Jenny McQueen

1. Paying high campground rent . This is really a two part mistake, because we got stuck paying high rent due to a crunched timeline and a lack of research. Without an exact move in date for our RV, I was frantically calling campgrounds to find who had avaibality in three weeks. My husband made a spreadsheet of 7 local campgrouns, 4 of home answered their phone, and only 1 had availability.

2. Knocking the back window out . This is why if you’re towing a 5th wheel, you probably should consider a long bed or purchase a hitch with an autoslide. Picture this: you’re parking the RV close to the end of the day, meaning it’s getting dark, so you have limited time. You have the option to make a super sharp turn, or loop around the whole campground. If you’re new, you choose the first one….with a little experience, you can guess what happens next. I was at the playground with the twins while Rome hitched up to relocate us from a weekly to a monthly site, and when he chose to make the sharp turn, he couldn’t get the hitch to slide out. He figured it was fine and moved ahead…only to hear a terrible crack sound, following by glass shattering all over the back seat. I am so so so thankful the twins were not in the car, and that we have good insurance, because this could have been SO much worse.

3. Not using enough water in the toilet. Y’all, I think every new RV person has an embarrassing black tank story, and we are not exception. When we were first getting settled in, we were just thrilled to have electricity and a place to sleep the twins. We decided we would figure out the rest of the details over the following week or so, meaning we didn’t connect to sewer or water. I had done just enough scanning of the 5th wheel threads to know that we could use our toilet, but one very important detail I missed was that we had to add water to the toilet. Every. Time.

Cut to a week

4. Using only propane for heat. Our 5th wheel came with an eletric fireplace, and I underestimated how powerful that baby is! Now this only works if you are at a campsite that doesn’t meter for electric charges, but we were a few months in before we realized that the fireplaces was powerful enough to warm the whole place up instead of burning through propane.

5. Not having a move in buffer. We were at the mercy of the dealership we purchased the RV from, but I still wish we had a way to plan this better. Our RV was delivered to the front of our rental home at 3 pm on Tuesday afternoon, and we had to be out by the end of the day on Thursday. It was not a pretty move out, and we spent SO much in gas going back and forth from the campground 45 minutes away to get everything ung out.