RV Musings

We bought our trailer last summer and had only a one week trip to test things out.  This trip, 3 weeks long gave us a much more detailed look at the RV lifestyle.  We stayed in RV parks this trip which gave us power, water and sewer connections.  We ran the gamut in temperatures going from snowy passes to 27C temps in Moab.

We had one morning where our water lines almost froze; only a small trickle greeted me when I went to make our morning coffee.  Our unit is winter ready with double glazed windows and insulation.  The furnace kept up without a problem and in many cases we just used a ceramic heater.  On the day it was hot we didn't even have to turn on the air conditioning as the trailer stayed quite comfortable.

We have plenty of storage and in fact had a lot more room than we needed.  Even with the stuff we bought and all the rocks that Lucy- I mean Laura, collected.

We had high head winds and hills to climb, the highest passes were Conners and Sacramento Passes at well over 7000 feet, Conners is 7280 I believe.  The truck pulled well and not once did I have to put the pedal to the metal.  The 6 speed transmission shifted well with the Tow/Haul button selected.  I did have to manually select- or force- the transmission into a lower gear on some hills.  Downhills were no problem with the transmission downshifting and holding speeds to acceptable limits.  The trailer brakes were easy to adjust and performed smoothly.

Fuel consumption, as I've mentioned earlier, ranged from 27 L/100km while fighting head winds and steep grades to finally average out to 21 L/100km once the winds dropped off and we had some downhill runs.  Cabbage Hill outside Pendelton, Oregon was a 10 km downhill run!  We climbed this on our way south with 90km headwinds, no wonder we burned a lot of fuel then!

So, a trip average of 21 is slightly better than I was hoping for.  A fully loaded trailer including winter safety equipment like tire and tow chains means that most of our trips will be better in terms of fuel consumption.

Living for three weeks in the trailer was comfortable and because of the slide gave adequate room and a comfortable living space.  I'm still trying to figure out how to make a more convenient computer station rather than using the table.  Because of photo downloading and editing this is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome.

As a practice run for longer retirement trips I would call our choice in this trailer a resounding success.

I've got a lot more editing to do but here's a couple more shots of the Colorado River in the Moab area.

This is a pedestrian/cycle bridge on one of the many cycling paths in the Moab area.  I liked how the rust blends with the surrounding canyon walls.