Another Thinking about a Motorhome

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Ted’s Thread is working on being one of the top longest thread and I have enjoyed reading it especially as my (spoiler alert) own motorhome adventure began. So here is my own thread.

To I keep it lightly Aviation Related, I primarily use my RV’s to attend Soaring Competition and Events

Warning this story started last January so there is a lot of catching up to do AKA Long. On the other hand I seem to have some time on my hands at the moment so lets tell the story. And actually with my backstory below it started about 2008. I don’t post a lot simply because I am usually to busy to do so. Photos included because I know threads without photos are useless.

Part 1. The Back Story aka Before the Motorhome.

In about 2008 my folks decided to upgrade from their 1984 23’ Bumper Pull Komfort travel trailer and asked if we should like to buy it to replace our even older Tent trailer. It was in good condition and well taken care of so we bought that and pulled it with our 1995 F-150 for about 10 years.

In 2016 my wife was T-boned on her motorcycle and lost her left Leg. Part of that was we had to replace the F-150 (Stick Shift) with a Nissan Titan (Automatic and Suicide door.) The suicide door ended up being awesome for her as she could toss her wheel chair in the back and hop in the drivers seat. BTW I have an awesome wife she was driving with two months of her accident and was riding a Can-Am Spider with 6 months. She is the one that drives the trucks in the family, I drive the 2002 Toyota Corolla to commute between home, work and the airport, because it gets great gas mileage and has just enough towing capacity to tow my glider short distances.






In 2018 my wife found a 30 foot 5th wheel Toy Hauler on craigslist and thinking it would be great to bring her Can-Am Spyder along, so we went and looked at. We really liked it, BUT there was no way the Nissan Titan was going to tow it. So we started looking for toy Haulers that a 1/2ton truck would tow.

Not liking anything we could find used, we ended up buying 2018 TQ300 ToyHauler bumper pull. I thought I would prefer the bumper pull over a 5th wheel. I didn’t like losing the bed of the pickup that I could carry an ATV in. In hind sight my opinion is any bumper pull over about 26ft to 30ft is more for camping/living than pulling, great if you going pull short distances, but otherwise there is reason you see so many 5th wheels. Namely bumper pulls that long it take a bit of engineering and magic to get them to pull decent without swaying. Or just tow them with something ridiculously oversized to for towing it. It is doable but 5th wheels don’t require the precise balance of equipment that long bumper pulls do. Fortunately most of my trip are no more than 300miles from home.

Also turns out I hate buying any vehicle new. I am sure there are exceptions if you buy really high end RV’s but for the most part new vehicles are stripped down with none of the accessories and upgrades they need. It didn’t help that the Coleman was a low end RV. But it served our purposes, I had a generator I mounted on the stand on the front. Added storage for the black water hoses. Added an Inverter and quick drains for winterizing. Added an Awning over the slide-out, a necessity if you don’t want climb up there and sweep it off every time you extend it under trees. I was working on how to fix the separate Gray and Black water drain hookups, and getting some sort of stabilizer for the stabilizing jacks to help stop side to side movement when parked. Buying a used vehicle, usually the previous owners have figured out many of the inconveniences and upgrade/fix’s for them have already been done

Stay Tuned for Part 2… The Coleman

 

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Part 2. More BackStory, The Coleman

So we took the Coleman on it’s inaugural trip just a weekend trip about 60 miles away. What I learned was the Titan had every towing option imaginable so I assumed it was rated to the Max towing capacity for Nissan Titan’s. I was wrong. It towed great with lots of power in 3rd gear, but even on flat ground it could just barely tow with overdrive, which meant it was always towing at High RPM’s and shifting between drive and 3rd. It has been a couple years so my details may be a bit fuzzy (it might have been 2nd gear) but suffice it seemed obvious to me that towing any distance or grade with it was going to be out of the question. An actual check of the data plate showed that it did not have the towing differential installed thus its towing capacity was about 2000lbs less than max. Yes I should have checked that 1st.

So now we are truck shopping, short version is we ended up trading the Nissan for a 2006 4dr GMC 2500. I thought would should stick with suicide door for ease of access for her, but she insisted she liked the 4door crew cab and could make that work. I know better than to argue with her. This ended up towing acceptably I thought transmission gearing could have been a bit better and much over about 75mph it would start to get some light sway going, but I rarely need to or want to go over 70.

So now we had bought a new trailer and new (to us) truck. It turns out most of the glider pilots I fly with have Class A motor homes. They also have significantly more resources than I do. I am the budget flyer of the bunch, But it occurred to me for the money we had put into the truck and trailer, we probably could have bought a nice used Class A Motor home. I mentioned this to my wife and she seemed rather uninterested. Like we just bought a truck and trailer we are not going to do something else now, which was a response I expected and agreed with. But I thought i might have got a “that would have been a good idea, if we had known” or something like that.


On a couple occasions I found a motorhome that looked interesting on craigslist and showed it to my wife and each time I got a pretty cool response from her, she would look at the ad but wasn’t very interested in anything. By this time Ted’s “Thinking about a Motorhome” thread was going strong which kept my interest at least a little bit alive.

Stay Tuned for Part 3. The Motorhome