Every RVer has a first travel day story. This is ours, and we're telling it with all the mistakes left in, because the polished versions of this hobby on the internet nearly convinced us we were the only ones failing this hard. The mission was simple: drive our Brinkley Model Z 3515 about 300 miles to drop it off for a solar and battery install. The mission was not simple.
Watch the full video on YouTube to see every mistake as it happened.
Packing up a house that moves
Our first mistake happened before we turned a key. Packing an RV for travel means imagining every cabinet during a hard brake, and we clearly lacked imagination. We spent hours securing, stowing, and second-guessing, and we still got it wrong in ways we'd discover at highway speed. There's no checklist you can download that replaces the education of hearing your kitchen rearrange itself behind you.
Hitching up while terrified
Hitching a 15,000-pound fifth wheel to a truck for one of the first times is a two-person operation where both people are pretending to be calmer than they are. We got it connected, checked everything three times, and pulled out of the lot feeling like astronauts. That feeling lasted exactly 14 miles.
Mile 14, and mile 14.01
At mile 14 we stopped and discovered what our packing job had missed: dishes had left their cupboards and not survived the trip. We cleaned up, adjusted, and got moving again, at which point the day immediately escalated. Tight urban streets, an unplanned detour, and a stop sign that ended up closer to our rig than any stop sign should ever be. Nobody was hurt and the damage was minor, but the sound a fifth wheel makes when it disagrees with street furniture is one we won't forget.
Our first dump station was a squeeze
Somewhere in the middle of all this we also had to dump our tanks for the first time, and the closest option was a small state park with roads built for cars towing canoes, not 40-foot fifth wheels. Threading the rig through those lanes to reach the dump station was its own workout, and then we got to learn the sewer hose routine for the first time with an audience of day-trippers. It went about as gracefully as you'd expect. It also went fine, which is the thing about most scary RV firsts.
The dead end
The grand finale was a dead end. Not a metaphor: an actual road that stopped, with our truck and trailer on it, requiring the kind of multi-point turnaround that ages you. By the time we finally delivered the rig for its solar install, we'd been stressed for roughly ten consecutive hours and were asking each other, half joking, whether we were traumatized.
What mile zero taught us
Here's what we'd tell anyone about to take their first travel day: it will go worse than you planned and better than it felt. Everything that went wrong that day had a fix, from packing foam between the dishes to routing apps that know our height, and none of it made us want to quit. We laugh at this footage now. That took a few weeks.
Watch the whole disaster, stop sign 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.