We Are Doing This! NOW?!

April thru June 2021

We sold our house in June of 2021 in hopes of hitting the road to explore all the United States had to offer. However, deciding just a few months prior in April to pull the trigger and not look back left us with a LOT to accomplish in a very short time. One of the first things to take care was actually acquiring a new 5th wheel to replace our 32′ bumper pull camper.

The bumper pull was sufficient for weekend warrior camping trip getaways, however would not do fit the bill for living in fulltime. The problem was, we were not the only ones in the country looking for RVs – and in conjunction the RV manufacturers were just beginning to pump out RVs to fill a 6 month backlog of orders. This spelled trouble for us trying to find a 5th wheel that met our checklist of must haves for a somewhat affordable price. Luckily we were able to find a 5th wheel with the floorplan we wanted, however it was in Beloit, Kansas – a 4+ hour drive away. We hopped in the truck that weekend and made the drive to look at our potential future home.

As most people who buy a new RV can attest to, you can’t walk on a lot and buy a new one and drive away with it that day. The dealer needs time to go through the RV from top to bottom to fix goodness who knows what – especially in today’s market where the manufacturers are pushing out RVs with low build quality, with stripped out screws, missing screws, etc – who knows what. So after finding out new 5th wheel, we drove home to prepare for bringing home the new baby. The first order of business was getting a 5th wheel hitch installed in the 3/4 ton pickup. Let’s just say it is just as difficult to find somebody available to work on RVs – or install anything for them – as it was to find an actual RV. That meant installing our own 5th wheel hitch within a week so we could make the return drive to pick up the 5th wheel.

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The following weekend we returned to Beloit, KS to pick up our baby and take it home. It sure makes the 32′ bumper pull look small.

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Now we just needed to wrap up selling the home, going through possessions to determine “to sell”, “to store” and “to go with us”, having an estate sale, actually put items in storage and get the 5th wheel loaded and ready to hit the road. Our advice to anybody else planning to do something similar – start this process a LOT earlier – like a year in advance if possible. When you start packing items in your 5th wheel you will need plenty of time to figure out where things fit, what will not fit, and what is not as important to take as you think at first.

Once we finished the estate sale and sold the house, we were still quite not ready to hit the road yet. We decided to camp at Clinton Lake in Lawrence, Kansas for just over a week to take care of business with the house/other things in Shawnee, KS and say farewells to some friends and prepare the trip ahead. This stayover at the state park gave us time to get the 5th wheel organized, some R&R – and thankfully our first real rain since picking up the 5th wheel. It is a good thing we received rain like we did before hitting the road, the rain exposed a major leak in the front window of the 5th wheel. We already were planning to take I70 through Salina, so luckily we were able to take a small detour off of the interstate to stop in Beloit for the dealer to fix window leak. The leak is fixed – let the adventures begin!!