You now own an RV!

For the next week we pour over maps and AAA Triptiks and download half a dozen apps to figure out what the first leg of our tip should look like.  Much more on that later. Finally we drive down to Reno (it is really driving down from our house at 7,260' to ab
out 4,800' in Reno) to get checked out on how the RV works, where all the switches are, how to fill stuff up and empty it and so forth.

Lesson 1: RV's are complicated. Even an experienced technician trying to tell you everything about the RV will miss really important stuff. Also the owner's manual (all ten of them) is a really hard and slow way to figure this stuff out. (more on this soon)

Lesson 2: The week between when you buy the RV and when you take possession is a time when things can go wrong and you might not notice or even be sure when they happened. Take a lot of pictures when you put the deposit down and pretend it's a house in escrow, which it sort of is...   Especially on a used vehicle sold as is. You might not remember exactly what "as was" looked like a week later. Just saying.

Now we have the as yet to be named beast and we drive it back up the mountain to home.  There are now four days until departure.

We start packing, friends and neighbors tour, and we get great advice from friends who go to Michigan every year with a fifth wheel. They have a log of how much progress they make every day and what they spend on gas and where they stay.  They provide two super important pieces of information. 

1. You won't get nearly as far every day as you think you will. Shoot for about 5 hours a day, with occasional big pushes where you don't even try to cook. 

2. You should have a surge protector (they lent us theirs, we ordered a replacement for them).

Somewhere the second day we start the generator and there is no power. We try and plug in the 15 amp line and blow the breakers in the house.  Calls to the RV place do not generate an answer, so we drive it down the the store, and are told 2 minutes after arriving, "oh, you have to plug the 30 amp cord into this plug (that we didn't tell you what it was for even when you asked, ooops)."  On the way down one of the covers for the water heater blew off. Order the part would take weeks, and we are leaving the next day.

Lesson 3: Repairs, if available, take for ever. (stay tuned for more examples).

Packing continues.  Blissfully we had a vacation house that we switched from short term to full time renting, and we pretty much had a set of everything we could want all set to go. Stephanie ordered one set of light unbreakable(ish) dishes and we bought a few RV things like leveling blocks, but that was it.