Where has the time gone

Two years ago (04/04/11) we accepted an offer on our house, the final hurdle in our plans to live full-time in the RV.  Sitting here now it's hard to believe it's been a full 2 years since then. It seems so long and yet has flown by so quickly.

So what have we learned?  For starters, that we should only travel with 1 vehicle and trailer - you may remember we started off with 2 vehicles and 2 trailers: the pickup towing the 5th wheel trailer and the SUV towing the utility trailer.  While the utility trailer has been great for garaging the motorcycles, the financial strain having to buy fuel for both vehicles, as well as the physical strain with both of us having to drive identical trips was wearing on us.

One year after we started fulltiming, we decided to get rid of the SUV and to leave the utility trailer and motorcycles with friends while we traveled.  Nowadays we talk about getting a toyhauler to eliminate the necessity of leaving the motorcycles behind and free us from the utility trailer.  Based on what we've seen from various RV manufacturers, that plan is sometime in the future.

Another biggie we wish we had done from the get go was the air bag hitch in the truck for the trailer, thereby having much less bouncing between the rig as we drive down the road (we did swap to an air bag hitch after one year).  Also there's the desire for a rear bumper on the RV so we could put a bike rack on that instead of carrying the bikes strapped to the RV ladder.

We joined one discount RVing club when we first started camping, but would have joined another one sooner if we had really looked at how much we were going to travel.  Good Sam has been a good 10% discount at almost every RV park we've stayed at, but Passport America is even better at 50% off the regular price.  Granted the rules for Passport are more rigid and change from campground to campground (blackout days, # of days, specific sites, etc).  Still, any savings we can find while traveling are appreciated. Getting life memberships in these two clubs was smart also - we recouped those expenses within 1 month of travel.

When camped at an RV park with only 30 amps, we've quickly learned to NOT run the a/c and coffee pot and/or microwave all at the same time.  We've also learned to locate the breaker for our site within the campground if it's not right on our electric post.

Less obvious things we've learned: half the items we've packed in the RV are still "packed", we don't need / wear all the clothes we brought; there's not much room for personal decorations - what open wall space we have get covered when the slide rooms come in so nothing can be placed there permanently and hardly any shelves to display mementos; how to build a decent campfire (do not stack wood and kindling in a heavy pile, rather form a teepee shape), and with the fire, how to cook a decent frozen pizza over a campfire; you can never have enough pieces of wood in various lengths and thicknesses to use for leveling blocks. Pullthru RV sites are much easier to maneuver on than backins, and cement pads are better than sand or grass sites.