An Exhausting Day and A Blown-Up Couch!

An Exhausting Day and A Blown-Up Couch!

We were so excited to officially begin our full-time RV lifestyle! We always knew there would be hiccups along the way, both because we had never even stayed overnight in an RV before and because we had purchased a travel trailer that was 15 years old. We knew we would be tired at the end of our first day, but we never imagined how exhausted we would truly be!

The video above is our first "official" YouTube episode documenting our new lifestyle, and it shows how minimalistic we were planning to live. When we decided to begin this crazy RV life of ours, we decided that we would give up nearly everything we owned... which really wasn't much, considering that we had been living in an apartment that was about 500 square feet, and that we were living a pretty minimalistic life anyway. 

We began by purchasing an inflatable... yes, inflatable... couch and mattress to get us by until we figured out what would work in our small space. These worked just fine until a) the first real cold (by Florida standards) night hit, and b) Bailey decided to jump straight from our bed onto the couch. 

Let's just say right now that air mattresses offer zero insulating properties. Zilch. Nada. And that when the said mattress is sitting on top of a plywood slab that also has nothing insulating beneath it, well... you get the idea. Brrrr! Sigh. Time to shop for a new mattress... something we had been planning on for the New Year's Day sales. Oh, well.

Let's also say right now that a dog's toenails will puncture an inflatable couch. Easily. Yes, we knew that. We also usually kept the couch covered with a blanket to protect it. For some reason... probably because we were using it on the previous cold night... that blanket wasn't on the couch when Bailey decided to play parkour and jump directly from our bed onto the couch. We instantly heard the hiss of air from the puncture wounds. Sigh. Time to shop for a new couch. In the meantime, we were thankful that the couch had two separate air bladders so we could "make it work" until we could find a new one.

Now, for the problems that actually occurred on Moving Day. 

First, the shop that was making some repairs on our trailer and getting it ready for us installed the hitch incorrectly... more on that later. They also didn't insert the weight distribution bars correctly, which we discovered as we were pulling out of their lot onto the (thankfully) small road and one of the bars actually fell off and onto the pavement with a loud clang (again, thankfully we heard it and it was on a road that wasn't busy).

Second, the seven-pin connector wasn't inserted tightly into the truck. We kept getting an error on the lights and couldn't figure out why. We never received a "disconnected" signal, so we assumed it was a wiring issue... which was actually not a bad assumption (again, more on that later). We were almost to our destination when we finally got the dashboard notification that the plug was disconnected. We were able to pull over immediately to check it. Turns out, the plug must have been disconnected for quite a while, because the road had completely destroyed it. Sigh. 

Something we learned, and would continue to learn, from these and future events? If you want something done right, do them yourself. In more than three years of owning this trailer, we have completed all repairs ourselves since then. Other than having Discount Tire... who we love, by the way!... install new tires on Bandit (our name for the trailer), we have done all the work ourselves. Trust me when I say it has been a definite learning curve. 

Do we regret our lifestyle change? Follow along here on the blog and on our YouTube channel to find out!