Author: areeb

Training Camp

We are now in Howe, Indiana, at the DRV Mobile Suites factory.  We are having some modifications made to our RV, (washer and dryer installed, cook top replaced with a full oven/range, slide toppers installed and a more comfortable mattress) and tending to a few minor service issues.  On the one hand, it’s not exactly what you envision when “going on the Great RV Adventure”, but it’s not all bad either.  The factory provides very nice full hook up RV parking spots in their parking lot.  So, we have full electricity, water and sewer conveniences in our RV while we are parked next to the toll road in a giant factory parking lot…..but there are patches of grass for Gerry and the other DRV Mobile Suites folks who are here for similar reasons are extremely nice and helpful.  We will be here until Thursday afternoon.

Ray and Cindy are parked next to us, they are from Illinois and helped us figure out our first full water hook up yesterday when we arrived.  In otherwords, when I was about to hook up the water fixture backwards, Ray kindly said, “how about you let me show you how to do that?”  And today Ray showed Steve how to tighten the lug nuts on the RV and truck to the right “torque”.  Rob had gone over this with Steve before we left, but a refresher course was needed.  Evidently these need to be checked after every trip and involve the use of an impact wrench.  For those of you who know us well, you will appreciate the humor in the words “torque”and “Steve” in the same sentence.  But, we are learning!

I toured the factory today and saw how they build these units and learned a lot. I am meeting with the service manager tomorrow to go over my LIST of questions which I’m sure will be the highlight of his week – but I figure I need to take advantage of all the resources while they are right here literally in my backyard.

I’m also using this waiting time to attempt to learn our new Rand McNally RV Navigation tool.  It allows us to program in our size, weight, height, etc so we don’t get onto roads we shouldn’t be on with our big rig, or with bridges that are too low.  Not turning out to be as easy as I had hoped it would be to learn how to use….so spending a lot of time figuring out our route for our next leg of the journey which will be to a campground in Minnesota.  Guy will be joining us there for the weekend and we are looking forward to that!

So I’m calling this little part of our journey our “training camp”.

The Journey Begins!

Dear Family and Friends:

We finally “launched” our journey – Tuesday, May 30, we departed Columbus at 5:30 pm.  A few weeks later than originally planned, but everything worked out just fine in the end.  We have sold our house, sold our car, our furniture and downsized almost all of our belongings into our new DRV Mobile Suites 5th wheel, towing with our new Dodge Ram 3500 dually diesel.  We have no experience with camping and have never owned a truck before, but that’s part of the adventure!

Our first night we drove to Toledo and stayed in a Walmart parking lot.  It was fairly noisy, with cars in and out of the parking lot, and several semi-trucks were parked there too.  But, it was easy and convenient for us on our first night.  We were a little nervous driving the “big rig” since we are so new to this, but Steve did a great job driving and we had no problems.  The next morning we found out we have a small electrical issue with the gfci outlets….suffice it to say that before now I had no idea what gfci outlets were but I do now!

I should mention we would not have made it out on the road without our friend Rob who Steve met at a gas station a couple of months back.  What a gem he has been, helping us with modifications and improvements to our truck, installing our hitch (after researching and finding the right hitch for our rig) and showing us how to hitch and unhitch the truck to the rig.  He and his wife have been super friendly and so much help….thank you!

On Wednesday, May 31 we drove to Fort Custer State Recreation Area in the Battle Creek Michigan area.  Our first campsite of the journey, and it was a “back in” type site…no pull throughs at this campground!  Steve was working on backing in, and had made a few pretty good attempts when a really nice guy (who is named Steve also!) was riding his bike by and stopped to ask if we’d like some help.  One minute later he had jumped into the truck and backed us into our site like he had done it a million times!

We’ve already discovered how nice everyone is when camping.  And of course everyone wants to meet Gerry!  He is loving the journey and is a great passenger in the truck.  He’s made the back seat his home.   We miss Gunner and Jaeger terribly and still can’t believe they aren’t here with us.

We went on a hike today, about 3 miles, the longest Gerry has done yet, around a beautiful lake.  We also visited the Fort Custer National Cemetary, a military cemetary.  Very beautiful and peaceful.

Leaving home and family and friends was hard – you all are special to us in so many ways.  Thank you for your support and well wishes.  This journey will change us in ways we have not yet imagined, I suppose.  But we hold you all close in our hearts and look forward to having visitors.

Hope to update this blog on a (somewhat) regular basis to share our journey with you.