RV Lessons Learned

I thought I’d write a few notes about the RV. If you’ve rented one before, then you would know all of these things, but we had to find out the hard way! And it’s sort of amusing the problems we had, figuring the whole RV thing out.

1) Make sure all the cabinets, refrigerator door, and the RV’s side door are locked before setting out. We picked up the RV, unpacked our stuff into all the cabinets, nooks, and crannies, then went immediately to a grocery store to stock up for the week. We bought a ton of food, stowed it all, then as we pulled out of the parking lot and took the first right, the refrigerator door flew open and stuff poured out rolling everywhere. Or, we would leave parking lots and forget to lock a cabinet or 2 and stuff would come flying out as we were driving down the road. And once, we forgot to lock the side door and that thing flew open as we were driving. All of these events are accompanied by loud shrieks from our children, “Stop the car! Oh my gosh! Everything is falling out! AAAHHH! We forgot to lock the door!”

2) Fill the toilet flushing water tank separately from the main water tank. We were using our RV toilet (basically a porta-potty) for a few days, then suddenly it stopped flushing. We would press the little flush-the-toilet button, but no water would come out to flush the stuff down. We went about 10 hours with it like that. We didn’t know what was wrong with it, since we had plenty of water to wash our hands with in the bathroom and we had water running in the kitchen sink as well. And, we knew the water tank had been topped off every day and we figured, “it’s an RV, how many water tanks can it have?” Well, apparently 2, which we found out after searching through the instructional DVD. The waste water tank is separate (and smaller) and has to be refilled often.



3) Leave the ladder to the upper bunk down while driving. We stowed the ladder to the upper bunk (the double bed that is right above the driver’s seat) every morning because the location of it,when it is down is right in the aisle way from the front seat to the back. So we thought it was inconvenient, because it was hard to get around and we didn’t really want the kids up top, we wanted them to stay down at the table where the seatbelts were. But of course, the kids wanted to go up and down, and unbeknownst to us, they started using the table to climb up. Eventually, after a few days of that, Jacob broke the table. We heard a horrible cracking noise and he and the table fell. He was unhurt luckily and quickly said, “I am SO sorry!” The other kids had been doing it, but he weighs more, so that was bound to happen. Luckily Paul MacGyver-ed it back together, after we bought a screwdriver from a local hardware store, so we didn’t get charged. It looked like that had happened before. So we learned our lesson and left the ladder down the rest of the trip.


4) Store upright sauces/bottles tightly together in the cabinets & refrigerator. On the second to the last day in our RV, we had much less food then, since we were trying to finish everything off before we turned it in. So we had a cabinet with upright bottles of olive oil, ketchup, soy sauce, Worchester sauce (things we borrowed from Cheryl for our 10 day trip)… stuff like that. But we had cleared out a lot of things and they were on one end in the cabinet, but as we drove, inevitably with all the vibration, they fell over and one spilled, which of course was the bottle of fish sauce. The kids started yelling, “Stop the car! There’s something leaking out of the cabinet and it smells like dog poo!” (They always said, “Stop the car!” if anything happened.)
So why, you ask, did I have a bottle of fish sauce? And that leads me to my last lesson learned.

5) Lower your expectations. I had unrealistic expectations of being in an RV. I thought it would be like being in a house or apartment, and I was going to whip up amazing delicious dishes, like I would at home. But it was much more like camping, making simple meals and showering using the RV facilities, not our porta-potty bathroom/shower. Don’t get me wrong, we had a great time in it and there was almost no whining, complaining, or fighting from the kids. Also, we didn’t have to stop for meals or to go to the bathroom, so that was the only way we could do that many miles in such a short time. And we would definitely do it again. It’s just not as luxurious as I had imagined. I don't know why I had that expectation to begin with, I mean, is it from TV? Or did I think we were traveling in one of those rock band converted bus things they use when they're on tour? In any event, we enjoyed the experience and highly recommend it.



Right now we are in Tokyo. We've been in Japan for about a week. It's been quite whirlwind. There is so much to see in Japan, we are barely scratching the surface. But it has been really nice, since we got to stay with my gracious cousins, Ben & Teresa, in Hiroshima and we also got to see a friend of mine from high school, Bill, in Tokyo. So seeing some friendly faces has made Japan even more pleasant. I'll post about it in detail with pictures hopefully soon. We head to Seoul, Korea in 2 days.