Move Day Magic (and Mayhem): Life on the Road in an RV

A face full of sewer gasses…that’s what greeted me at 8 a.m. as I was disconnecting the hose between the camper and the sewer ground pipe. Could have been liquid instead of gas, so all things considered, it could have been worse. I wiped my watering eyes and kept moving. After completing the tear-down process, with rubber gloves disposed and a stinky slinky stowed, I de-crouched out from under the bedroom slide and massaged my lower back. I silently ruminated, “I don’t recall seeing this particular online post properly articulating the dream of hitting the open road.” Not the start of move day that I was hoping for.

Move day is never among the favorites on the calendar. It involves tearing down, travel and then finally setting up again. There’s an awful lot that has to happen in a (mostly) specific order to ensure smooth sailing. With two of us tending to the process, we’ve developed a rhythm in the course of the past year. Donelle handles the inside tasks, like making sure cabinets and the fridge will remain shut on your average highway cloverleaf. Essentially she stows away everything, and vacuums thoroughly so that we can retract three camper slides.

That leaves me with the tow vehicle and the outside stuff. In addition to being sanitation engineer there’s the obvious water and power lines to disconnect and stow and a slew of less obvious tasks. It boils down to Donelle and I playing a huge game of Tetris in packing all our personal belongings into confined spaces so that everything arrives at the next destination and does so in one piece. It’s a ballet set to a country two-step melody so we can waltz down the road. We found out early on that it’s hard to retrieve a surge protector from a campground when you’re 400 miles and two states away (that was my bad) and you can’t close the dining slide all the way with a broom handle leaning against it (that was Donelle.) We each have had our oopses. 

Prior to launching on this endeavor our online research touched only briefly on travel day. Some YouTube videos suggested creating a checklist of tasks to be completed while others suggested developing some sort of rigid routine in order to develop good habits and make sure every task is accounted for. That’s all well and good, but after a year of traveling, I can honestly say that my rigid routine is more like room temperature poutine. There are just SOOOO many variables.

We’ve parked on slopes ranging from uphill to downhill and leaning left or right with every variation of tilt in between. We’ve experienced wide-open skies, wind-blown vastness, campgrounds with a wide range of obstacles, ranging from posts, stumps, boulders and trees to all manner of vegetation overhead. We’ve been in sites where our slides are almost touching the trees on both sides, to sites where we could turn our whole rig around and still have room. All of it affects move day in a way that living in a house just can’t prepare you for. Our 24 previous years of fixed habitation made us experts on seasonal variations, an occasional impromptu repair, and frequent HGTV-inspired home remodeling projects. Never before had I thought of how to contend with an uphill slope at the end of the sewer hose.

So as I stood there, outside our rig, with the sewer gasses slowly clearing, I tilted my head back and opened my eyes to a view of rich blue sky serving as a backdrop to dark green pine trees. Goodbye bad thoughts…hello blessings, right? No, the first conscious thought at that moment was of all the pine cones up there, the same ones that blitzkrieged the camper like a meteor shower two nights earlier. Before retracting the slide-outs I had to make sure the tops were clear of debris. We got lucky when the broom caused no damage but I don’t want to find out how 20 small pine cones and 10 pounds of needles will affect the slide mechanism. Time needed to be spent up on the ladder cleaning off the slides. Just another move day variable.

Once everything is stowed, it’s time to hit the open road. That’s the glorious part we dreamed about during all those years of going to work day in and day out. Getting out of the campground, however, means first extracting 55 feet of hinged mobile living from a wide range of spaces that are not typically very wide. Throw in the fixed obstacles along with issues like traction, pitch and camber and it can be a bit of an adventure just leaving. At one campground, we were so tightly packed in that I was scratching my head on how to get out. New campers had moved in next to us essentially blocking us in. A woman appeared out of nowhere telling me exactly what I needed to do which included driving straight ahead into the empty campsite in front of us and turning out of that one. She marched over and started moving things out of the way such as the picnic table and small boulder. She knocked on the doors of the adjacent trailers telling them to move their trucks and unhooked the cables that were there specifically to prevent anyone from doing what she insisted we were to do. No conversation, brainstorming session, or asking our thoughts. We could tell she was a woman who got her way and we happily followed along if it meant a safe exit. Her plan worked brilliantly. Reflecting back, perhaps she wanted us gone so bad that she actually moved rocks to make it happen. Hope not.

Once on the highway it’s smooth sailing and adventure awaits! It was during one of these open sections that Donelle and I were having a discussion about her perhaps taking a turn at the helm in order to get comfortable driving. After all, she is the one with the class A license…that she hasn’t used for 14 years. Before we could get to the next rest area, an extended row of orange pylons narrowed two lanes into one. Concrete dividers then closed in from the left shoulder until there was fully 8 inches of clearance on either side of the camper. For the next 12 miles I clenched the wheel, took deep breaths and puckered. She decided to “rest her eyes” and nervously clutched her pillow. I heard a few intakes of breath and muffled “holy cow’s” before the lanes opened up again. We decided that it would be easier for me to finish out this run.

With the assistance of multiple phone apps to account for weather and routing guidance, travel eventually becomes a brand new destination with all its requisite excitement and confusion- especially when the roads on the map don’t match up with what we see outside the windshield. We navigate unfamiliar surroundings, numerous roundabouts, and obstacles before finally arriving at a new camp site. Sometimes we can easily pull straight in, others are delightfully angled, and others are spacious back in sites. Still others…not so much. Some sites take us longer to navigate, talking with each other on the phone while I back in and Donelle guides. Those days require lots of deep breaths and a beverage for a job well done.

The process begins by reversing the tear down routine with buoyed enthusiasm and the prospect of uncharted territory (for us at least) to explore. For some reason, the set up process is a lot quicker than the tear down. Maybe it is because our renewed energy of what is to come versus the sadness for leaving where we were. Oh sure, there are other surprises. Like the living room drawer the self ejected and turned itself into two hardware store runs in Colorado. Or the bottom of the cabinet holding up the glasses and cups threatened to drop out somewhere between Alabama and Louisiana….we have since taken to triple-checking everything in tearing down our site. Whatever the reason, each move has given us the perspective of closing one window and opening the next. How lucky are we to be able to look through so many windows on this journey. I can say with certainty that it has been worth every second.