There are plenty of people who decide they want to become full-time RVers and then spend a year researching and preparing to make sure they are well-equipped to handle life on the road. Not Reid and me.
Nope, we brought up the idea in casual conversation in January, took our first trip ever in an RV for my birthday weekend in March, bought an RV April 29th then got on the road first week of June. Whew!
Needless to say, we didn’t leave much room for the whole careful consideration, research, and planning thing. Our style is much more “just jump” than “look before you leap”, so we’ve done a fair bit of learning from our mistakes we’ve made since we didn’t know everything we shouldn’t be doing til after we’d done goofed.
And maybe, some of these things we’ve discovered might have been things we would have never known to research anyway, sometimes you just gotta learn as you go!
Our Sage, Sage Wisdom
- Don’t fill up your 79 gallon water tank right before a long drive – that’s 500 lbs of extra strain on your gas mileage, and trust me, our poor RV needs all the help it can get in the gas economy arena.
- You’d be surprised how many times you can lose the same item in one day even in such a small living space… especially something super important like, say, the RV keys before you’d made any copy of them. So, a) make sure you have two copies of your keys, and b) have a designated place for everything and always leave everything in its place!
- Always have your devices charging when you’re running the generator! May as well take advantage while enjoying the AC.
- When cooking bacon, use the burner most back under the hood, otherwise you’ll spend the whole time cooking fanning the smoke detector (at least if your RV is janky like ours).
- Don’t fill up your ice trays with water within 8-10 hours of driving, otherwise it won’t be frozen yet and will spill over everywhere.
- When potty-ing, take care to throw your TP directly into the middle of the toilet bowl, so you only have to use the least amount of water possible to flush it all down the tube.
- Speaking of the black water, for those of us who may have indulged in such guilty pleasures previously, no mo’ peeing in the shower… otherwise you’d be mixing black into the grey tank!
- When driving, you want to use your sideview mirrors to look along the back wheel and edge of the RV and make sure you’re within the lines. When your passenger sideview mirror falls off, and the insurance takes a week to get back to you about your claim, just hug the left line and have your passenger stick their head out the window to check before changing lanes to the right!
- Prepay inside at the gas station, to avoid having to go inside to pay twice after the pump’s $100 limit 😅
[[I’ll add to this as we remember and discover more!]]
