Jenny McQueen

1. Hired a professional inspector. This was not cheap, but we.knew we also couldn’t afford to purchase our 5th wheel without knowing *exactly* what we were taking on. I found our inspector through NRVIA , using the search map function to find someone who was located near the Ohio dealership we purchased from. Typing in my credit card felt like jumping off a cliff because it was a no-turning-back moment.

When I tell you this man was thorough….y’all I received a 183 page report from him. 418 photos plus some videos. It was worth EVERY dime of the $800 I begrudgingly paid. He flagged 10 action items for the dealership to fix, some smaller, like replacing a blown fuse, and some slightly bigger, like a docking lamp that was out. He spent almost 8 hours going over every square inch of the RV and we were so thankful I would have happily invited him to all future family holdays, but that would have been awkward, so I settled for leaving him a glowing review.

2. Asked a friend with a CDL to help us move it for the first time. We had our 5th wheel delivered to our home at the time, with only a few days to pack it up and move it to the campground. So no pressure. On the second day, we needed to tow it down to the end of the street to open the slides, but a cozy neighborhood is not exactly an ideal place to learn to tow 43 feet of trailer. Enter a friend who kindly helped us pull it around the corners and into a large parking lot. Once we were loaded up, another friend who drives truck for a living helped my husband make the drive 30 miles down the highway and into our new temporary neighborhood. We saved all our towing mistakes for later 😅

3. Staying stationary for the first 3 months. We had SO much to learn before we were ready to start traveling, and although we are very much both feet in kind of people, it quickly became clear that we just weren’t ready. As in we had to call an RV repair guy within the first week for user error 🤦🏻‍♀️

What originally was going to be 4-6 weeks quickly turned into 3 months as we learned how to do things like change the propane, flush the black tanks, not overfill the grey tanks, reset the GFCI outlets…and figure where the heck to store all of our stuff. We ended up doing multiple trips to the thrift store for offloading more things, as well as placing a ton of last minute amazon orders. We moved into our RV the 9th of February, and by the time we hitched up and rolled out in the second week on May, we felt just a *tad* more qualified to hit the road.

4. Accepted help from strangers with backing up. Okay I should preface this by saying we didn’t accept *everyones* help. But there have been a couple tight situations where neighbors have popped out asking if we needed assistance, and ESPECIALLY on our first back in site, I asked my husband to pleeeeeease say yes. There is one camp host who will go down in our family history as an angel in disguise. He got us into a spot we had literally no business fitting into, and the whole campground kept complimenting our parking job when really, it wasn’t us. Kevin in Wisconsin, you’re getting all the crowns in heaven.

5. Taking our sweet time on travel days. Our first official travel day was from Petersburg Virginia to Colonial Beach Virginia, a whopping 100 miles. We thought we had prepped ourselves the day before (my husband actually took two days off work for this) and we started packing up at 9 am. We officially rolled out at 1, and got to the next campground at 430pm. We were riding shotgun on the struggle bus. 😅 We still made mistakes (who needs taillights hooked up anyway?), but we arrived in once piece, and this trip really taught us a ton about how to*actually* get ready for travel days.

Fast forward to now (July), we have about 10 travel days under our belts, and we still take our time, but it’s reasonable to expect to leave by 10 am without rushing.

6. Getting an extended service plan…and using it. This is controversial and I can already feel my husband rolling his eyes because I was in NO way on board with this at first. When I saw the price tag ($3700) I said absolutely not, we are on a budget. But I thought more about how we couldn’t afford any major repairs, and realized they could roll the cost into the RV payment, so I grumpily said yes. Here’s the thing: if you have a nice cushion in savings, it’s probably not worth it, but unfortunately that isn’t the case for us (yet).

And spoiler: he was right. Not only have we already used it to replace our water pump, they have an excellent tech support option that my husband has used multiple times to troubleshoot things. I’m talking about an hour on the phone diagnosing a blown fuse that we would have never found. We also have another appointment on the books to get our converter repaired after the tech support helped us figure out that it’s not functioning properly.

Our extended service plan is through Preserve, and the jury is still out on if I’d recommend them, but so far so good!

7. Joined a facebook group of fulltime RV families. Listen, I know FB groups can be a hot mess, but if you can find the right one, they can be pure gold. I found this one, and I use that search bar to answer so many of my questions. It far more trustweight than Google, and I was able to ask for input from people who were actually living the experience. I don’t know if it’s the particular way this group is moderated, but I found not have all of the junk that typically comes with Facebook groups. I asked questions about things like tow capacity, storage, downsizing and I even found our RV model in this group.

One day I’ll get brave enough to share allll the mistakes we have made, and I’m sure there will be more to add to the list by then. 😅 Happy travels, friends!