Have you ever had the no camper blues? Let me tell you, it stinks! We have been without a camper now for two weeks. In March, we spent almost three weeks in it and our whole family absolutely loved it. Our ultimate goal is to move into it full time and sell our home. We thought that we would be living in it already and have our house sold, but those plans took an unforeseen turn.

As you may have read in an earlier post, we purchased a membership to a local private RV park near where I work, called Tres Rios RV Resort. That membership allows us to stay there at no cost for up to three weeks! This is going to come in very handy over the summer at the very least. 

We plan on staying there for the max that we can according to my work schedule and then spend a week at home. This will allow us to enjoy our time in our camper doing what we want to do and it will allow our kids to enjoy all the things that Tres Rios has to offer. 

The icing on the cake of this is that we have about 40 solar panels on our home and can produce and send back to our electric company 50+ kilowatts per day on days that we are home. Since we won’t be home and won’t be using any power to speak of, we are going to be sending back even more. All the power that we produce gets banked for later usage until the first of the year, when the power company will send us a check for it!

We Have The Blues

Over the past five months or so that we have had our camper, we have gone camping several times. Most of those times were just for a few days, with the last time being several weeks. Every time that it is time to pack up and leave our kids get super cranky and depressed. They constantly say that they don’t want to leave. We no more than pull into the driveway most of the time and they start acting totally opposite of how they acted during the camping trip. 

I’m sure that it has something to do with the fact that there is less stuff to do at home. They can’t ride their bikes any more than in our driveway. There aren’t any activities to do. All this takes its toll on them.

Honestly, it takes a toll on us as well. We have pretty well stripped our house to bare minimum when we had our house up for sale and basically live in about a third of the entire house while we are there. This makes it where the stuff that is required of us in the house, like cleaning, is at a bare minimum. While we are home, my wife and I have this sense that we should be doing something while we are there and oftentimes at the end of the day we feel like we didn’t get anything done. Even though there really isn’t anything to get done.

What’s Wrong With Our Camper

The second camping trip that we took, we noticed that we had water leaking behind the toilet. I checked it out, because I am somewhat of a handy guy. If it was something easy, I could probably fix that. I looked at the connection and thought that maybe the leak was where the water line connected to the back of the toilet. So I tried to take the hose off and put some teflon tape on the connection and see if that fixed it. 

Unfortunately, it did not fix it and upon further examination, I realized that it was coming from the top of the connection, not the thread side. Being that we had wanted to spend as much time as possible in our camper now, we decided to install a shut off valve inline with the supply hose and just keep it off until we needed to flush the toilet. 

When we were packing up to go home after our next camping trip, I noticed that the black tank valve would not shut. After messing with it for a while, I accidentally bent the shut off cable which made it worse. Later while using a plumbing snake to make sure the tank was empty, we located a rather large piece of flooring styrofoam logged in the pipe where the gate shuts.

A couple days after we got home, we had a pretty significant rain storm and noticed that there was water all over our kitchen counter and down on the floor. Guess what, there was a leak in the window seal!

For this being a brand new trailer, that was literally only built four months prior to us purchasing it, it sure has more than its share of problems. The last problem reared its ugly head on our last camping trip. The last one was the first time that it had been warm enough that we had to fire up the second air conditioner in the trailer. When we came inside for the evening and were getting ready for bed, we found out that our bed was wet and it was coming from the A/C unit above it!

That did it for us, it was time to take it in for fixing and hope that the repairs wouldn’t take too long. We were in for a surprise…

Time To Take It In

While we were still on our last camping trip, we called and made an appointment to bring our camper in to get fixed. When we made the appointment, we learned that the appointment was only for a repair needed diagnosis. Once a technician looked at our camper, they would then have to turn it into the warrant department and wait on a response from them. While they were waiting our camper would be taken out of the shop and stored outside. 

We were told that if they had to order parts for whatever was wrong it could take four to six weeks to get the parts in. They did say if they had to order parts that we could come and get our camper if it was in safe working order, then we could bring it back after parts arrived and they would put the camper in the queue to be fixed. 

They couldn’t tell us how long that would take though. So there was a potential that we could be without our camper for two or more months! That was not what we wanted to hear. This is prime camping time!

Status of Our Camper

We dropped our camper off on April 4, 2023 and were told at drop off that it would be three to six days before it would be looked at. That was more than what I wanted to hear, but the dealership we bought it from is the #1 selling towable dealership in the nation, so they are pretty busy. Nothing could be done about the time frame so it was something we just had to accept.

The following Tuesday, we still had not received a call saying that they checked it out yet, so we gave them a call. We were told then that they were running behind and they were closed on Friday and Saturday for Easter and that it would hopefully be looked at by the end of the week or the beginning of the next.

By the two week mark, we still had not heard anything on the status of it and honestly I was getting a little upset. I tried to call in and talk with the person that was our contact, but she did not answer so I had to leave a message. A couple hours later, I still had not heard back from her so I called again. This time they told me that she was not there that day and sent me to someone else to try and answer my questions.

When someone finally came on the line, she said that they did get it in and was able to determine what was wrong with it. This is what we were told:

1. The handle on the black tank was bent. Nothing was said about the chunk of styrofoam that we saw inside.
2. The flush system on the back of the toilet was leaking and would have to be replaced
3. The seal around the kitchen window has some holes in it and would have to be patched
4. Some of the hoses in the a/c unit were not sealed where the connections were and was causing the cooled air to be mixed with the outside air causing the condensation

Basically all the stuff that I figured that it was, but unfortunately unable to repair myself. I guess I am going to have to start learning so this doesn’t happen again.

That was yesterday. Today I got a call from our actual rep which basically said the same thing. However he did add that our camper had a recall on it. One that had to do with electronic stabilizer jacks. She said that the back of the switches are not water tight and there is a possibility that while we are driving down the road the jacks could start extending on their own. 

WOW!

Just that part of it could be three to four weeks to get replaced. Hopefully they can fix the other stuff now and can take it back when the new switches come in, if it is going to take that long.

So now we wait…

We wait on them to hear back from the warrant department. We wait for any parts to come in that they have to order. Then we wait for them to get back to our camper to get it fixed. Then more than likely, when they call to come and pick it up we wait until my day off to go and get it.

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Until it’s time to hitch up the camper again,

Happy Camping!

NOTE: This is an old post from when earlier this year(2023) when we first starting our blog. I am posting old blog post first to get caught up the present then I will start posting new ones.