Ok, so you’d think wed learn our lesson by now and not try to do a lot in one day … Ya.
After a week of being at the RV repair shop, we were more than ready to hit the road. We’d been told that everything would be done by Monday, after thinking it’s all be done the previous Thursday – all we had left was the trim work and the cooktop.
Unfortunately, our cooktop hadn’t been delivered yet, but was due at some point on Monday. Of course, it didn’t arrive until 2p. As promised, it installed quickly and by 3p we were all set.
However, while I thought this meant we could just go, it didn’t. Apparently, we still had to dump our tanks, hook up the car, and refill our propane tanks.
This happened to coincide with the kids naptime and both were melting down. Mini-man desperately wanted his daddy, but Damon had been busy all morning trying to get us ready to leave – something mini-man didn’t understand.
At this point, I was very unhappy with the repair shop. While they were nice and did a nice job repairing everything, not once did they give us a time estimate. They just kept saying it would get done. What really got me was we asked them to order everything ahead of time so it was ready. They didn’t, stating it would only take a day for everything to arrive. Instead, our cooktop took a week and we waited most of the last day for it to be delivered. If they’d ordered when we asked, the delay wouldn’t have happened.
By 4p, we finally hit the road but we didn’t finish our prep work for the inside of the RV. On our first big turn, the fridge door came flying open and food spilled out. Damon stopped to fix it since I’d finally gotten the kids down for naps.
You’d think it be smooth sailing at this point. Unfortunately not. The kids naps last only 30 minutes and both were very cranky for the rest of the trip, which was hard on me since I was going on very little sleep at this point.
Then, as we’re driving, the bunk above the drivers area slowly starts to fall down. We had to stop several times to raise it back up. We later learned we had too much weight on it.
Then, at about 8:30p, we pulled into our campground. We we’re all tired and hungry but we needed to hookup, cook dinner (unfortunately we were 40 minutes from the closest take-out place), and wind down the kids for bed.
What a day! I was more than happy to get to be. And we did learn a few lessons from our first trip
- We cannot start this late in the day. We need time to set up, play with kids, and eat.
- We tried to do too much in one day – repairs, breakdown, driving, and setups is too much for one day
- Be firmer with repair shop on time expectations.
- It’s much harder to manage both kids at once by myself. In the suburban, Damon could help, at times, with mini-man.
Heartswell Adventures 