a nomad’s life isn’t all fun and games, part 1
We’ve been driving to a new destination every week since Christmastime. In that time, we’ve already accumulated quite a bit of practice at fixing things. It seems that owning an RV is kind of like owning an old house: there’s always something going wrong.
I believe that the majority of our trailer problems aren’t because our trailer is a PoS (no matter what we may curse at it while we’re wielding tools at it). Even the nicest trailers also on tour with us seem to be falling apart at nearly the same rate as ours. Something called a “recreational vehicle” just isn’t meant to be used 48 weeks of the year, but we hitch and unhitch our trailer twice a week, every week. Compare that to the 3-10 times, max, the average RV trailer gets taken out for a spin. We bought our trailer from another circus family that left the tour, so our rig has quite a few miles on it and an unknown amount of jury-rigging. We’re lucky the wheels don’t fall off.
If you’re thinking of taking up RVing full time (or even just for little trips), it’s worth knowing how to fix as much as you can with your own two hands. In the six or so weeks we’ve been traveling, we’ve already had the following issues (and if we’d known better, we could have prevented some of them):
- we found and flushed a grey pipe clog (prevent by catching all hair in the shower with a wire basket….stoopid post-partum hair loss…) Oh, and no Drano or Liquid Plumr in your greywater (runoff from the shower, kitchen sink, and bathroom sink) tank, unless you want to replace all plastic in your trailer’s innards.
- we replaced a blown out tire (be super-wary of fluctuations in temperature. Barely 50F in Savannah turned into 85F+ on I-10, en route to Tallahassee, thus causing our trailer tire to be completely and utterly destroyed!)
- we almost poisoned ourselves by being thisclose to filling our trailer’s fresh water tank and using it…luckily we noticed the warning that said “sanitize your tank before using”. Eek.
- we’ve dropped the trailer onto the bed of the truck. Apparently everyone who owns a fifth wheel does this at least once. I’m pretty sure this happened by hitting a couple rather large potholes at a very slow speed, and obviously we hadn’t quite hitched up correctly. It took a $100 visit from a giant wrecker to lift up the trailer onto the truck again. Lesson: quadruple check your hitch.
- we’ve killed the trailer battery by leaving the furnace on overnight and then being unable to bring in the slideout or lift up the trailer legs to hitch the next morning. We had to learn the hard way that the truck’s electronic hitch to the trailer does a shitty job of recharging the battery. Lesson: if you don’t own a generator and will be without power hookup overnight regularly, get yourself a second trailer battery and trade off charging them when you’re plugged into the grid.
- the front legs on our trailer have…issues. We’ve gotten help from various circus folks who are adept at fixing things, but I believe new legs are the only solution. We did not unhitch the truck for a good week and a half because of this problem.
- we forgot to rehook the trailer electrical plug to the truck and dragged it on the road for 100 miles. It looked like this when we arrived:
I learned how to splice wires together and reattached a new one myself. It was probably one of my proudest moments!
There are of course other odds and ends in the trailer that need attention in the coming weeks: replacing the kitchen faucet, clearing an inexplicably blocked floor vent, repairing completely f*cked-up drawer slides, figuring out where the grey tank leak is coming from, etc. etc. etc. I’m coming to realize that only a brand-new trailer should be considered in “turnkey” condition!
Don’t get the wrong idea…we are loving our new lifestyle. It’s just keeping us a little busier than we expected.
