel trailer: if you want to drive to a restaurant or a museum, you have to pack up the whole “house” and drive the truck-size vehicle. Either that or you have to tow a car behind the RV and use the car for in-town trips. That refocused me on a travel trailer. We would have the living space of a class C motor home and the truck to use for the in-town trips.

I got home from Atlanta on Friday, May 31 having thought this through and ready to buy a travel trailer and a pickup truck. Candy deserves a lot of credit. When I started talking about travel trailers, she neither threw me out of the house nor made me sleep on the couch. To say that she was emotionally behind me in this process would be an understatement. She is one strong woman, though; she caught up quick.

The last hurdle was realizing that buying a trailer was not a forever decision. We could try it and, when we were tired of the trailer, we could sell it. And if we shopped carefully, we would not lose a ton of money in the process. On Tuesday, we went and looked at a few travel trailers. On Wednesday, June 5, we went back and bought the one that we liked.

Yes, there was more to the shopping than that. I had been obsessing over RV dealer websites, looking at an almost endless string of photos and floor plans. When we actually went to visit dealers and look at trailers, I had it pretty well narrowed down.

In the middle of this process, I had hit up Steve, my friend and pickup truck guru. He gamely got past his disbelief that I (Mr. Electric-Cars-Rule-And-Gas-Guzzlers-Drool) was seriously considering a truck and kindly gave me some good advice, all of which I followed.

The RV dealer where Candy and I bought the trailer also sells used trucks. After closing the deal on the trailer, I walked to the other side of the lot, sat down with a truck salesman, and told him that if he could make it really easy, I would buy a truck from him then and there. Guess what; he did.

Our Trailer and Truck

We bought a used trailer and a used truck. Both are 2020 models, old enough to have depreciated significantly but new enough to still be in good, reliable condition.

The trailer is a 2020 KZ Sportsmen LE 261RLLE. It is 30 feet long with a floor plan that is perfect for the two of us. It even has enough space to accommodate our two parrots. My favorite parts are the huge windows, the recliners, and the kitchen where I can craft real meals. Candy’s favorites are the recliners and the dinette where she can eat what I cook.

We also have nice creature comforts like a space for a TV above the mantle, a sound bar for the TV and Bluetooth phones, and an electric fireplace. The bedroom has a king size bed. The bathroom has a real shower.

For a tow vehicle, we bought a 2020 Ford F-150 XLT with the V8 motor, four doors, and the short bed. It has the towing package, Android Auto (so I have my tunes and won’t get lost), and cruise control, the essentials on my shopping list.

Then we started to spend real money. We hit up Walmart and Amazon and Harbor Freight for the canonical furnishing-your-first-apartment-after-college shopping spree. Did you know that they still sell the same green handled broom with dustpan set that I bought back in the middle of the last century?

A week later, we returned to the RV dealer to pick up our trailer. They had cleaned it up, serviced it, and installed both the weight-shift hitch and the backup camera. The last step was a two-hour orientation where they showed us how to work everything in the trailer and how to connect and disconnect the hitch.

Our First Overnight

We decided to try a quick overnight to Graham Cave State Park as a shake-down trip, just to see if everything worked. We left home on Saturday afternoon, drove less than an hour to the park, spent the night, and were back before noon on Sunday. It went great!

I had towed a pop-up trailer with a minivan but it had been almost 20 years and I had no other towing experience. Other than a couple of rental trucks, I had zero experience driving trucks of any sort. Despite all that, pulling our trailer with our truck turned out to be easy as pie. I am not great at backing it up; it takes me a few passes to get the trailer where I want it, but I am able to park it exactly where I intend and I have not run anything over.

Once at camp, setting up the trailer went pretty well. I learned that I should have leveled it with blocks under the wheels instead of under the stabilizers. Since I did it “wrong,” the floor was level but the frame of the trailer was torqued enough that the bathroom door would not latch. I bought a set of leveling blocks so this won’t be a problem in the future.

The kitchen was every bit as good as I had wanted. It has a three burner propane stove with a real exhaust fan, plenty of light, and plenty of counter space. I made a shrimp pasta and a zucchini mint salad for our first meal.

We both got the best sleep we had ever had while camping. Credit goes to the comfortable bed and, of course, to the AC. And it was a real treat to be able to use a bathroom in the trailer instead of schlepping across the campground to a bathhouse.

On Sunday morning, we took our coffee on the veranda, enjoying the morning breeze and the woods. Breakfast was pancakes and eggs inside the trailer.

Before leaving the park, I spent 20 minutes or so at the dump station, back-flushing both the black water and grey water tanks. They were each pretty clean which was a great relief. No maintenance needed in that department.

There are about a zillion companies in the world that build travel trailers. What do you think are the chances that, on our first trip, we would be camped one site away from another trailer of the same manufacturer and model, KZ Sportsmen?

Lessons Learned

Everything was not perfect but we did not have any serious problems. The biggest gotcha was that our water tanks are under-sized. The trailer was built with a 40 gallon fresh water tank and 32 gallon tanks for black and grey water. Someone has replaced them, though, so we now have only 20 gallons of fresh water and only 16 gallon holding tanks for black and grey water. I had put 12 gallons of water into the black and grey tanks prior to driving to the park. I wanted the water to slosh around and, had there been any solid waste in either tank, loosen it up. I was lazy and did not drain the tanks upon arrival at the park. I thought that I had about 20 gallons of available capacity. Wrong; I only had four gallons free in each tank. Black water wasn’t an issue; we weren’t camping long enough to need to flush the toilet very much. Grey water was a real problem. We simply did not have enough capacity to wash the dishes. They got a quick rinse and we brought them home dirty for a run through the dishwasher.

• Lesson #1 – empty the black water and grey water tanks before setting up camp

• Lesson #2 – get a campsite with full hookups (water, sewer, and electric; not just electric) if I will be cooking or if we want showers

I learned that leveling the trailer with the stabilizers really does not work.

• Lesson #3 – use leveling blocks under the wheels to get the trailer level side-to-side

The funniest problem happened when we were packed up and almost ready to leave. Neither Candy nor I could get the rear door to open. It was stuck fast and that was a real problem because the rear stairs fold up inside the doorway. I futzed and futzed with the door and was about to disassemble the stairs so that I could haul the trailer home when our next door neighbor walked over with some advice. She had had similar problems on her trailer. It turned out that Candy or I had inadvertently latched the deadbolt on the door.

• Lesson #4 – the deadbolt works really really well

Finally, gas mileage is about what I expected. We got 9.2 MPG over 131 miles and that included 20 miles of putzing around town. While we were on the highway going 65 MPH, the mileage was going up. I think that we may well get 10 MPG on longer trips.

The overnighter was a resounding success. I am already planning our first trip. We will head for Springfield, IL and the Quad Cities.