Crunched our camper - may have totaled it | Grand Design 310GK | RV life | Fulltime RV Living

oh what happened we wrecked our rig and we learned a painful lesson welcome to the channel i'm liz and i'm paul and these are exciting times to push past fear build confidence and live amazing and we are not living amazing right now because we did something really bad to our rig we may have totaled it we don't know oh what happened oh no oh no oh no baby oh we broke the bike rack i know i know i know just take a breath we messed up your bike too look your bikes your bike's first oh i know i bet the wheel this is thousands of dollars i know baby we're done for the for the next foreseeable future and i don't know what do we do i i mean i don't even know what to do yeah it's pretty bad um and we're still holding hands so that's a good thing well the main thing is is that there were no injuries and we're still in love so but we learned some painful lessons more than one painful lesson didn't we yeah yeah we yeah there's yeah so learn from us you know here we are out here we wanted to keep it real we don't want to make this video honestly we talked oh no this is not a video that i'm that i'm looking forward to putting out there but we wanted to keep it real for you because if we can help prevent you from making the mistakes we did then our mistake wasn't wasn't uh totally in vain we had what i call get up and go disease and i don't even know why we haven't i don't know why we were a day early we were arriving at a park a day early so just know that this can happen to you you can just kind of get this road fever where you're like let's just go if you have seen my camper crash video i crashed a camper about seven years ago it had the same kind of thing where there was an agenda driving that crash so we are going to have some hard and fast rules from now on so let's just go ahead and set the scene for you we were headed to sequoia rv campground which is where we are right now what was it a little under 200 miles right so not a big travel day paul drove for the first couple hours and then i was driving for about an hour and it was time to get fuel right and so should we talk about the first mistake yeah so we both were talking about well let's find a truck stop so if you've seen our video about where we almost ripped the air conditioning off the top of our rig because we were under a low awning in a gas station you know that we recommend that you go to a truck stop yeah yeah truck stops are always going to have awnings high enough to get under them no matter what you're driving they're going to have big parking lots big clearance it's going to be easy and easy out yeah so we were headed to a truck stop bud bud so i got gas buddy out and i'm looking at the cheapest gas prices because i'm a cheapskate i found a vallejo station at like two exits up from where we were at the moment in ciao cielo california and i said let's go here and as we can wait wait wait how much cheaper was this gap oh it's like three cents three cents a gallon so be nice to him yeah so i got into the gas station okay it was a little tight but i i got into it was just a regular gas station i said walk man go and go back over there and see if i can get around that day's end or something yeah so the gas station was on like a frontage road and next to it was a days inn and another gas station and he said we'll see if we can just continue on the frontage road and you turn down there so i came back with a good report but you didn't hear my good report no no i didn't i was already i while i was fueling up i i went out and looked and i kind of in my head kind of measured yeah i could make a u-turn here yeah it was like a kind of a hairpin turn to get out it was going to be a tight u-turn but it was doable what i didn't consider was tail swing oh my goodness so talk about what tail swing is the trailer that extends past the rear wheel is what you're concerned about and as you do a sharp turn that tail comes around and it pivots it pivots at a pretty steep angle and i know about it i am fully aware of tail swing i just completely forgot about it in the heat of the moment of considering this u-turn and how tight it needed to be didn't rip this one off it looks like that and then this broke off and then you don't know now it's loose so i don't know it could have been worse we could have taken out the whole gas pump we could have caused a fire you know you know it really could have been awful but it was still bad enough oh it's it's horrible but when i checked in with paul he said what i was done done with everything yeah i was done done with rv life yeah i was just having a i mean it was just heat of the moment type of thing but it was like okay i'm finished this is the frame this is the back frame of the rig yeah right so it could fall apart yes yeah this is not safe to drive like this this will flap off the the rig wasn't drivable with this gaping hole and we felt like it might shake apart because the frame was was broken yeah i didn't not the chassis frame but the body frame is busted at the moment i didn't know if it was even drivable because you know a big portion of the back corner is is torn out we thought we would have to park the rig and just stay in a hotel we just felt like it was not drivable so one of the rules i think is really important for you anytime you get behind the wheel whether it's a regular vehicle not just you know towing a camper or driving a a motor home is ask yourself are you tired are you hungry were we tired were we hungry both yes yes yes that was a really really big mistake so we now have a checklist that is on the sun visor with a few questions on it that we ask each other before we start driving so we decided before doing anything else that we just needed to unhitch the trailer we got permission to park it there and then we went and got lunch yep yeah we went and chowed down a couple of tacos and and i was actually going to go to harbor freight and get a pry bar i have a flat pry bar but i was thinking i if i could get a narrow enough pry bar i could put it up into the the frame rail that was bent away from the back of the rig and use that as leverage to push it back in but just before we left to go get something to eat i got down and looked up into the square tube that that makes up the back frame of the rig and they put wood inside of it so there's no putting anything up in there so we had some angels show up that day first of all was angie in the gas station was so nice i mean she really was we called the insurance right away but she was so understanding she was very very sweet i know [Music] we just went to lunch and then we came back and we still thinking we might you know have to cancel everything and get a hotel but then the second angel showed up and his name was ed wall i didn't account for tail swing and i took out the gas pump oh here yep oh lord yeah yeah see we got the valero blue now what did they say well we got insurance so we called our insurance yeah and what did ed wall do well he just helped calm me down a little bit and so i could think clearly what i had been thinking of using the truck as a way to bend that frame piece in because there was no way i was going to bend it in with my you know by kicking it in i had already tried with a sledge hammer tried with his foot tried yeah exactly i was beating on it with a yeah like she said with my foot and with a sledgehammer and it was not going to budge so he came and i said you know what do you i just wanted somebody else's opinion on it and i said what do you think about using this oh yeah i think we could do that and then and it was a three-person job yeah so we needed an extra person to to accomplish it and he had such a great attitude and we needed that because we were obviously you know feeling stressed so we managed to push the the gaping wound closed and i just got out a roll of gorilla tape and taped it all together and tape you really need tape on the road you may have seen a video recently we did about where we ripped our roof and we talked about eterna bond tape so now we're talking about gorilla tape so you must have two must-haves but you're on the road yeah gorilla tape is basically black duct tape i mean it's it's very similar to duct tape except instead of silver it's black it's holding i mean we drove another 100 maybe 100 miles a little under 100 miles to get where we're at now until we get that back wall off i'm not sure what the repair is going to be so we were able to resume our travels but we're realizing we need to get off the road and get this fixed we need to make sure that it's safe to drive we also need to find out is it totaled or not so we definitely need to get it to shop we will be making videos and in fact the next video will be an update as to where we're going and what we're doing this is the realities of being on the road and then having something happen with your house yeah yeah i mean this is yeah this is our house leave a comment in the section i mean i already know i'm a bonehead so you don't need to tell me that we are sick about it so we appreciate your comments of support we haven't talked about this for a while but we have another youtube channel it's called amazing bike rides it just shows us out riding our e-bikes in beautiful places so people will watch our videos for virtual travel and and exercise i wish i'd had something like this when i was in a sticks and bricks house and riding my stationary well check it out it's amazing bike rides

Channel: Liz Amazing

Views: 499,560

Rating: 4.8721018 out of 5

Keywords: WreckedCamper, crunched camper, tail swing, costly rv mistake, fulltime rv living, rv life

Id: Rs4asoBWo_8

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021