While most RV owners were getting their rigs ready for their first camping trip this spring, we were waiting impatiently at home. You may recall that shortly after we purchased our trailer in Texas and brought her home to Colorado, our trailer got stolen, damaged, and then abandoned in the middle of a snowy intersection about a mile away from our home. It took nearly a month for our insurance to arrange for our trailer to get picked up and taken to the dealer for a repair. Then another month before we could pick her up.
The dealer did a beautiful job replacing the damaged coupler on the hitch and replaced the jack that the towing company had damaged pulling the trailer onto the flatbed. We decided to forgo parking our trailer in the lot of our apartment complex, from where it had been stolen, and found a gated storage lot about 10 minutes from home.
The lot will cost us just over $100 a month, but if all goes well, it will only be there for seven months until we hit the road full-time. We got the trailer back just before Memorial Day, but by that time it was too late to get any campgrounds for the long weekend. So instead, we decided to focus our time on making a few upgrades.
First, we swapped out the lousy thin RV mattress with a new Casper mattress. It came rolled up in plastic, and somehow we managed to unroll it backwards. So we had to rotate the thick, heavy queen mattress inside the trailer. And since our spot in the storage lot was barely wider than our trailer, we had to do so with the slide in.
We had also decided to put in a backsplash around the oven and the bathroom sink. We thought about putting one around the kitchen sink, but with two windows nearby, it would have taken a ton of precision cutting to get that done.
We purchased some adhesive sheets of subway tile and added some Gorilla Glue spray adhesive to give it extra strength. It was tough lining up the tiles around the stove, but the end result wasn’t too bad. We haven’t done the bathroom yet, but at least now we’ve got the general hang of it.
Then I installed a rear view camera on the back of the trailer. Mrs. 123 borrowed a six-foot step ladder from the library where she works. I got the camera connected to the power cord, and screwed everything in place, but the monitor wasn’t picking the wireless signal from the camera. Unsure what was wrong, I consulted the experts of all experts: YouTube. Sure enough, I found a video showing the install and found out that I had to turn the running lights of the truck on, to power the camera.
We’ve also started acquiring bins of various sizes and shapes to store our belongings in the various cabinets of the trailer. We found small plastic baskets that lined up neatly in the medicine cabinet. Some larger plastic bins for the back of the closets, and some nifty clear drawers that would fit in front.
Our next adventure will be a single overnight shakedown trip at a county campground just a few miles from home. We need to dewinterize the trailer, flushing all the antifreeze from the plumbing system, but we need to connect to a water supply to do that. We’ll try to do that quickly at the dump station when we first arrive.
We also needed to refill our propane tanks. On our return trip from purchasing the trailer in Texas, we had spent a frigid night at a visitor center in Amarillo, only to have the heat go out in the middle of the night. I had assumed that the dealer hadn’t filled the propane tanks as promised. So we just got in the truck and drove home without investigating further.
This week, in preparation for our shakedown trip, I removed the propane tanks to take them to get filled. They seemed surprisingly heavy. Sure enough, one of the tanks was ¾ full and the other was completely full.
We’re not quite sure exactly what happened on that chilly night in Amarillo. We asked in some Facebook groups, and learned that it might have been the battery that had gone low and didn’t have enough voltage to power the furnace fan. I’ve also read that in cold weather, regulators can actually freeze up. Regardless, we’ll try to reconnect the tanks this weekend and see if everything works.
We have plans for our first real camping trip in mid-June, driving about four hours west to Dinosaur National Monument. Our camping adventures are just around the bend.
