As readers of this blog will recognize, we’re planners – or at least Mr. 123 is. The plans for the first three years of RVing full-time have been years in the making. And despite minor hiccups and alternations, we’ve been able to stick to our plan and are now just a few short months from departing on the grand adventure.
But life has a way of sticking it to you once you get a little overconfident. That’s what we’ve experienced in the past two months.
Originally, our plan was to depart Denver at the end of the year, drive our trailer to Florida, then fly north to spend the holidays with our family. Then our RV road trip was due to start on Jan. 12.
Well, in the meantime, my mom’s health has degraded to the point where she can no longer live alone. While my siblings and I have been able to work together to manage her needs up to now, one of us was going to have to be here to help her transition into a new phase of life. Since I had the most flexibility when it comes to where I work and live, Mrs. 123 and I decided to relocate to my mother’s house in the suburbs of Philadelphia through the end of the year.
That meant we had to accelerate our plans to pack up our stuff in Denver, and move the trailer east. We had another last minute hiccup as we discovered the skylight over our shower was leaking. Fortunately, it was leaking into the shower, but it needed to be replaced. We learned that Grand Design had experienced a lot of problems with the skylights and had replaced a number of them on our model of trailer. Fortunately, Bernie and the good folks at Windish RV in Lakewood got those repairs done quickly.
In the end we had about a month to get things packed up. It was hard to believe how much crap we had accumulated in just four years in Colorado. We basically drove two car loads of stuff from our home in Oregon, and acquired a lot of cheap furniture either through Facebook marketplace or picking up stuff our neighbors left behind when moving.
We were able to sell most of the furniture, even a few things we had gotten for free. The rest of our belongings had to be divided between what we would need through the rest of the year in Philadelphia, things to go into the RV and stuff to leave in a small storage locker in Denver.
We had planned on leaving on Saturday, Aug. 19, but by noon on the 18th, we had liquidated or packed almost all of our things. We figured if we pushed hard, we could take care of the rest and leave Friday afternoon.
According to GoogleMaps, it would take about 26 hours to drive to my mother’s house. Of course, that assumed we would be driving the speed limit. We were keeping to under 60 miles per hour for the drive. For one, our tires are only rated to 65 mph. And second, the faster you drive dragging a giant square brick behind your truck, the worse your gas mileage.
The time estimate also didn’t account for the two hours we would lose by crossing into more easterly time zones. Getting three hours of driving in on Friday made a world of difference.
We logged a long, 12-hour driving day on Saturday, through brutal temperatures in Kansas. At one point, we had actually hit 116 degrees Fahrenheit.
The day also included a brief pit stop to get a small repair done. The back window of the camper shell on the back of our pickup truck got stuck. Fortunately, we found a camper shell dealer in Kansas that fixed it for us for $20.
We decided not to stay in our trailer on the trip to avoid the brutal summer heat, but also to avoid wasting time setting up and breaking down our campground each day. Instead we stayed in hotels and with friends.
We finally made it to Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon, and dropped off the trailer at my brother’s house. The next day we came back and unpacked most of the things in the trailer.
We had arranged to leave the trailer at my friend’s property in Delaware until December. We decided to winterize now, so we wouldn’t have to move it again until we were ready to depart on our RV journey.
He had a spot where we could park it, but it involved backing up the trailer about 50 feet up his driveway, and then tucking it into the corner of his driveway. It took a few attempts but in the end we finally got it in a reasonable position. We said goodbye to our trailer knowing the next time we’d see it, we’d be leaving for our big trip.
So now we’ve got to survive four months. I’ll continue working my full-time job and helping to take care of my mom, while we clean out my mom’s house and prepare her to move either to a nursing home or to my brother’s place. I’m not going to lie, it’s going to be tough. Being a caregiver is exhausting work and my mother frequently wakes up in the middle of the night confused about where she is. We’ll be in survival mode for the next four months, but we’ve got a giant reward waiting for us at the end of the year: we’ll finally be ready to live our dreams on the road.
