Our Test Trip. AKA The Shakedown Trip

Okay, now you have your rig. But don’t jump in and hit the road blindly. It is always best to do a test trip. AKA, the shakedown trip. A campground or area close to home. Take a weekend or a week. Get to know how things work, how you set up and tear down, and how it handles going down the road. Get to know your rig on a personal level.

Will you learn everything the first time out? Nope. Rvlife has its learning curves every day. Nothing is perfect all the time. EVER.

What do you bring? I have always traveled with weather in mind. It could be hot or cold. You will overpack and you will forget something. Everybody does. You do have to be mindful of how much weight you are loading into all those cabinets and storage bays. This is the time to see what you need and what you don’t have a use for in your rig. Don’t get me wrong, four months in I still come across items I thought I would need, and I haven’t touched once.

So let’s get into our test trip.

Our planned trip was five days. I grocery-shopped the day before. We were stocked on drinks, coffee, dinners, snacks, and breakfast foods. The dogs had enough food and treats, their dog coats, and blankets, and we had dog waste bags (you will need these if you travel with pets). I had been packing up our rig throughout the week. Transferring household items into the RV. Shopping at home is always the best place to start. Bedding, towels, dishes, cookware, utensils, silverware, cups, and coffee cups (coffee is important). I packed the inside Wolf packed the exterior. His tools, a small air compressor, sewer hose, water hoses, chairs, outdoor table, and our blackstone grill and butane burner. We are not newbies. We had experience with camping. I felt confident we had all we needed for a week-long trip. All we had to do on travel day was pack our backpacks with clothes, toothbrushes, socks, underwear, and jammies, then we were good to go.

We left Las Vegas around ten in the morning, two hours past our target time. Don’t stress over leave times, it’s OK.

So, our first rest stop was in Kingman, AZ. Only one hundred miles from Vegas. We pulled into the TA truckstop for a quick check on how things were traveling. The dogs were okay. Nothing fell over or out of the cupboards. I went into the store to grab us a couple of coffees. Wolf rolled down the driver’s window for me to hand him his cup of java and we heard the scratchy noise. (Now, we are familiar with this sound.) And sure enough, he tried to roll up the window, and instead of up it dropped down inside the door panel.

The month before, we had this same issue with our van. Scratchy noise and into the door the window fell. DeJaVu. Ugh!

We have an inside joke, Wolf MacGyveres things, and he’s good at it. Always prepared with his tools and he watched a quick YouTube video on how to remove the door panel. We started the task to get the window in a closed position. Together we worked the window up just enough to loop some string underneath the bottom of the cable mechanism to hold the window in place.

String? Do we carry string? Yes, we do. We use to own a pop-up tent trailer and before that, we did tent camping. The roll of packing string was in the camping gear bucket and we never took it out. (Thankful for that!) You never know when old-fashioned, junk drawer items are useful.

Now that the window was secured we continued on our trip. Like I said, that’s RV life. Calmly, take a moment to think things through and issues will work out. We have an outside windshield cover so we put that on at night to cover the gap in the window. This happened in March so we weren’t concerned about bugs. *NOTE add to the list- order new window mechanism.

I had pre-planned areas to visit with our first overnight stop booked into a campground. The rest of the trip was a let’s see where we wanted to go next. No bookings were made. We still travel like this. I don’t do a lot of pre-planning too far in advance.

Seligman, AZ KOA, was our destination for the night. (Highly recommend this campground.) Seligman KOA is located at the end of the Kingman to Seligman Route 66 just off Interstate 40.

Ah yes, Interstate 40. Talk about a shakedown. The winter of 2023, everyone knows, was a bad and weird year. Snow in parts of Southern California? Well, in Arizona the snowstorm that had closed Interstate 40 between Kingman and Flagstaff a few months before did some damage, serious damage to I-40 East. The road was so bad there were (/is?) Ruts that are about three feet long and six inches deep. I counted six cars pulled over to the side of the road with flat tires and/or damaged rims. There was a truck with an oversized flatbed load of panels in front of us, and we watched as his load shifted and the top panels began to slide over to the side. The driver eventually had to pull over. This is no exaggeration. I should have taken a photo. That insane part of the interstate should have been closed or repaired before allowing traffic to go through. Shame on you, Arizona. 👎

After our stressful day, we did get a good night of sleep. The motorhome is very well insulated. I know this because it was 34 degrees when we woke up. It was chilly but not freezing inside the motorhome. This was a great time to test the heater. It is a propane heater with a thermostat. I set it to 70 degrees, turned the on switch, and it screeched so loud the dogs flew out of bed! Scrambling to turn it off we had to wait for the fan to stop spinning. Wolf was pounding the cabinet to try and knock the fan back into place or something. It eventually shut down. Well, good morning neighbors sorry for interrupting your sleep. It was early, the sun was just beginning to peak over the mountains. NOTE* added to the list- fix the fan on the heater.

Coffee. Coffee is always the first order of the day. We had our coffee and leashed up the dogs for morning piddles. We went outside and there were patches of ice. The rain puddle from the day before was a tiny frozen pond. I was grateful I put our winter coats in the closet. It was cold 🥶.

Back inside it was time to get dressed and get ready to hit the road. It was at this moment I realized “the forgot” items. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, deodorant and the worst – my hair brush! I am one of those people who carries everything. I started digging through bags and found a hair pick in my work messenger bag. Whew! A washcloth wipe down and I went on with my day. See, sometimes it comes in handy to put random stuff “just in case”.

Once the beautiful sun rose and it warmed up, the ice melted away, and we prepped for our travel day. We drove down Route 66 to the Kingman Museum. We stopped a couple of times along the way.

The elevator to go down into the caverns was closed for repairs. No worries, not sure I could go that far down without a slight panic attack.

It looks backward on a map to make the big circle, but it was the plan. Drive this Arizona portion of Route 66, go down toward Needles, CA for more Route 66, loop up through Laughlin, and head home.

We stopped at KOA in Needles, CA. (I recommend this KOA, less $$ than its neighbor park). Here it was warmer and we were able to test the A/C.

We were talking to our neighbors about traveling and the gal said on their test trip she forgot to pack clothes. 🤣🤣 You will forget something. It never fails. We had another good night’s sleep and headed out for another travel day.

This was in a casino parking lot in Laughlin, NV that offers free camping. It was a little crowded and too close to the road, and no easy place to walk the dogs
We opted to pass and go home a couple days early.

Did you do a test trip in your rig? What did you forget? Let me know in the comments below.

Overall, we had no major issues. The rig ran great, and everything worked. She just needed some minor maintenance touch-ups. Nothing we couldn’t fix or handle ourselves. The trip was to test our Daisy’s roadworthiness and test a few things out. We did confirm; the heater works, (needs some WD40) but it did turn on. The A/C worked great. The city water and water pump worked. We were warm when it was cold, and cool when it was hot. Both the cab and the coach heating and cooling worked great. It was quiet and cozy at night. We were comfortable and knew we picked the right rig for us.

Thank you for checking out this blog. I hope you’ll give it a like 👍. Subscribe for future blogs on our full-time adventures. Next Sunday’s post will be about our launch day. There’s no turning back now.