11/05/08 A new RV

We have made some changes!  After we left Mom’s house over the weekend, we spent a day with Theresa and Tom Haller, then went to Sherrard to visit Lonnie and Chris for a day. We had a great visit, but both mornings we had to jump-start the RV. That problem continued, and at one point the RV wouldn’t go over 50 miles per hour – which is bad news on the freeway. Randy put some additive in the gas and it seemed to help, but by then we had decided to either get a different RV or stop RVing. Our RV felt like it was always on the brink of breaking down. And when we traveled in it, we realized it didn’t have enough space for full-timing. Full-timing is a combination of traveling and staying put, and when we traveled in that RV, everything was unbearably cramped; there was no way to organize it. Plus we still have a few things in storage that we could not fit into it.


So we stopped at every RV lot on the way home. We looked at lots of them, some new and some used. The new ones are simply outrageously priced. As Randy says, “the new-car smell isn’t worth that kind of money.”  We found a couple we liked, but there was always something that indicated we shouldn’t buy yet. Then when we stopped at Lovell RV in Columbia and we found one we liked. From the outside it looks similar to our old RV but inside it is laid out better. It has more cabinets and a full refrigerator. The windows are double-pane. It has a slide-out in the living room, just like our old RV, but it also has a slide-out in the bedroom. It’s four years newer than our old RV and it feels more solid. The only things I didn’t like about it were the things Randy had updated in the old RV, like faucets and flooring. This new one could use that, too but we are going to try to avoid major changes for awhile.