After six weeks in Brazil we finally got back to the Brinkley, and the welcome committee was not what we ordered. Deer in the field, chipmunks on the picnic table, all very charming. Then we opened the rig and found droppings on the mats, chew marks where chew marks should not be, and the unmistakable evidence that someone had been living in our house while we were living in Fabiola's.
Watch the full video on YouTube.
The status check
Our first job back was the standard post-storage inspection: humidity, mold, anything that leaked or froze or died while we were gone. The DampRid had done its job and the rig itself came through storage fine. The problem was strictly the tenants. Within the first hour we had visual confirmation of an actual mouse, which changes the mission from "clean up and move in" to "this is war."
Following the evidence
Mice are honest in one way: they poop everywhere they go, so the droppings draw you a map. Ours led through the main living area, into cabinets, and down into the pass-through storage bay, which turned out to be the transit hub of the whole operation. Day two we found more droppings in places we'd already cleaned, which is the demoralizing part of mouse hunting. Cleaning isn't progress. It just resets the map.
Testing every trap and bait we could find
Rather than guess, we bought basically everything: classic snap traps, glue traps, and an ultrasonic repeller, plus a range of baits to see what our particular mice actually wanted. We spread them through the rig and the storage bays and checked results each morning like a very grim advent calendar. By day four we had real data. Some placements produced immediately, others sat untouched no matter what we baited them with, and the pattern said more about location than about bait. Traps on the travel routes (along walls, in the pass-through, near the entry evidence) did the work. Traps in open floor space were furniture.
We'll be honest about the ultrasonic repeller: we installed it, and we're reserving judgment. The reviews online swing between miracle and myth, and four days isn't enough to know which camp we're in. We'll report back.
The underbelly investigation
Killing the mice you have is half the job. The other half is figuring out how they got in, so we went under the rig and into the underbelly looking for entry points. On a modern fifth wheel there are more candidates than you'd hope: gaps around the slide mechanisms, penetrations where plumbing and wiring pass through, and corners of the underbelly material that don't seal tight. Steel wool and sealant went into everything we found. Whether we found them all is a question the next few weeks will answer, and we'd rather find out now than during a hard freeze.
If you've fought mice in an RV, and the comments suggest most of you have, we genuinely want your tips: favorite baits, trap placement, entry points you've found on Brinkley rigs specifically. We read everything, and we'll share results in a follow-up video, including whether the traps-plus-sealing-plus-ultrasonic combination actually holds the line.
Watch the full four-day battle, droppings and all, on YouTube. We also send a short weekly newsletter about where we are and what broke this week. The signup form is on our newsletter page.