Once we purchased our new RV, our next step was to get her! The RV was in Huntsville AL, and we are currently about 7 hours away in Florida, where are working on renovating a rental home that we bought. Jeff, the guy we bought the RV from, was nice enough to offer to drive it just south of Birmingham, so we agreed to meet him there. We met in a parking lot just outside of Oak Mountain State Park, where we had previously arranged to spend a few nights. We spent a few hours with Jeff talking about the RV, and Deas took it for a test drive.
Then, with me following with the dogs in the car, and Jeff in the passenger seat, Deas drove it into the state park, and parked it in our camping site! He did a great job!!
Jeff helped us get all our hook ups in place, and then, we were on our own. We were really excited but knew we had so much to learn. We let the dogs onto the RV and let them have a good sniff around. Once they found a dog bed, toys, and food, they were good to go.
We ended up spending 4 nights in the campground, and overall everything went great! We did make a few small mistakes. We tripped the circuit breaker twice by having too many things running at once. While Deas was outside one night looking for something in the underneath storage bins, he left one open and we didn’t realize it until the morning. Luckily, there was nothing important inside! When we were closing the slides, we forgot to pull the passenger chair forward and there was suddenly a loud POP! which gave us a heart attack, but didn’t seem to do any damage.
But, we did some things right too! We figured out a rope system to keep the dogs nearby and tied up while we are outside, but still allow them room to move around.
We cooked a few meals, including sausage and eggs, jambalaya, brats on the grill, and hamburgers.
And, perhaps most importantly, we manged to dump all the black and gray tanks without any issue!
We even hosted our first guests! Our friends Sean and Kristy, who are avid RVers themselves (longlonghoneymoon.com), happen to live in Birmingham and joined us for take-out Thai food one night. We had a great time hearing all of their stories while drinking wine around the fireplace.
On Saturday, we packed everything up, and Deas drove the RV all by himself (with me in the car behind him) all the way back to FL. Once again, he did a GREAT job. We got home just in time to see this lovely sunset as we were passing over the bay.
Can’t wait for our next trip!
Nealys on Wheels 