Picked up our new home and 1st docking

Friday:  Last day in the Shack

We spent the day getting ready for our trip to the RV dealer in Shoemakersville PA. on Saturday morning.  I made sure that the truck tires were the correct pressures and the monitoring system was working.  This has been a long process as finding a place with high enough air pressure has been less than convenient to say the least.  At the last minute the drivers front tire valve stem dill valve was too far recessed to activate the monitor sensor.  Our neighbor helped out with a tool to adjust the dill valve so it would work.

Patty and I got out the suit cases and assorted bags to fill for our trip to get the RV in the morning.  We were not going to move everything, just enough so we would have some stuff to set up camp for the first time at our friends, Cindy and Robs, house in Keyport NJ.  The main things to get were the daily drugs, coffee and the coffee pot, and change of clothes.  We will go back to the shack on Monday to get the remaining items.

Our Shack mates/friends Tom and Michele arrived early evening to start our final night.  They made us our favorite food, a fantastic dinner of king crab legs.  They were delicious!  Thanks Tom and Michele. The plan was to go to sleep early so we could get up rested and early, 4:30 am on Saturday.   We were too excited and it was, our last night in the Shack.  After dinner we sat, talked, and drank wine for way, way, too long!  I think I got 4 hours of restless sleep. 

Saturday:  The start of our RV life

Big day!  4:45 am we are up and getting the coffee ready.  So are Tom and Michele to see us off.  They really are good friends.  Most stuff was already packed, just needed to get the last minute stuff like the coffee pot and computers.  We did our hugs and said goodbye and we were off to our new home!

We arrived at 8:00 am and ready for our inspection and tour of the RV.  The tour/inspection took about 4 hours.  I was pretty happy that I knew most everything from my years of research.  Still, nothing like seeing it yourself.  The big challenges will come when we actually doing it by ourselves.  The inspection showed us that the RV doesn’t come with much in the way of essential accessories, like water and sewer hoses, electrical adaptors, and wheel chocks.

At around 11:30 we were ready to hook up the truck for the first time.   This is the stuff that I could not really research, we were now moving to brand new experiences.  We tried first to hook up to the RV while it was still inside the work area, however, the truck was too high to couple to in and the ceiling was too low to raise the RV.  So they coupled up a tow vehicle to the RV and put it in the back parking lot.  

Moving our Sanibel to the back lot

Here it comes around the corner

Getting it ready for me to hitch up to it for the first time

It took several attempts to get the RV to hitch to the truck as the hitch was brand new and not worn in.  Finally we got hitched and we were ready to go.  

Finally got it hitched!

Here it is ready to head east to NJ

First, need to make the final payments, get the title, and purchase the stuff we need that the RV did not come with.  We added a water pressure regulator, 10 feet of extra sewer hose for a total of 25 feet, 30 foot 50 amp extension cable for a total of 55 feet, and adapters for 30 amp and 15 amp electrical service connections.  Oh, one last thing, Patty got extendable marshmallow forks.  All for a grand total of over $300 for essential accessories!  Now we are ready to take the RV  120 miles to our first camp spot.

The trip was fairly uneventful, thankfully!  We went from PA state road 61 to I78 to I287 in NJ and then to the Garden state parkway to exit 117a.  A few thing stood out though.  First was the relative ease of pulling the RV.  The truck actually rides and handles better.  However, I was surprised that the truck really does a lot of work going up long hills.  I didn’t think it would rev as high as it did with almost full turbo boost.  I was maintaining a 65mph highway speed though.  The other interesting thing was that people would actually give me room to change lanes, even in NJ!

Now for the real test and one that I didn’t think would be as hard as it was, backing in to the camp site, in this case a driveway.  This site is actually a very forgiving site with a wide road in front and nothing overhead.  Even with this easy site, It took us about an hour to accomplish the feat!  I learned a few things but not enough yet.  This will be very embarrassing to do with an audience!

I think we did good for the first time parking it

No room left in the driveway, need to park in the street

We have a great view from  of the back yard

We got the electrical and water hooked up the slides out and the AC on.  All good.  We were exhausted!  We ordered out for a strombolie and watched the olimpics until 9pm and then went to bed.  We slept like dead logs for 10 hours. All is good!

Stay tuned!