13 Lessons Learned our 1st Year RVing

we learned a lot in the last year rving and we want to quickly share the things that we either didn't know or never considered before we started this lifestyle keep watching all the way to the end you'll be a lot wiser than we were before starting the rving journey first up is allergies and be prepared to get your butt kicked if you visit areas that are in bloom if you have bad allergies or if you never had allergies you might just experience them for an example i'm from michigan my allergies would be kind of mild and they'd come out late april early may last about a week be done now i found that i have really terrible allergies to something in florida in february and it's april right now in california as we're filming this and i'm just getting over some very terrible allergies probably the worst i've seen her go through yeah it's bad i felt really bad and with allergies you might not want to purchase non-refundable tickets really far in advance in case you get to an area and you have bad allergies when i have bad allergies i don't want to go anywhere i'm not going to have fun and people definitely don't want me around them in public coughing and hacking all over them right we learn there's a big difference between rv parks and campgrounds as a general rule of thumb campground is going gonna be more family focused there's gonna be people that are vacationing for the weekend yeah bonfires yeah a lot more noise when you come to rv park it's gonna be a little bit quieter not really the camping amenities of fire pits and things like that more people in rv parks are full-time living working in the area they just live in that park all year or they move around as snowbirds do also some places call themselves rv parks but they're really mobile home parks with a few spots you can bring your rv in the park if you don't want to be in places like that really helps to plan ahead what we learn is looking at google maps at overhead view and the street view to plan out what places we want to stay we learn this while we're doing hurricane work in the south and many places down there are really mobile home parks with a few spots to park rv vicious dog breeds are another big concern we want to share this with you we don't have dogs but we see it all the time on facebook groups people are going full time they didn't know about this and now they're having a really hard time trying to find somewhere to stay at a campground or an rv park and they're not allowed to because those places don't allow vicious dog breeds on the property due to insurance reasons and at some places i also see in the rules that they require proof of vaccination for your animals i'm not sure if you actually have to show them the shot record or you just say that they have them but that might be something you're going to run into while you're on the road and then there's a smells sometimes the good sometimes the bad lots of bad it could be your neighbor entering their black tank when their rv is really close to you or the gray tank those usually smell worse than the black tanks do or you're walking around every part for your evening stroll and you smell the nice grills and the italian cheese bread cooking and everything else you get so hungry you stop by you wanna invite yourself over for dinner then you realize you're being a creeper that way just about six to eight pm might not be a good time to cruise around the rv park if you're hungry this one we never really considered until right before we left is washing your rv when you're driving down the road in the summer and it's bug season those bugs are just smashing your windshield they're going right above hitting the cap of your rv and they are smashed on and when the sun hits them they are hard and baked on so you're gonna need to wash your rv and then if you're driving in rainstorms a lot of the sludge gets kicked up on the windows and if you have a new rv with those big pretty windows and you can't wait to get somewhere and see out of them you're gonna need a way to wash them so you're gonna have to have a ladder or something depending on how tall your rv is to wash your windows while you're out on the road and now you're wondering how do you actually wash the rv a lot of rv parks do not let you watch the rv yourself on the property one people make a mess when they do it so that ruined it for some of us and two they try to conserve water when you wash the rv with the regular hose water use a lot more water than the power washer does so that means you have to bring in an outside company that does the washing for you we've seen the prices range anywhere from one hundred dollars up to four hundred dollars that's up to ten dollars per foot of the rv to wash it now they do a really good job wash wax through the roof and everything else so if you want to get that job done once in a while to make your rv really pretty you can do that but it gets pretty costly do that quite often what we'll do is we'll stop by a truck wash that the rv fits through and we'll wash the rv there to get all the major grime and the sludge off and driving down the road but you need to make sure that you bring your own brush because those brushes that get washed in the trucks they get full of salt and dirt and rocks it's a great way to put nice big scratches up and down inside your rv or your truck if you're washing that as well and the last time we did that in oklahoma it cost us just under forty dollars was like 39.25 that's the do-it-yourself now you can go through a truck wash that they'll wash it for you again make sure they're not using the brushes on it to scratch it up i think those prices start at 40 dollars for a basic wrench or up to 80 or a little bit higher depending on what you add on for your wash and that's going to kind of be like an automatic car wash but it's for a truck so your camper can go through so you don't have to do the work they do it for you and what i found is a good way to wash the rv at the rv park yourself is with a waterless system i use aerocosmetics wash and wax system takes around a half an hour due to the rv total i usually have to do a part in the morning part in the afternoon so the sun's not baking it on another good tip you can use to keep the rv clean is a good base coat wax job that especially helps in the front cap get those bugs off they'll come off much easier if it's not the plain fiberglass you have a wax coat in between i'll put a link to that down in the description below we like to make sure our rv is washed with soap and water and a brush at least every three to four months now that depends on what roads were drove on if they were salty got a lot of bugs in the front our favorite way to do the washing is moot stocking at a family member's house that's the easiest and he does all the work if you didn't know we make educational videos for our viewers and share our adventures and findings along the way so if you like this kind of content please consider subscribing to our channel and if you're finding value from this video please hit that like button and let's get on to the next one let's talk rv spots now this is something we had no idea about when we started we just thought that you went somewhere and they had a spot and you rented it and it was one price a lot of places you pay by the length of the spot and they'll have names like rv site deluxe site scenic waterfront and you have no idea what they mean or how big they are and on their website it doesn't say that like the deluxe site will fit 40 feet or 60 feet you have no idea and every place that we stayed we actually had to call and find out and say this is the length that we are do you have a spot available and what we usually find is that rv park will have one or two spots available for our size of rig we're 41 feet long and then connected we're 60 feet with a truck and if we want to disconnect we're usually trying to find a way to wiggle the truck forward and backwards in a tighter spot so we fit inside of the area and not have to find an auxiliary parking spot so some of the places that we went to they say yeah you can fit but you have to disconnect the truck wiggle it in and you have like no room front and back if you are planning a route and you plan on stopping like at walmart sam's club costco and you're just going to pulling off the road park at the end of the parking lot go and get grocery stock your fridge and keep going we suggest when you find an area that you think you're going to stop at go look at google maps and see if it's an easy in and out or if there's a whole bunch of tight turns now where we're from all those types of places we could easily get in and out with our rv no problem but we're at filming this in a large city there is no way we could bring the rv all the parking lots are connected there's tons of tight turns we can barely fit with our dually just trying to maneuver through the parking lot systems and all the lights and all the traffic to even get a spot there is no way we could bring the rv unless you came at three in the morning and no one's open at three in the morning our next couple are all about the weather let's start with the rain inside the rv when it rains it can be very loud even if it's not raining that hard outside it sounds like it is well the reason is especially in the slides there's not a lot of insulation in rvs usually the top of a sly is a harder piece of plastic rubber up there you're going to hear every raindrop echo inside if your bedroom slide goes out or your head is in the slide you're going to want to bring that slide in during those big rainstorm nights but bring it in before it rains you don't bring a wet slide inside that way you have two layers of protection over your head and you're not out in it also if you work in your rv and it's going to rain during the day you might have a hard time having a phone conversation conference calls zoom calls things like that just hard enough having a plain old conversation inside there be a lot of them try to get someone hear you through a phone or something like that yeah sometimes you're yelling back and forth just inside the rv trying to hear each other and we have four cats three of them are terrified so then when it starts raining even if it's not raining hard they start meowing because they're scared so then it makes it even worse on the plus side if it's a nice light rain it's so peaceful to sleep in yes it is as you're planning your route especially on travel days you need to keep a close eye on the weather you might wake up in an area that's beautiful and sunny and you're driving a couple hundred miles the weather can change a lot a few hundred miles especially if you're going through mountains or different types of terrain we keep the close eye on the radar to see what weather patterns are coming through it's also a good idea to travel with a weather radio so you'll get alerts in the area of some major storm is popping up especially if it's a tornado or really bad storms and while we're talking about driving through multiple states the road conditions will change either when you cross a county line or a state line because they don't have the same kind of funding so if you're having a nice smooth road you're like oh cool we passed another state sign and you like take a picture of it put it on instagram and all of a sudden it's like bam bam bam bam so just be prepared for that and usually the time erica asked me if something's wrong with the truck or the rv i have to explain it to her just to change the road and if you're like me and you get sick from drinking carbonated beverages when you start hitting bumps and you're coming up to a state line you might want to wait to crack that pop or whatever you're drinking open until you experience the new roads and make sure they're smooth before drinking that this is a good reason to travel during the daytime you can see those piles coming up on the road or bad conditions on the road where you can go around them not having to swerve at last minute also plenty of following distance gives you time to see things coming up how you plan on rving and how you actually rv are probably going to be two different things so don't go out and buy a whole bunch of stuff that you think you need just wait until you actually get on the road just get the essential stuff because things are going to change when we started we thought that we would do short travel days and we'd stop and explore the areas that we're in well that's not the case we have four cats in the car i only like to leave the cats alone in the vehicle for about five minutes max and they're quiet from about 11am to 7pm that's when they're sleeping and it's nice and peaceful during that time for us to drive but every time we stop they wake up yeah meow meow meow meow so we like to kind of like just keep cruising have food in the vehicle make minimal bathroom stops or if we do get gas it's going to be like the fuel stop we're going to go to the bathroom and we're going to eat at the same time so we don't have to keep waking them up we found it's a lot less stressful on us if we do it like a 10 12 hour drive day we get to the location we're going to open the rv up with the cats inside and then we can start exploring and with that i would not suggest buying all the memberships that are possibly available until you know what you're actually going to need you might use a good sams at many rv parks things like that but you might not use the boondocker's welcome to harvestos and so on and so on all the way through until you actually get in situations you're going to be using those areas they charge you for the yearly fees from the day you sign up for them there's really no advantage to sign up early for those programs just sign up for those types of memberships right before you're going to start using them now let's talk about clothes and laundry you need to pack for at least three seasons and be prepared the weather can change very quickly we all seen what happened in texas in the spring of 2021 where they were at 80 degrees one week and next week well below freezing for a long period of time and with that you actually need a lot less clothes than what you think but you're going to bring all the clothes with you so do whatever you want and then when you get on the road you're going to realize i'm only wearing the same couple things and you don't have room in the drawers and then once you get to that point you'll start discarding items that you really don't need anymore also by doing laundry inside of the rv we're only going to watch what's in the tub so those clothes are right back in the pile i just wear them over and over again now a lot of rv parks and campgrounds have washers and dryers for you to use but they all don't have quarter machines and it's not really easy sometimes to get quarters on the road when you don't bank in the area and you're not making cash transactions so you might want to pack quarters or save up every little quarter that you get on the road in case you can't get them at the rv park and if you do have them don't use them like use theirs and just use the quarters that you're saving for emergencies if you want to pick up some tips and doing laundry in your rv you want to look at the video link in the description down below now for something fun steve what's something that is easier and harder than you thought it was going to be about this lifestyle this is easy for me i didn't realize how relaxed the lifestyle i actually can live i used to have a very very hectic lifestyle yeah working 100 hours a week never being able to catch up now with the rv lifestyle i feel like a normal person some days i can catch up on things you have time to relax enjoy the scenery exercise all the things that you should be able to do as a regular person but you don't really see it while you're living in it because you're so wrapped up in it no i thought it was normal before now i realize how normal it's supposed to be but one of the bad things of rv life is all the maintenance goes into rvs they require a lot of upkeep to keep them from breaking or fix things as they break and keep it rolling down the road and every time that you go on the road things are going to be loosening up it's like an earthquake shaking around every time you travel yeah so it's not like you just do your yearly maintenance and you're good it's like every time you travel and while you're sitting there we have a weekly monthly quarterly and yearly checklist that we go through okay erica those are mine how about yourself okay the big pro would be impulse spending not really doing it we're saving a lot of money we're not buying stuff one we can't fit anything else into the rv that we really don't need and two we can't bring on extra weight we're pretty much at capacity an example of this is we were at kohl's the other day and they had like the cutest dish towels they had the spring summer stuff coming out and i wanted all of them but i don't really need any more dish towels so i'm not spending money on like the seasonal stuff so i just picked it up showed steve like look how cute these are pretended they were in my rv and how cute they looked in the rv and then i put them back and when i came back i used our three dish towels that we have so if there's a way you say our being is cheaper than regular life that'd be a way yeah for sure and on the flip side of that one thing that's really annoying me is when we travel and it's more because of covid is the fast food restaurants are still shut down and usually we eat our own food on the road but sometimes i just want to get fast food and not have to worry about it or having like a taco bell craving and we can't pull into just any spot anymore you can't pull in next door where there's an opening then walk into the restaurant inside and get your food and then go out with that we're really limited to whatever food is located inside of a truck stop if we're looking for fast food let's help each other out and put your tips in the comments below so we can learn from each other and if you're new to the rving lifestyle we suggest you binge watch our new to rving playlist so you can learn tips and tricks before you hit the road and you'll be better prepared we hope you picked up some good tips and we'll see you next video

Channel: Radar Road Warriors

Views: 3,862

Rating: 4.9714284 out of 5

Keywords: Lessons Learned RVing, Lessons Learned our 1st Year RVing, New RV Owner Advice, rv full time, top 10, new rv owner, how to rv, rv beginner, rv mistakes, rv travel, full time rv life, rv living full time, rv newbie mistakes, rv living for beginners, rv life full time, lessons learned our 1st eyar rving, Lessons learned our 1st eyas rving, rv living tips, living in an rv, rv for beginners, rv tips for beginners, rv lessons learned

Id: uEI2OoXimGw

Length: 15min 33sec (933 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021