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What is this?
If you come to this website, you might be wondering what is going on here. Well first off, welcome to my site. It is a collection of stuff about two primary things, our travels in our RV and about my Role-playing Game hobby, which at this point I am attempting to do some stuff while we traveling.
Last 5 Travel Journal Entries
Extra Water
If you are going to extend stay somewhere, one thing for sure you need to do is have extra fresh water for your RV. This is certainly something we thought about before we started doing the RV full time.
As the wife puts it, “you can never have enough water”. I agree. Most RVs tend to have small water tanks. I think only a few Toy Hauler RVs have tanks larger than say 50 Gallons of Fresh Water. While I have no idea what others usage is, ours is about 8-10 gallons of Fresh a day between food prep, showers, cleaning, and toilet. We don't use our fresh water tank drinking water, for us that water is carried in separate 5 gallon jugs. With our 45 gallon fresh water tank, the water lasts about 4-5 days depending. This means if we want to stay a week or longer, we need more water.
In our current configuration, that problem is solved by having two 55 gallon fresh water barrels in the back of the truck. We get maybe 50 gallons in each barrels, so we fill up completely we have about 140 or gallons of fresh water that we carry. That will roughly last us 14 days (unless we do laundry). We have a water transfer pump that we use to pump the water out of the barrels into our 45 gallon holding tank. The only downside to the pump of course is that uses power to run it, so I make sure we only do a transfer during the day when either there is full sun or we are running the generator.
There are of course other ways to do this besides the barrels and the pump. I seen some people just carry a bunch of 5 gallon just that they use to fill the fresh water tank. Or could have your extra water tank could have a valve at the bottom of the tank so gravity does the work to empty it and fill your tank. No matter which way you go, I would certainly recommend carrying at least some extra water, even if you don't think you will be out as long as you think because you never know how much water you will really need or if you will be forced to stay somewhere an extra day or two.
Flat Tire
It's hard to believe but we got a flat tire the other day. We had made an overnight stop at a rest area. In the morning we found a tire on the trailer to be flat. Luckily the wife had us get a spare tire. Still it sucks. We found a piece of metal in the tire. Must of ran over it and it slowly leaked out over the night.
Today, we are on our way to a tire shop, to see what our options are for it. While not a fan of a plug, it would be an easy fix and we would just have that for repair. Otherwise we have to replace the tire and it is hard to say if the shop will even have that tire size on hand. With all the weird supply chain issues, a lot of tires have to be ordered and are about one week out. So we will just have to wait and see. I will update when I have more information.
Update : We were able to get the tired patched up. So that is at least a good thing.
Solar Panel Reconfigured
I am not sure where to start this one. Seems we had nothing but issues with rack system that we mounted the solar panels on. No matter what we did, the screws kept breaking. We spent an afternoon replacing them in a Home Depot parking lot, only to have the break after a test drive down the road. The road was not rough at all.
So we made the decision to take the whole thing down and we ended up with 600 watts of panels in the bed of the truck for now. I have no idea if that is going to be enough when we stop but for now, it seems to be working. Only future usage will tell us anything.
Broken Screws
One thing for sure, the rough roads in the forest of South of Prescott is not for the trailer. We went to try to find camping near Thumb Butte. To say the least, all the campsites were taken and the road we took around was really rough. It was not until the next day that we noticed that about half the screws holding the solar panel brackets on were broken.
We limped it to North Of Paulden. We managed to get some new screws in. The wife has to go out and get some more washers and screws so we can finish the repair. Needless to say we are going to have to watch them and see if we can get some less bumpy roads.
At this time, we think we are going to just write off all the sites south of Prescott. For whatever reason, they are always taken and even with the newer smaller RV, the sites are really small and hard to get into. I think they were all meant just for tent camping. Even then some of the spots, I do not think I would even want to do if I was only in a car and a tent.
Last 5 Trailer Conversion Entries
Waste Storage
One of the big things we have to think about for this conversion is waste tanks. We know that we want something to last a while.
One of the things I noticed about a lot of the trailer conversion I have seen is how many of them sort of exclude a shower and/or toilet.
If they have a toilet, then they do something like a cassette or compost toilet. Neither of those options were something the wife liked. If they had some sort of shower, a lot of them seem to just have a drain hole to the outside and no storage tank. That was not option for us either. While we do go places that you could drain somewhere outside, there will be places that we go that we can not.
So we have decided to install both a black and grey tank in our conversion. The trick is for the black tank, the toilet has to be over the black tank just like in normal travel trailer. And the next trick is going to how to install the tanks we did get. Right now the plan is to build a platform for the shower and toilet area and have the tank underneath that platform. Going to lose headroom doing that. I will have to sit down to shower but I should be able to manage.
The sink is the only place where we will have a separate small holding tank we can dump. We should be able to dump it either outside or in the shower or toilet.
Hopefully these plans will pan out. Will update in a future post.
Starting a Trailer Conversion
We have an old 5th Wheel RV that we have been using since May of this year. You can review our Travel Journal to see some of the places we been in the last six months.
In those travels, we came to one conclusion, the 5th wheel is just way too large for us. For us, it has some of the following shortcomings.
- Too Long to fit in some of the boondocking spots we wanted to go to.
- Tends to no like the rougher roads we use for boondocking. In some places we have bent our truck bed when the RV has touched it.
- A slide-out. We have found that we do not like it at all. One more thing to fail and if you wanted to discretely park somewhere overnight, you have to slide-out just a bit to acess the bedroom and bathroom area easily.
- Too much wasted storage space. Since we rarely slide-out all the way, the storage hidden by the slide becomes useless to us.
- Grey and Black Tanks too small.
- Stairs and more stairs. We did not like having to go up into the bedroom and bathroom via stairs. We like things on a single level.
We looked at small travel trailers and they pretty much had the following wrong for us.
- Really small Tanks for fresh and waste water.
- Bad layout
- limited cargo capability.
- really pricey for a new one
In the end, we decided that while it will be a lot of work, we will convert an enclosed cargo trailer to have the features we want. After some searching and looking, we found a 7×14 enclosed for sale. The person that had it, only used it a few times. It pretty much was brand new.
I will post more information about the conversion when we do more.