Going full-time is a pretty big commitment. And while some people jump in and spend their first night camping the day they depart for full-timing, we wanted to make sure we’d enjoy the lifestyle. So last year, we decided to rent a trailer for a two-week vacation in southwest Colorado. We found a lightweight trailer, a 2018 Keystone Springdale, for rent just outside of Denver for about $100 a night. With a dry weight of 3,225 it was well within the limits of our truck.
Booking through the RVShare website was pretty easy and the owner was responsive to all of our questions ahead of time. He had purchased a new RV and instead of trading in his old one, decided to rent it out instead. When we arrived, he walked us through how all the systems worked, helped us hitch the trailer up to our truck and told us how to get to the highway without navigating the tight turns on the road we had driven in on.
At first towing was nerve-wracking. I spent half the time looking in my rearview mirror to make sure the trailer was still there. I’m not sure what I would have done if I looked back and didn’t see it, but newbies are gonna newbie. I could have just waited till we reached a hill, because the truck would have told me herself she wasn’t all that happy.
At our first restroom break I took this photo of the truck and trailer. As you can see, the truck was sagging majorly from the weight of the hitch. It didn’t help that we had all of our supplies for a two week trip in the back of the truck as well. Later, I moved much of the cargo from the truck to the trailer and that helped with the sagging. We would have benefitted from a weight-distribution hitch, but that wasn’t part of the package, so we towed it for two weeks with just a simple ball hitch.
Within an hour, the first problem emerged. The owner hadn’t locked one of the windows in the trailer, and the arm that pushes the window out at the bottom of the pane had broken off. I could see the window and the blinds flapping as we barreled down a two-lane highway. It took a good 15 minutes for me to find a safe place to pull-over and check on the window. I tried taping the window shut with some tape from our first aid kit, but it was so old and dry, it wouldn’t keep the window from flapping. Another 20 miles down the road, we stopped at a Dollar Store and bought a roll of duct tape and taped the window shut. We messaged the owner to let him know what had happened, but we didn’t feel like the issue was going to affect our trip.
Our first destination was Mesa Verde National Park in southwestern Colorado, about a 6 hour trip according to Google maps. We broke the trip in two, stopping along the way at the Woods and River RV Park in Del Norte. We booked pull-through, full hookup sites for the entire trip – no sense in struggling with backing up or boondocking our first time out. In Del Norte, we didn’t even unhook the truck.
After an uneventful overnight, we continued to Mesa Verde, staying a full week at the Ancient Cedars Mesa campground, just opposite the entrance to the national park. For the rest of the week, we left the trailer in its spot, taking day trips to Mesa Verde, Telluride, the Hovenweep National Monument, the Four Corners area, Ouray and the Million Dollar Highway.
The next week we hitched up the trailer again and drove it to Valley Sunset RV Ranch in Delta. From that base camp, we visited the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the Colorado National Monument, and Grand Mesa. The scenery at all of those sites is just spectacular.
During the second week, another problem emerged with our rented trailer. The owner of the park knocked on our door to tell us we had a leak below the trailer. We had no idea why the trailer was leaking or how to solve it. A sniff test suggested the water was fresh, not from the black or gray water tanks. And when we shut off the water supply to the trailer, the leak subsided. We kept the water shut off as much as possible, but as a temporary solution, bought a plastic bucket and placed it under the drip so we could still have water when we needed it.
Having two maintenance issues on our first trip was probably a good preview of what full-timing will be like. We’ve read that towing an RV is like subjecting your home to a small earthquake. Things will break, things will go wrong. Obviously we weren’t going to try to fix these issues ourselves in a rented trailer, but we found temporary solutions so they wouldn’t derail our vacation.
Other than that, we had a blast. We loved eating all of our meals outdoors. We met some lovely people that shared their RV wisdom with us. We even ran into a couple camping in the very model trailer we were planning to buy. We know full-timing won’t be a vacation, but we were hooked. The grand adventure was still on.
