Why we Quit Full-Time RV Life

what's up guys i am back with part three of our 2020 rv travels and if you've made it this far i just want to say thank you uh for for following along i really appreciate it and you know also we wanted to say thank you for all the incredibly nice comments and other support that we've been receiving so thank you as you can see we are still here in bodrum turkey loving it just going on a little hike this morning with my boy fritz and found a pretty good spot if you happen to miss our first two videos of the series i guess you could call it i'd go check those out i go over how we managed our struggles of destroying a trailer getting back on the road dealing with losses like losing our beloved dog roomie and other things i mean obviously it's not all bad we really had an amazing time but there were absolutely some challenges and things that we had to overcome in the 2020 year so if you happen to miss those i will link those somewhere around here and you can check them out as i'm sure you've already seen in the thumbnail of this video we had a breakdown with our trailer and while we were getting help we were robbed and this was really the cherry on top of the crap sundae so to speak because the previous week wildfires had broken out in oregon and so we had to deal with evacuations and trying to find a place to go because essentially the entire west coast was on fire so it left us very little options for a place to escape to today i'm going to be telling our story of our experience of escaping the wildfires of 2020 only to have a breakdown subsequently be robbed and then being displaced once again which resulted in our decision to quit full-time rv chris do you want to go he can't stay still for too long so we gotta keep moving if this is your first time here my name is dan and my wife's name is barbara and we are wandering while we can we are full-time travelers and we just share our experience of living a nomadic lifestyle so if that is something that you're interested in consider subscribing and uh i would really appreciate it if you would hit the like button and leave us a comment because i would love to hear from you all right with that said let's get into today's video after the loss of roomie we moved from colorado to the grand tetons in wyoming like i said in our last video it just felt so incredibly strange to be leaving without him and just constantly felt like we were missing something although i just i had to remind myself that he wasn't with us anymore with that said wyoming was spectacular it met all of my expectations and more and it seeing the tetons for the very first time was awe inspiring i it was one of those images that you see on your desktop computer but this time you're in it looking up at it and it seems so surreal after the grand tetons we went to lava hot springs in idaho [Laughter] sun valley then we came back into wyoming to visit yellowstone [Music] then we went made a quick stop into bozeman montana glacier national park [Music] then we went over into washington for uh to visit north cascades national park are you interested to know what's behind us my purple hair yay olympic national park which is all the way on the west coast hey then finally down into oregon where we explored tillamook 3 30 30 from california then went over to portland to finish it up portland and then hood river to put it simply i loved everywhere that we went i was constantly amazed by the natural beauty i had never explored any of these places knew anything about them and it just blew me away this was the highlight of our time on the road in total i loved it but unfortunately all of this fun came to a screeching halt in the middle of september [Laughter] after tillamook we arrived in portland on a sunday with enough time to get set up and actually go into the city and do some exploring now there were no fires in the immediate area but there was a lot of smoke so when we went into portland it seemed like something out of an apocalyptic movie because with the sun hitting the smoke it was like it created this orangey tinge everywhere you looked and also i'm sure if you've been to portland you know there's a very large homeless population so you see things like trash and graffiti and all other sorts of mess around the city so in combination to that smoky atmosphere it really didn't make for a great experience with that said the next day was quite the opposite there were some really strong winds that seemed to have blown out all of the smoke so when we woke up in the morning it was a perfectly clear blue sky so we were pretty excited although by 1pm i looked out the window and i saw a plume of smoke up in the sky and i immediately went outside and i saw that we had some neighbors that were also looking at this plume of smoke so i walked over to them and i started chatting with them to see what was going on and they said that a fire had broken out very close to the campground and that they thought that we would be evacuated soon i decided to put my drone up in the air to see for myself and sure enough they were right there was a huge fire now i didn't know exactly how far like miles wise it was from our campground but you could see it was it was something serious not long after that a park ranger did come over to us and told us that we would be evacuated so we had to scramble last minute to see if there were any campgrounds or rv parks in the area that had availability and could take us but because everyone also was scrambling last minute we didn't find anything now we had plans later in the week to go to mount hood so we just started looking in that area and we did find something there and even though we didn't want to do it quite yet we just moved over which was about an hour outside of the city while it was stressful we were safe and we had a place to go and there were no fires around the mount hood area so we felt pretty comfortable with our decision the smoke in mount hood was horrendous which was such a shame we had seen all the pictures on instagram and online and we knew how beautiful the area could be and yet everything was just socked in smoke the visibility was really poor and it completely changed the feel of this normally beautiful location we tried to tough it out over the next eight days and eventually decided that we had enough we made some phone calls and decided that we would jump forward in our itinerary and go to northern california to the redwood national forest because we knew that the air quality was significantly better there now we woke up very early and the plan was to drive to bend and see how the air quality was there and possibly stay thursday and friday night and then leave on saturday morning and drive the rest of the way to northern california unfortunately when we arrived in bend the air quality was only marginally better like i said we were just so tired of dealing with smoke that barbara and i talked about it and considering that we didn't have anything extremely pressing with work that we decided you know what let's just drive the rest of the way and get it done so we got back on the road and we drove for another six hours or so and we arrived in reading california in reading we needed gas we needed to eat and we needed to take a break get out and stretch our legs while i was refueling the truck i took a look at google maps and i saw that we had another three or four hours until we actually arrived outside of the redwood national forest it was around 4 pm in the afternoon and we were probably going to arrive a little bit after a right at dusk now even though i factored extra time on top of what google was giving me i did not factor in that we were going to be passing through a substantial mountain range and not only that was that we were going to be passing through one of the most dangerous passes in the country if you guys have ever seen the documentary murder mountain on netflix i'd highly recommend it but this was the mountain range that we were going to be passing through humboldt county has a lot of marijuana fields and they attract a dangerous element and we were going to be driving through the primary drug corridor of these this area so we got back on the road with no clue with what was about to happen about one hour after we left reading we began to climb into the mountains and i felt a very strange movement on the right hand side of the rig so i looked in the side mirror and i saw debris from the tire flying off to the side and i knew that we had blown a tire thankfully i was able to pull off to the side of the road relatively quickly and i jumped out to go swap the tire now to my utter disappointment i saw how much damage these this blown tire did it had left marks all over the side of the trailer ripped apart the wheel well although knowing that we were under a really tight time frame i just had to ignore that and swap out the tire as quickly as i could so that we could get back on the road so that we wouldn't be arriving past dark for the next hour the highway had a lot of twists and turns and ups and downs it was just putting a lot of strain and pressure on the truck and the trailer and all of a sudden i got a notification warning on the dashboard of the truck saying that the trailers brakes had been disconnected so obviously this is a huge problem and right as i saw this there was a turnout coming up so thankfully i was able to pull off once again without too much time passing i jumped out of the truck thinking that the cable between the trailer and the truck became loose because that had happened before but i came over and i saw that that wasn't the case so then i went to the other side of the trailer to just check on the axles and the wheels and what i saw caused my heart just to sink the hub connecting the tire to the axle had completely snapped off i have no clue how that tire didn't just go flying off because there was nothing or it seemed like there was nothing really keeping it attached to the trailer and yet there it was although at a very disturbing angle now we wouldn't find this out until much later but what happened was that the hub simply overheated we had been driving for over 10 hours and in combination with us doing all of the twists and turns and ups and downs all that extra pressure added which resulted in the hub failing since we were deep in the mountains there was no cell service so we couldn't call roadside assistance or any other help and it was also getting dark so really it didn't leave us a lot of options aside from pretty much unhooking the truck from the trailer and leaving it there for the night uh we were exhausted and decided that the best option was to find a motel get a good night's sleep and call roadside assistance in the morning now just in case we took out all of our valuables from the trailer and we started our drive down the road hoping for a place to stay after about a half hour of driving we realized that we were not going to find anything in the area and that we were going to have to drive all the way to the coast which i was not happy about because that was an hour away and by the time we actually arrived there the only thing that we could find that had availability and accepted dogs was in a drug infested neighborhood it was not easy to sleep that night because my mind was racing thinking of all the things that we needed to do the logistics the costs the time frames the repairs whether the trailer was okay obviously i did not want to leave it along the side of the road and on top of that being in a horrible sketchy neighborhood in this motel the next morning we woke up and i started making phone calls to the repair shops as well as the roadside assistance and because i didn't have internet when we left the trailer i did not have the exact gps coordinates but i knew generally where the trailer was so we had to drive back to the trailer to get those coordinates so that we could give them to the roadside assistance and then they could dispatch a truck to come pick it up after a quick breakfast we drove the hour and a half back to the trailer which was thankfully undisturbed we took pictures requested by the repair shop we got the gps coordinates and then we locked everything back up now we drove to a nearby town which is about 30 minutes away so that we could have cell service and call for the tow truck our roadside assistance was with our insurance provider progressive now i've never used it before but based off of my experience with working with other services like aaa it should be relatively straightforward you call them you let them know that you need help or pick up they collect various information from you like the gps coordinates and then they give you a confirmation time and then you just wait that is not what happened at all to summarize we had to make multiple phone calls too progressive to check the status on our request but because they use call centers each time you call you have to speak with a different agent who knows nothing about your case which means you have to re-explain everything again and at the same time each agent that we spoke with tried to turn our request into an insurance claim which is not what we wanted because that would further complicate things it was so frustrating and even thinking about it right now makes my blood boil it took almost eight hours to finally get a confirmation that a tow truck was on its way after getting that confirmation we could finally go back to the trailer which that entire time of us sitting in that town for eight hours in the back of my mind a little voice was saying what if the trailer got hit what if someone tried to break into the trailer what if this happened what if that happened and i had to push those thoughts to the side and just hope that everything was going to be okay upon pulling up to the trailer everything looked fine at first glance i got out of the truck and i was walking up to the trailer i noticed that the front storage compartment was open and i was thinking oh maybe we just forgot to close it or maybe someone just broke into the front storage compartment it ended up being a lot worse i opened up the storage compartment and i noticed that quite a few things were gone so the next obvious thing that we needed to look was the main cabin now we absolutely locked everything before we left and so when i went and i tested the door to the main cabin and it opened i knew that we were in big trouble we slowly opened up the door just in case someone was inside but thankfully it was empty but our worst case scenario became a reality whoever was inside was smoking so the entire trailer reeked of cigarette smoke which just added insult to injury knowing that there was someone in there casually smoking a cigarette as they cherry picked our things that they wanted to take thankfully the trailer slides were closed which blocked the main living room area the kitchen and the back of the trailer so the thieves kept their focus on the front of the trailer which had the bathroom and the bedroom we feel pretty confident that there was a man and a woman because all of barbara's clothes her jewelries and makeup and accessories were all taken some of my things were taken not everything which was very strange but all of the tools were gone we had our bikes on the back of the trailer which i had thankfully locked to the ladder but they even stole the tires off of those bikes days later we would determine that about 5 000 of our things were stolen as you can probably imagine barbara and i were at a breaking point it just seemed like everything was going wrong one thing after another and that there was nothing that we could do to stop it it was difficult to think and my head was spinning typically in the past i would go into emergency mode where i would just stay super focused to get everything resolved or try to figure out a way to fix it but in this time there was nothing and instead that focus was replaced by anger i was incredibly angry at the situation i was angry at progressive and i was angry at those thieves for stealing our things to this day we have no clue how the thieves got into the trailer i'm thinking that they have that standard rv key that you can use on all generic rv locks we had not yet upgraded to that rv lock with the key code with that said i wanted to call the police but because the tow truck was on its way and that the town with cell service was over 30 minutes away there simply was not enough time to drive back to the town call and deal with the police and then go back to the trailer and on top of that it would have resulted in one of us having to to stay with a trailer or leaving the trailer vulnerable and so we just made the decision to stay with a trailer unpack our things and prepare for when the tow truck arrived while we were packing up we heard another car pull up behind the trailer and it was a young couple and they wanted to see if we needed any help and if we were okay which i thought was incredibly considerate so both barbara and i came out and we started talking to them and while we were very much appreciative at first as we started to talk to them we realized that there was something wrong there was something strange with their speech pattern the questions that they were asking us seemed off and they were trying to engage in like normal chit chat which ignoring the fact that we had just been robbed it just was a very very strange interaction for example the guy had asked me if i was interested in selling the trailer it's like um really i'm broken down along the side of the road and i'm waiting for a tow truck and you want to come and buy my trailer for me it just it was very very weird now keep in mind during this entire exchange i was having a hard time thinking my brain really was not working properly i was just so tired and so i didn't really put things together until after they left and so after they left barbara and i started talking about it and we were pretty sure that they were on some sort of drug and in addition to that they probably had something to do with the theft either they were the ones that did it or someone that did it told them about it and they were coming to see if they could get some things as well in that moment we did not have the luxury of time so we just needed to focus on getting everything out of the trailer into the truck and be ready for when the tow truck arrived and before we knew it the tow truck had arrived which was such a relief because at least one thing was going in our favor and while it was not easy to get everything hooked up because our tools had been stolen and the tow truck driver unfortunately did not have his own set of tools but thankfully we're able to figure out a solution get the trailer up onto that flatbed and it was on its way to the the repair shop in reading earlier we had booked a hotel room so we were headed in that exact same direction and once we were in the truck and we were driving we felt like we were through the worst of it fortunately things would go in our favor over the next four days the next day i went to the repair shop they received the trailer and they amazingly told us that they could get everything repaired within a few days which was actually a shock i was planning for the worst case scenario considering that it was coved times and there were shortages on all sorts of different rv parts and so you better believe that we were so so happy and thankful that we would be getting our trailer back in a in a very short period of time despite the hub breaking the axle and the spindle which is what attaches to the hub were undamaged so we were so so happy to hear that news in addition to this we also had them fix all the damage that tire blowout did to the side of the trailer we had them repack and re-grease all of the wheel bearings we got new tires and we had them inspect the trailer to make sure that there wasn't anything else that we were forgetting so that we can make sure that we are traveling as problem-free as we could over the next you know few months dealing with the insurance on these repairs was very straightforward and simple in comparison to when we totaled our trailer before maybe it was because it was a low dollar amount but everything was processed and approved very quickly and so that was great on the other hand the theft claim was much much different in the end progressive denied our claim the primary reason was that we had no proof that anyone had broken into the trailer and stole our things and their version or their definition of proof was essentially forced entry if the window would have been broken or if it would have appeared that a crowbar was used to open up the front door or the storage compartments or anything along those lines they would have approved the claim but because we think that they used a standard rv key that can open up a generic lock there was no damage for them to enter and because of that that was their sole reason for you know denying our claim as i said before we couldn't call the police because we didn't have cell service at the trailer and did not have enough time to drive back to the town and back to the trailer before the tow truck arrived but the following day we did call the police and report the theft but because the police could not come and physically inspect the trailer in the time of when we discovered the theft it didn't really affect the insurance claim at all now we tried to fight it with the california board of insurance and they reviewed our case but unfortunately they came back and they agreed with progressive so there was nothing we could do i was furious how progressive because in my opinion they caused the theft when i had called the roadside assistance department i explained the situation multiple times that our home our trailer was sitting along the side of the road and that someone could come along at any moment and either hit the trailer break into the trailer who knows what could have happened and yet their department had no urgency essentially i felt like we were robbed twice once by the thieves and again by progressive so i highly recommend i implore you do not use progressive roadside assistance the tow truck driver even told us that if we would have used something like aaa that there was a much higher chance that their his company would have been out there a lot faster while we were waiting on the trailer we got caught up on work and we even got to explore reading a little bit but there was one big lingering question that we needed to answer and that question was were we going to continue our rv travels and it really was not a difficult decision to make both barbara and i quickly said no we're done despite all of our amazing experiences we just couldn't seem to escape the constant a barrage of problems from the start of 2020 we totaled our trailer we were displaced for six weeks while we found his replacement kovid started we unexpectedly lost our beloved dog roomie we were caught in the middle of the wildfires on the west coast which forced us to flee south only to have an axle failure in the middle of the mountains of northern california we were robbed and then had to get our trailer fixed i don't think anyone would fault us for quitting our full-time rv travels after everything that we had gone through in the 2020 year looking back at it now we don't think that we would have quit if it wasn't for the robbery i think that we would have just had the trailer towed to the repair shop gotten everything fixed and continued along our way but that robbery made us feel incredibly violated and it was just the straw that broke the camel's back and really we were at the end of our itinerary already now we were going to miss things like yosemite which is a big one sequoia national park in death valley but we just thought you know we can always come back if we really want to see those things so we began planning our trip back to the east coast now as you may have seen in our earlier videos our time off the road was a temporary one so in the next video i'll go into what it was like getting off the road and getting back into a sticks and bricks house that's going to do it for today's video and conclude our 2020 rv travels i sincerely hope that you learn from our mistakes so you do not have to go and experience the same kind of problems that we did but if anybody has any questions please leave them down below and i will be happy to answer them i hope you enjoyed today's video and if you did i'd really appreciate it if you give it a thumbs up and if you loved it please consider subscribing lastly if you stuck around this long i have added a video from the night that we discovered the robbery and the tow truck was picking up the trailer now most of that has already been explained in this video but you'll just see how exhausted we are after going through that horrible ordeal anyway thank you for watching and we will see you in the next one goodbye guys oh my gosh tell them a little bit i'll tell them a little bit yeah of the yesterday today let's see everything was good we were escaping the fires of oregon and coming south where we were told the smoke wasn't so bad along the coast and uh yeah everything was fine and then what was it after we got through reading we got a flat tire actually a blowout no actually when we got close to band the smoke was not great so we decided to keep driving to california yeah yep so we had already been driving for two hours and i just didn't really think about how much driving it was and anyways uh we got a blowout um after passing reading and i got out i've switched out the tire and we were back on the road and it seemed like okay that was a bummer because it did some damage but you know it's like okay well we're gonna [Music] it's like the worst of it um but an hour later i got a signal in the truck saying that the trailer brakes were disconnected so i pulled over i um i took a look we took a look at the the same tire and the entire axle that the canister the thing that connects the tire to the axle just broke like the metal was just broken uh and so i knew we just weren't going anywhere and we were not in a great position we were like still an hour and 15 minutes away from eureka and you know so we didn't really have much of a choice other than leave the trailer here drive in because there was no cell service we had no cell service and so yeah it's just been a i guess this is part one of our horrible ordeal so [Music] you

Channel: Wanderin While We Can

Views: 57,901

Keywords: theft & rv camping, rv robbery, rv theft, rv breakdown, rv wildfires, Do not use progressive, why we quit rving, why we quit full time rving, why we quit full time RV life, 2020 rv travels, travel trailer accident, rv traveling the usa, rv life full time, wanderinwhilewecan, wildfires 2020, west coast fires, progressive sucks, humbolt county, drug corridor, surviving murder mountain, rv lifestyle, rv travel, rv life, rv living

Id: nn0JwnI0HVM

Length: 32min 23sec (1943 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2022