- Good morning from a chilly campsite here in Charleston, South Carolina. Today, I'm back with another video, and I'm gonna be telling
our story of our second year on the road. And I really had to think hard about how I was going to tell this story because so much had
happened in that second year that I decided that I would break it up into three major incidences
that had happened from January to September of 2020. And I will say that by the third incident that Barbara and I were broken, that we had decided to get off the road, that we just couldn't handle it anymore because of the circumstances,
which once you hear, I think that you'll understand why. If you missed our first video,
I'll link it somewhere here, but I went over how we got on the road, our experiences of traveling
throughout the east coast, and just our general time
adjusting to full-time RV life. With that said, I couldn't be prouder of how
Barbara and I worked together as a team to overcome each
one of these situations. You know, when we first started
the trip, I was thinking, man, if we could survive living together in such a teeny tiny space
with no personal space 24/7 for over a year, then we
can overcome anything. And now after going
through these experiences, I know for a fact that
we can overcome anything. And it's such an incredible
feeling to realize that, that your partner, you can go through the worst of things, and you know that they have
your back, you have theirs, and you just can support each other. If this is your first
time here, my name is Dan. My wife's name is Barbara. And we are Wandering While We Can. We have been full-time RV-ers for the last two and a half years. And we just share our experiences of living a nomadic lifestyle. So, if that is something
that you're interested in, please click the subscribe button, and if you wouldn't mind
hitting the like button and sharing with any friends and family, I would really appreciate it. Okay, with that said, let's get inside, warmed up,
and I'll tell you all about it. Let's get into it. There. Much better. (Dan laughs) Nice and warm in here. Okay, so we had just gotten
back from Pittsburgh, and we had a couple days left in Austin before we hit the road. Our plan was to drive to
Big Bend National Park, which was about an eight or nine hour trip considering we're towing,
stopping for gas, lunch, et cetera. Now, up to this point,
Barbara had not driven at all. So, I had been through Texas before, and I was anticipating a
very long and boring drive. And I thought that this
could be a good opportunity for Barbara to get some practice towing. And on top of that, I had
some work that I needed to do, so I kinda was thinking
we could kill two birds with one stone with her driving and then with me doing a bit of work. So, we decided that I would
drive us out of Austin, get us away from traffic,
a lot of turns, et cetera, into a spot where it'd be
easier for Barbara to take over, a little bit more comfortable for her. So, we got on the road,
and about two hours later, we were out in the country and we found a little spot
off the side of the road that we could just pull off and switch. So, I had hopped out, Barbara
jumped into the driver's seat, and before we knew it,
we were back on the road. So, Barbara pulled off and
we got back on the highway. I began unpacking my laptop so
that I could start some work. And about five minutes
later, Barbara asked me, "Hey, should I feel vibration
in the steering wheel?" I'm like, "No, no, you shouldn't." I'm like, "You know what, slow down "and see if the vibration goes away." And so she did, and the vibration stopped. And she said, "Okay." And so probably another
five or 10 minutes goes by, and she's feeling a little
bit more comfortable, so she starts increasing the speed again to get us around 60 miles an
hour, maybe 65 miles an hour. And again, she starts saying, "I feel a vibration in
the steering wheel." And I said, "Huh." And before we knew it, all of a sudden the trailer
just started swaying in the back. And I didn't even realize it immediately, but Barbara yelled out because she saw it in
the rear view mirror. So, I look back and I can see
that the trailer is swaying, and it went from slow to
fast, very, very quickly. So, I yelled out, "Slow down, slow down!" And she did. We began slowing down, but that actually seemed to make it worse. The trailer was just
going all over the road, and there was nothing I could do. I was completely frozen in fear. And I look over at Barbara, and I can't even imagine
what was going on in her head because the worst part was
when I turned my glance onto the oncoming traffic, I could see a row of cars coming at us, and the trailer was pushing
us into the oncoming lane. And so Barbara did the smartest thing, and she decided to put
us into the shoulder to start moving the truck and the trailer over to the shoulder to try
to get us into the dirt. Now that shoulder had a dirt incline, but it wasn't like a steep incline. It appeared to be somewhat gradual. So I'm thinking, "Okay,
we're gonna be okay." And I think at this time
we're probably going around 30 miles per hour. So, I'm hoping the best. And so we start moving over, and the trailer is still
going crazy in the back. And we hit the dirt. And all of a sudden, the
truck gets pulled back, everything, just everything, just blacks. I can't even really remember
what happened in that moment. All I knew was that we slid
to a stop at some point. And until we came to
that final stop, I just, we were both hyperventilating. It was eerily quiet inside the truck because we were both in disbelief. And for a very, very
split second, I thought, "Everything's okay. "The truck and the trailer, we're okay. "Everything's in one piece. "I think maybe things
are just shooken around "inside the trailer, "but I think that everything is okay." And then the reality of
this situation sank in as I looked back. What had happened was was that when we hit that dirt shoulder, the trailer flipped, the trailer flipped on its side. And what happened was, it pulled us all, it pulled the truck backwards, and the momentum ended
up sandwiching the truck and the trailer together, in that the back of the truck went through the front of the trailer. So, the truck was several
feet off the ground because of how the hitch
is connected to the truck. And the back end of the truck was through the front of the trailer. One of the cars that we narrowly missed, stopped and rushed over
to see if we were okay. I really don't remember what they said. It's all a blur. But they got us out of the truck just in case there was a fire
or some sort of explosion. At the time, I don't
think I fully understood how close we were to
seriously hurting ourselves or possibly even dying. The dogs were fine. They were incredibly
excited and barking a lot but perfectly fine. Barbara on the other hand was not. She was crying and
obviously very much upset. And it took me a minute to compose myself, but when I did, I walked over
and we just held each other because in that moment, that pain that we were feeling
wasn't going to go away. We were in the middle of nowhere and our little home on
wheels was destroyed. When I began to think back
of all of the hours painting and renovating it and
making it our little home, I just felt like I got
punched in the stomach and I wanted to throw up. It was a brutal and helpless feeling. After sitting there for a bit, my mind just went into survivor mode. I was trying to weigh
all the different options and think of the possible
scenarios of things that we could do to fix this. Thankfully, the two
gentlemen that had stopped to see if we were okay had
already called the police, and the sheriff showed
up not there long after and just made sure that we were okay, asked us some questions, and
then he called the tow truck. Now I didn't have cell service, so I couldn't call our insurance company. So, I had no clue what we needed to do. And I had to wait until
we got back into some town or area that had service. But thankfully the time waiting for the tow truck went by really quickly. I was amazed. I was so surprised 'cause I just figured that I would be sitting there ruminating. But thankfully that was not the case. After the tow truck arrived, they gave us a very good demonstration of how to right a trailer and disconnect a truck
from a twisted up hitch. If it wasn't my truck and trailer, I probably would have found
it incredibly interesting, but instead it was just horribly painful. Before they loaded the
trailer up onto the tow truck, we were able to get inside and get a couple articles of clothing and a few personal items so that we could at least be
prepared to stay in a hotel. The nearest town was Junction, Texas. And when I say a stereotypical
Texas town, Junction is it. The very first thing
that we saw upon coming into town was a Christmas
tree made out of deer antlers, next to the deer
processing plant of course. Now, it was a quaint little town. The main street seemed like
it had seen better days with most of the shops being empty. But obviously at that point, all we wanted to do was just get to a spot where I could make a phone call and figure out where we're
gonna stay for the night and our next steps. So, the tow truck driver
had recommended a motel in the downtown area of Junction. And so he had dropped us off there with the little belongings that we had. And we went in, got a room, and went over to plug in our cell phones to start charging them
and make the phone calls to the insurance company, as well as to our
families to let them know that we were okay. Dealing with the insurance
was incredibly frustrating. It was 3:00 or 4:00 on a Friday, and our provider, Progressive, they do not work on the weekends, so no one is answering phone
calls on Saturday or Sunday. So I had called, I had put in a claim, and I was waiting for
someone to call me back. No one called me back until Monday. So, we had no clue of what was happening, but after it was 5:00 PM on that Friday, I knew that we were at a
minimum going to be staying in Junction until Monday. We didn't hear from the
claims adjuster until Tuesday. And because of how busy they were, they couldn't come out to
see the trailer until Friday, which meant we were in
Junction for over a week, really without having any
idea what was going to happen. Because of this, we had to work on an assumption, and that assumption was
there were two options. The first option is that
they consider it a total and we get our money back. Second option is that
they're going to repair it, and we're gonna be off the
road for four to six months. Now, obviously what we went through was incredibly traumatic, and so Barbara and I had to
have a serious conversation about whether or not
we wanted to continue. So, after we let the emotions die down, the shock of it just pass
by, we talked about it. Selfishly, I did not want to end the trip. And my reasoning was is that first, I didn't want to end
the trip on a bad note. I didn't want to end the trip like that. And also we had an itinerary that was going to be incredible. We were going to Utah, we were
going to the Grand Canyon, Arizona, Wyoming, Montana,
Idaho, Washington. There was so many things
to look forward to that I did not want to miss
that, and I wanted to continue. But if Barbara wasn't onboard,
it wouldn't have been fun. It wouldn't have been enjoyable. She probably would have been miserable. And so we played that scenario out. What if we quit? What if we went back? What would that look like? And what would we regret
from choosing to go back? Would we regret anything? Has it been too much? And just kind of play out that scenario to see how we would feel. Thankfully, we both agreed
that we didn't want to stop yet and we wanted to continue. (crowd cheering) So, Barbara and I talked about what kind of trailer we would want. Actually, it was kind of fun. And in hindsight, we had
the benefit of living in our previous trailer
for seven to eight months, so we knew the things that we liked and the things that we didn't like. And so we took that experience and put together a list of the things that we would want in our new trailer. The first was size. We knew that we wanted a bigger trailer, and now that we had a bigger
truck, we weren't as limited like we were when we had
our Toyota Highlander. So, we had a higher towing capacity and we could get something bigger. Now I'm not gonna go
into all the specifics of exactly why we chose our new trailer, but thankfully I had jumped onto RV Trader and narrowed down our
options to a few trailers until we found one that we really liked, which was in Tucson, Arizona. So, you're probably thinking, well, "How were you planning
on getting to Tucson? "Your truck was totaled." Surprisingly enough, that was not correct. So, the truck had been dropped off at a mechanic in Junction, so they had an opportunity
to look at it, inspect it, and see what had happened. And it was fine. The axle was okay, the wheels
were fine, engine was fine. It was perfectly drivable. Now, yes, the back of the
truck was completely banged up and it needed new tires because
they popped in the impact. But again, it was drivable. So, that was a great piece of
news and a relief on our end. So, when we found out that
we had a drivable truck and we had a potential
trailer that we could buy, we had something we could work with and kind of develop a plan. The next step was to
get over to the trailer and to collect all of our things and salvage whatever we could. I have a very vivid memory
of seeing the trailer in the junkyard and
just my heart dropping. I wanted to cry. I saw it there and it was just sad, and it felt like the end of something. It felt like the end,
like a defining moment. But despite that, we
just had to get to work, clean everything out, and get ready for what the
next phase was going to bring, whatever that may be. So, we are cleaning up the
complete and utter disaster of our trailer flipping
and crashing yesterday. A little less emotional today, which is good because yesterday
absolutely was horrible. But, you know, it's one thing at a time. We're currently in a junkyard. And so that pretty much tells
you all you need to know. And so anyways, I'll just kinda cut to it and get right to the main damage. So, this is the front of the trailer, which is where most of
the damage happened. Essentially the trailer
or the truck from here, it turned this way and it
went up into the window here. So as you can see if
I come in at an angle, it is completely pushed in. It's completely crushed. Yeah. And down here, the metal bent back and the side is bent, is also bent. So it's, this is, I mean, I can open up the storage bay, but it's probably gonna
be difficult, obviously, I don't know if you can see it. It's really crushed in there here. So, this side of the
trailer, this fell over. This fell over on this side. I mean, basically all the
refrigerator and the food, all my office stuff, like
I had a printer here, all of it came through the
window and just smashed. So when they righted the trailer, all of the stuff was on the ground. And the propane tank went
flying down, I don't know, about 20 or 30 yards from the trailer. We had two gas tanks
here that were dumped. The gas was coming out. Here this is just... You know, you can see in. This is the bedroom. That's one of the
cabinets next to the bed. This side there really,
there isn't too much damage. I don't, I don't think. But like I said, and thankfully back here, the generator and all this was intact. It works. I tested it. It's fine. I'll show you the inside now. So, we've cleaned up a lot, but essentially all of this
was covered in clothes, food, glass, eggs. The refrigerator here when
it flipped on this side, this opened up, the
freezer did not open up, but this opened up and
everything inside of it, we just went to the grocery store so we were completely full, and everything fell this
way and just, you know, just crashed here. There's still, you can see
there's ketchup or whatever. I don't even know what that is. Some barbecue sauce. The wall here. It's just food. I think some sort of soy
sauce or something got out and broke. - [Barbara] Teriyaki. I don't know, I don't know what I had. - [Dan] Our plants... A couple of plants, and so
they just flew obviously and just smashed everywhere. There's cereal. Now, inside with this, you can see, I mean, it's
just, it's really messed up. The bed is completely off its... Like, I mean, I don't know about the bed. We haven't brought it down
yet to see the damage, but obviously you can tell here that this poked right through that so, and then down here by the
bed, this is all broken. I think that's about it really. I mean, this side of the
trailer didn't seem to be too, I don't think it's too damaged. - This opened. And, because my clothes, I
don't know if that was here, but my clothes flew out of here. And somehow this opened, And stuff came out.
- [Dan] It might be cracked. - And clothes come in, it was weird. It was weird. - [Dan] Yeah. So, the bathroom wasn't bad. The bathroom seemed to be okay. Thankfully, nothing came up. But we had dumped all of our
sewage tanks and our gray tank, so, you know, nothing, no fluids like that got into
the trailer or anything. I mean, all of this stuff
that we have in here now, we just bagged up. We're gonna be taking
this stuff out today. Yeah, so right now we just
have all of our stuff out. And we got boxes. We went to the local grocery store, and they had some boxes by the dumpsters that they weren't using, and they were clean boxes, so
we just went and grabbed them. We still have a lot of cleaning to do, like the chair here, there's
ketchup and stuff all over it. The bike that was on the front, this bike had been asking
to be killed a while ago, but this is, it finally ran out of lives. So, we're just waiting for
the insurance adjuster to come and kind of figure things out. But that's the quick and dirty. The tow truck driver that had
helped us pick up the truck and trailer on the day of
the accident was so nice. He let us borrow his truck, so that when we were
packing up all of our things at the trailer, we didn't
have to carry each box one at a time over to the motel. So, we just got his truck,
we loaded everything up, and we brought it over to the motel. The motel room was packed. We had all of our things
stacked up along the walls, and so, with two dogs, with
both of us, everything. There was hardly any room
inside of that motel room. Surprisingly, I look fondly
back at our time in Junction. It was a quiet town. We felt safe there. People were friendly. And it felt like we were in a movie. I felt like we got stuck somewhere that we had no other options, we were trying to figure
something else out, and then you discover that it's this quaint little nice place that you would have never
discovered otherwise. With that said, there was stress because we were hinging
all of our future plans off of the judgment of
our claims adjuster. So, when he finally arrived on
Friday, the moment had come, and we just couldn't wait
to hear what he had to say. And of course it took him
all day of going through, reviewing the trailer, the
damage, adding everything up, quantifying everything, until I think it was around 5:00 PM when he finally called us
over to go over the numbers. I remember that he did not
immediately say it was a total. He kind of led us on for a bit until finally he said,
"Okay, it's a total." We're like, "Oh, thank you, thank you." Because we had rented a towable U-Haul, and we were planning
on leaving the next day to drive to Tucson. So, after everything was done
with the claims adjuster, we excitedly hurried over to the U-Haul to pick up our towable trailer, and then we brought it over to the motel and started packing everything up so that we could get on
the road the next day. After packing everything up, we went over to our
favorite diner in Junction to have our last meal. - Going out for dinner. - Our favorite place. - Our favorite place in Junction, Texas. Just right there across the street. - [Dan] You gotta show 'em the pool. - Oh, we have a pool, and
our hotel room's back there. Sun Valley Motel. Great. - And then that night we
got a good night's sleep, and we woke up early
and we got on the road. It felt so strange to be
driving away from Junction because we didn't have
our truck the entire time that we were in Junction, and now we were not only back on the road, but we were towing a small little trailer, and so I was very nervous. I was paying attention to every sound, every vibration, every movement, just because I did not
want to get broken down or have another catastrophic event happen during our trip to Tucson. Our plan was we were
going to stay at a hotel for a couple of nights
until we found an Airbnb that we could stay at for
a longer period of time. We were anticipating on
staying in the Tucson area anywhere between two, maybe three weeks. And boy, were we wrong. (Dan laughs) It ended up being five weeks. So, we quickly discovered
that we were in Tucson during their world famous gem show. So, when we were looking
for any long-term Airbnbs, the prices were like double or triple what they normally were. And so, we were desperately
looking around for a place that had a kitchen, that allowed dogs, and was at a reasonable price. And we were not having any luck. So, Barbara finally found an option that it was his own
house, it had a kitchen, it even had a yard, and it
was within our price range. So the next question was,
well, where is it located? We knew nothing about Tucson. And so we got on Google Maps,
we got on the satellite view, and we're looking at the
neighborhood, and it seems fine. There was nothing that
we could really tell that made it seem like
it was bad or dangerous. And we were trying to look at reviews, and the reviews for the
Airbnb were really good. And so, we decided, "You know what, "there's no other options. "Let's book it." So, we move over to this Airbnb, and it ends up being in Southern Tucson, which if any of you are
familiar with Southern Tucson, you could have warned us. (Dan laughs) It was a very, very bad neighborhood. We could see drug deals
happening on the street. We were woken up to gunfire
in the middle of the night. We had ordered dog food and
that was stolen on the porch. So yeah, it wasn't great. But this Airbnb did
have bars on the window, it did have a full security system, and it even had a front gate in which we could park our
car behind and lock at night. So, really we did feel safe
when we were inside the house. It was just outside that you did not want to
spend any time walking around the neighborhood or even really driving
around the neighborhood. Despite that, things were going
in a good direction for us. We met with a couple that they
were selling their trailer and we loved it. They were super nice. And we were able to come to an agreement about buying it from them. We had found a mechanic that
was going to work on the truck, and they were going to fix it for us. I suppose that this would
be the biggest downside to full-time RV-ing is that when something happens to
your RV or your trailer, you are absolutely
displaced from your home, that you have to live out of a suitcase, you have to find somewhere to go. And if it's in some strange city where you don't know anybody, you don't know anything
about the location, it can be very stressful and
really, really difficult. So, I'm going to explain this story about us picking up our new trailer. And I'm almost certain that most people will
think that the people that we're buying the
trailer from were shady. Now I do want to express that
we did not feel like that. When we were buying it from them, we felt everything was on the up and up. There just were a couple incidences that kind of were curious. I didn't understand why they
chose to do certain things. And yet it happened. Because our truck was in the shop, we had no way of picking
up our new trailer, so we had to go to
enterprise and rent a truck. So, we were waiting for a text message from the couple to let us know when we could come over
to get the trailer. So, we do get a text message
saying, "Hey, come on over. "It's ready." So, we head over and we
arrive and they're not there. And there's a note saying, "Here is where you can
find the key, et cetera." So we were able to get into
the trailer and all this. I had texted the guy and I said, "I thought you were going to be here?" And he said, "No, no, we
left about a half hour ago. "We didn't think it would be
necessary to see you before, "you know, when you were picking it up," which I thought was
really kind of strange. I ended up shrugging it off because after thinking about it, there really wasn't much
for us to talk about it. It just would have been nice for him to walk me through the different systems and give me any other information and just generally be there for us to receive the trailer from them. So, I just thought, "Okay,
well, we'll get in there, "and if we have any questions for him, "we'll call him and let him know." Over the next hour or two,
Barbara was cleaning inside, I was tinkering around on
the outside of the trailer, and we were just getting it ready because we were going to be moving it to a campground outside
of Saguaro National Park. Barbara finished up inside, and I started backing up the
truck to hook up the trailer. And I had to jack up the
trailer to get it level with the truck. As I began doing this, I
heard liquid coming out. I heard water. And so I look underneath
the trailer and sure enough, there's water coming out from
the underbelly of the trailer. And so I kind of get closer and immediately this very
strong smell of sewer hits me. And I'm thinking, "Oh no, what is that?" Okay, so appears to be,
there's some water coming out. I think maybe the gray
tank valve is broken or something's going on 'cause... When I, I don't know. I get on the phone, I
call the previous owner, and I explained what is happening. And he said, "Oh, that's so strange. "We didn't have any
water in the underbelly. "Maybe it's just water that accumulated "from when we were towing previously "because we had towed through
a rainstorm or something," but he couldn't understand why there would be water underneath. Since he couldn't explain it and there really wasn't
anything that he could do, I had to get underneath the
underbelly and cut some sections so that it would drain faster. And after again, smelling it, and, it was sewage water. I'm certain that it was sewage water. But there wasn't anything
that we could do. So, we had cleaned out as
much of it as we could. It drained out for the most part. And we hooked up the trailer to the truck, and we got on the road. As you probably can imagine, both Barbara and I were so so frustrated. It was supposed to be a wonderful day. It was supposed to be a day of happiness of getting our new trailer,
making it our new home. And it was completely flipped around into almost like we bought a lemon that we didn't know what other problems that we were gonna find, but we did know that the entire inside of the trailer smelled like a sewer and that how were we
gonna sleep that night? Because it was so potent. So, we did what any
rational person would do. We opened a bottle of liquor. (Dan laughs) We had a couple of drinks. I crawled underneath the
underbelly of the trailer. We had some bleach. And so I had poured like a bit
of a bleach water concoction underneath, and we were trying
to, you know, spray it down, hose it down to help kind
of, you know, eliminate or reduce that sewer smell. And yeah, and that's, it did help. And we had all the windows
open in the trailer, so it just kind of aired out. And that night ended up not
being that bad of a sleep. You could still smell it,
but it wasn't horrible. The crazy part is that to this day, we have no clue of
exactly how that water got underneath there because obviously there would
be a leak in the black tank, and yet we have used the tank flush, we have used the black tank, and we have not had that
same issue come up again. So, we are completely dumbfounded as to what the previous couple had done to get that liquid underneath there. But the best part was that
we were out of that horrible, horrible neighborhood in Southern Tucson. We were out at a campsite. We were in our new trailer, and all we had to wait for now
was the truck to be finished, which in typical fashion,
the mechanic kept delaying where he would say, "Oh, in
a week or in another week." And the dates that he was
giving us kept changing. The major reason that that was
a huge inconvenience for us is the unavailability of campsites
and RV parks in the area. Tucson is already a high
destination for snowbirds during the winter months. But on top of that, with that gem show, there was nothing available. And we only had a few days at the Saguaro National Park campsite before we had to leave. So, we ended up finding a KOA in Picacho, which is about 45 minutes
Northwest of Tucson. So, that was our only option. We had to go stay there and wait for the truck to be finished. We had made plans with
my family to meet them in Joshua Tree, California for a weekend to celebrate my birthday as
well as my brother's birthday. And so we had a hard deadline to leave on. The mechanic knew this, and I
had constantly reminded him. And despite delay after delay,
I was patient and I waited. And yet it came down to
the very, very last evening before we needed to go. And thankfully he was able
to finish up the truck and the back of the
truck was like brand new. And we were able to get back on the road and head to California on
schedule to meet with my family. So, after six weeks from
the date of the crash until we bought a new trailer
and got our truck fixed, we're back on the road,
and we were so happy! When looking back six
weeks is really nothing, especially when it comes
to buying a new trailer, getting a truck fixed, packing up all of your things
out of your destroyed trailer, and moving it to another city. We did so much within that period of time that it's truly impressive. I've explained a lot of
the different upgrades that we did on the truck and the trailer in our Instagram page. But if that's something that
you guys are interested in, please just leave it in the
comments section down below, and I'm happy to give
you all the information of all the things that
I did to make our truck as rock-solid when we're
towing as possible. So, that pretty much summarizes
our first incident of 2020. This was the first. So, we started the year
destroying our trailer, getting stranded in the middle of nowhere, having to relocate to a
very, very shady neighborhood in Tucson, buy a new
trailer, get our truck fixed, get back on the road,
and continue our travels, which we did. So, yay! (Dan laughs) We had to go through a lot,
but man, man, it was worth it, and it created some very
long lasting memories that Barbara and I will
surprisingly fondly look back with. I hope you enjoyed today's video. I will be continuing our 2020
adventures, so stay tuned. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them down below. Thank you for watching, and
we'll see you in the next one. Bye bye. (bright music)
