What the Hell RV Doing?

How Do You Get Mail?

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 01:39:43 GMT

Trying to become a Florida Resident hits a snag

So when you are "full-timing" in a movable home, you are faced with an interesting option of being able to choose your state of residence. Since we no longer owned a home, and what we are living in could move from state to state, the question is, "What state do we call home?" As we found out, the answer is, "Wherever you choose." Thus began our quest to determine where next we would call "home."

State of Residence or Domicile

As we discovered, there is a distinction between the two terms. State of residence is where you are physically living, whereas domicile is where you call home. When you own property, state of residence and domicile are pretty cut and dry. You have a house. That house is in a certain state, and you live there. But when your house is portable, and you don't really live in any one state, it becomes a little more cloudy. We did a lot of research and there is a company that helps with this called Escapees RV Club . They have a lot of resources to help with this process. So basically we just need to establish an address, establish some connections to that state, and that becomes our state of domicile.

Texas, Florida, or South Dakota

The 3 main states that are advantageous to establish domicile are South Dakota, Texas, and Florida. All three states do not have State Income Tax, so there's that. We looked at each and we decided Florida was the best choice for us because the vehicle registration is flat for both the trailer and the truck, and doesn't require yearly emissions so we wouldn't be required to come back if we didn't need to. So with that decision made, we started to find out what we needed to do in order to domicile in Florida.

How do you get your mail??

The first part of establishing domicile is getting an address. This could be a friend or relative, but we didn't want to have someone have to deal with telling us what we received and decide what we needed to forward and such, so we found that there are mail forwarding services that will allow you to establish an address in one of these states that will serve as your place of residence AND they will collect all your mail and you can choose to destroy, forward, or scan the mail if you need to. We deciding on Good Sam's since you kinda need a Good Sam's membership for this lifestyle anyway, and their headquarters is in Florida, so there wouldn't need to be potentially two addresses to keep track of since the other services could requires two address.

So now we have an address......what's next?

The next major step in this process is getting getting Driver's Licenses and vehicle registration stuff done. Our first "home base" being Charleston, SC for a couple months, we "thought" that we could pop into Florida and take care of this and zip on back. A 4.5 hour drive. We could do that in a day if needed. Au contraire!! In Florida, you have do all this stuff in the county in which you reside. On paper that is Crestview, FL which would add about 4 hours to this errand. It is what it is, so what's next? FL provided us a form to provide to the leinholdeer to request the title to be transferred. Our instructions were to fax this form to them, and then, once completed the Florida DMV will have the title and we can do all of this in one fell swoop.

Enter Chase Auto Financing into the fray.

Our next blog will cover the ordeal of trying to coordinate this with through Chase and the Florida MVD. As of this moment, it's still "in process." It's a shining example of how not to treat your customers and how to hide behind the faults of the last guy you spoke to, but more on that.

Home Is Where You Park It

Oh, home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you
Oh, home, let me come home
Home is where I'm alone with you

Picking The Right Fifth Wheel

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:35:00 GMT

How we picked our future home on wheels

Since we didn't want a traditional motor home, our initial thought was a trailer of some kind. As I mentioned before, our initial thought was the smallest vehicle to pull the largest trailer, but as we soon found out, that didn't leave too much workable room since we were going to be working M-F in it. We came to the realization that a fifth wheel was ultimately the way to go.

We looked at a few RV shows and the local RV lots in Tucson to find something that already has some kind of office space. Initially there were some floor plans that had a bunk room which could be converted into an office space. We came across a model at Jayco called the Pinnacle which had a middle room that already had an office. So we set our sites on trying to find one.

We downloaded an app RV Trader (much like Auto Trader, but for well.....RV's) and we found a listing for a used one in California. It was 3 years old and was lived in by a family who bought it to live in while their home was being built. They had two small children and actually had a third while they were living in it. It had never been moved, they didn't even have a truck to move it. They bought it, parked it, and were selling it. They were nice enough tot give a FaceTime tour of the ins and outs of it. It had looked like it had been lived in....by three small kids. and we decided that we needed a newer model. We wanted to make our own dents in it.

He was even willing to deliver it to us for the asking price. It was the decor we wanted, too. We just had to wait until the house closed to buy it. We also looked into a having it inspected. Once we mentioned that to the seller, they stopped communicating with us. after a few weeks, we noticed the listing was marked as sold. I guess he found someone else and that's the problem with dealing with a private seller. Back to the drawing board.

The Timing Was Right

One Small Snag....

There was just one tiny detail with the fifth wheel. It was in Pennsylvania. We were thinking we might find something a little closer to Seattle. Well....new adventure. So now the plan included driving from Seattle to PA in a bout a week while working during the day and driving during the evening. We discovered that Marriot hotels allowed us to check out at 2 PM being Silver rewards members, sometimes 3 PM. So we mapped it out as long as we could have a Marriot hotel in a location that we were planning to stay in. It was exhausting to work and drive, but we did make it to PA in eight days. We had all of our stuff with us in a U-Haul trailer.

The RV dealer was nice enough to let us stay a couple days on the lot to get moved in. We also were met by a driving instructor who taught us how to safely drive , backup, and park the fifth wheel. More on that experience later.

Back the Truck Up

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 16:42:48 GMT

Houston....we have a problem!

Well since we decided we were going to go with the Truck/Fifth Wheel combination, we figured we better look into buying a truck. We've never owned a truck, we never wanted a truck, so this was going to be a learning curve. Since we had a good idea of what we wanted to tow, we figured that would be all we needed to provide our trusty salesman and they would point us in the right direction. [insert maniacal laughter here]

We set out on one Saturday to make the rounds of truck dealers to get an idea of the just how big a truck we would fell comfortable driving. I knew a Ford Truck salesman so I figured we'd start off there first. We walk into the dealer, ask for our friend, and were informed he doesn't work there any more. We sit down with a guy and he shows us a pamphlet of truck types. He asks us what we plan to tow, and suggests a 1 ton dually, which they don't have available to drive. Since he wasn't really who we wanted to talk to, and he also was "mask-impaired," we decided to try the Dodge dealer down the road.

Payload...What's That?!?

The FB groups were filled with a common question, "Can we tow X with Y?" and, the more we read them, it kept bothering us that we might have purchased the wrong truck. Our daughter, Danielle, had informed us that they wanted to move to Seattle, but one problem, they didn't feel comfortable driving a U-Haul in downtown Seattle. I don't blame them, I didn't want to do it either, but as good parents we offered to help. Eureka, we have this new truck, why don't we just get a trailer and tow all the stuff up to Seattle, then we'll tow our stuff to PA to put it in our fifth wheel, perfect, right??

So in order to rent a trailer from U-Haul, you have to prove that you have a vehicle capable of towing it safely. I knew that we had the truck to tow the trailer, but while we were at it, we would finally confirm that we could tow the fifth wheel we wanted. We found a towing calculato r so all we had to do was enter the numbers in and voila!! instant answers. Wait a second, what is Pin Weight, and payload, and GCWR?!?! OMG our head was spinning, because each website we would look up would call the same thing something different.

Long story short, we didn't have enough payload. The weight of the fifth wheel (hitch weight) was about 1400 pound more than what the truck could haul. Oh shit....ARMAAAAANDOOOOOO!! We got on the horn with Armando and explained our situation. We felt a little stupid for not knowing this, but also felt that knowing that we were first time truck buyers and knowing what we were doing with the truck we would be steered in the right direction by either the RV or Truck Salesman, but alas it was really up to us to know this. Fortunately, having a spouse who teaches sales for a multimillion dollar company comes in handy! She was able to persuade them to make things right, but there was one problem....no inventory. This whole "due to COVID" excuse was getting pretty old as we were running short of time.

We were coming home to rescue the Estate Sale (more on that later) when we called the dealer as we saw they had a 3500 Laramie in stock. It was brand new, so we would have to pay for the upgrade, but we would have the truck we want and the truck we need. The dealer was nice enough to refund all of our money, and apply it all to the new truck. They even moved the running boards and truck cover from the old truck as well as giving us the spray in bed liner as they did with the first truck. It was as if the first truck purchase never happened. We couldn't have been happier with the way that turned out.

There's a Stranger in the House

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Mon, 31 May 2021 15:01:23 GMT

The day someone walked in our house

Oh boy....This is a story that we will be telling for years to come. During the estate sale, we thought it was a good idea to get out of town to let the sellers do their thing. There was one problem, we had a lot of contractors ( roofers and solar reinstallation ), handyman , in addition to the estate sellers needing to get in the house, but only had one set of keys. So to coordinate the comings and goings of all parties was pretty daunting from a distance. Our solution was that we could open the garage door though an app on our phone so we made arrangements to all of them to let us know when they needed access and we would open the garage door if they needed to get inside the house. Sounds good, right?

So it was Thursday, which is the day of my BNI meeting . This day I was actually the feature presenter so I had a lot more than normal on my mind. The buyers of the home were scheduled to do their final inspection of the work we had agreed to do. In the last few days of the estate sale we had agreed to have some time each day before the final day of the sale. We had made an extra set of keys so that the estate seller could have a set. They had left signs up around the neighborhood because of the daily hours. Well occasionally people would show up at the house thinking the estate sale was actively going on.

One such gentlemen happened by 15 minutes prior to the buyers coming for their walk through. I received an alert from the Ring doorbell so I took a look. I didn't recognize him, but thought he was with the walkthrough. When I looked at the live feed, i saw he was looking around at some of the belongings that were on the front porch. At this point, I asked through the doorbell, "Hello, can I help you?" to which he said "Ok, Thank you!" Then walked in the house. One problem, there was no one in the house!! So here I am in shock, moments before my business meeting, and there is a stranger in the house. I try to get this person's attention but he is not within earshot of the doorbell.

We call the realtor to explain what's happening, and she suggests to call the police. That's just what we want the new buyers to see when they roll up is police activity at their new home. No thank you. We call the neighbor, but they are home alone. We finally get ahold of some close-by friends who bolt over to clear the house before the buyers come for their inspection.

As it turns out the front door was locked, but not latched. When I spoke through the doorbell, it cut out and he was far away, so he heard, "Hello, come in" He thought someone would be back so he just started looking for things to buy.

Here are the videos from the doorbell for your entertainment.

Ring Doorbell footage of the guy walking up and ringing the bell

Our good friend Levi shooing him away

"It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again
It's times like these you learn to love again
It's times like these time and time again"

There's a Hitch with the Hitch

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Sun, 30 May 2021 01:50:49 GMT

Finding the Right Hitch

One of the biggest surprises we’ve discovered is there’s not a universal way to tow something. There’s so much to know, and everyone you talk to will tell you the same thing, but call it something different. So here is our challenges with getting a hitch.

So here’s where we are at. We have the right truck now, we’ve purchased the fifth wheel so now all we need is a device, a contraption, a doohickey thingamabob to connect the trailer to the truck and off we go. Easy enough, right?? I mean there’s 5 holes in the bed of the truck to attach said hitch should be fairly straightforward.

So we asked for a recommendation from the RV salesman. He said we should get a B&W Companion sliding hitch . We have a short bed truck so the hitch should slide so that at slow speeds when you are maneuvering, the hitch can slide so the front of your fifth wheel doesn’t collide with the cab of your truck (bad news). Okay so we start calling around to see if we can pick this up. The first guy we talk to doesn’t recommend B&W, instead suggests we get a PullRite because it’s an automatic hitch. He starts asking if we have a Puck system. What the puck??? What is that?? Turns out that is the 5 holes in the bed of the truck. Well he doesn’t have one. So we start looking online.

Going online, we discover that PullRite is not making the automatic slider hitch for our model of truck since there was a slight change in the positioning of the pucks. Well that was a waste. Back to the B&W....but....it’s a manual slider which would mean I would have to get out of the truck, pull some lever, in order for the hitch to slide. I’m imagining it will be raining whenever I need to do this. Not a fan.

We continued our search and found this YouTuber who was a full time RVer who was comparing the Demco sliding to an Andersen Ultimate connector. So it sounded exactly what we were searching for. He originally purchased the Demco because he puts stuff in the truck bed when he goes his trailer. He has a Ram truck. It’s like he was speaking to me. So this new hitch attaches to the gooseball....Oh God!!!, something new!! This is the fifths of the 5 holes in the bed of the truck....whew. As I watch the video, he recommends this new hitch because it’s lighter (only 35 pounds), can be attached in 5 minutes, and still gives the maneuverability without sliding because the hitch attaches 9.5 inches back. So you can order this on Amazon. Okay this is getting even better. Oh and it’s about $1500 less than the Demco.

Bed Shafts and Gooseballs

Hold the phone!! What is this bed shaft? I've never heard of this. Oh man this is so maddening!!. So after looking into this, it turns out that this is a part that Andersen makes INSTEAD of the gooseball that goes into the bed of the truck and then I don't need a gooseball OR a connecting tube. I ordered online, and picked up in a local store. I installed in two seconds. Boy that was easier than I could have imagined. Even better was finding out the MorRyde pin box was not movable so I didn't need anything else. Hoo-Fricking-Ray!!

"Gonna hitch a ride
Head for the other side
Leave it all behind
Never change my mind
Gonna sail away
Sun lights another day
Freedom of my mind
Carry me away for the last time"

The Plan

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Sat, 29 May 2021 17:08:37 GMT

Now What?!?

So that now we made a decision to give this a go, what next? The decision was the easy part. Making it happen was another story. So we started thinking about a plan to make this happen. We’ve lived in the same home for 24 years, never moved, never bought a home other than new construction, never owned a vehicle bigger than a minivan, and owned any camping gear other than a tent.

We quickly learned that there was a LOT to learn, but we were up for it. In our relationship, Theresa is the planner, I am the doer. Theresa is a master planner, project manager, and analyst. She can compile choices that helps make decisions, so that would certainly come in handy in this adventure. We discovered there were Facebook groups where we could learn the ropes and get guidance on next steps.

We broke down the major steps in this journey as:

Sell the House
Go through all our stuff
Purchase a Truck
Purchase a Trailer

As we quickly learned, each of these major projects had countless other smaller tasks like, making sure we had reliable internet, upgrading our phones, do we buy new or used, we have a LOT of stuff to go through.

So we gave ourselves a timeline of the end of 2021 to get this all accomplished, however there were a couple things gnawing at us to put this on a fast track. The housing market was a seller’s market, and we REALLY wanted to see our son.

Noah had left for Boot Camp in November and was unable to be communicated with for the better part of 3 months. During that time, he was started and stopped his training due to COVID. The little we could communicate with him only strengthen our desire to be closer to him. He did graduate boot camp and is currently in training for Nuclear Engineering outside of Charleston.

Our original thought was to rent an AirBnB for a month or so and be close by and see him as time allowed. As we looked at the calendar we soon realized that the actual amount of time we would get to see him coupled with the expense of renting something like that didn’t seem to be worth it.

Enter game changer: I said, “why don’t we accelerate the house sale and let’s just do this. We work better with a deadline, so let’s just throw down the gauntlet and fast track this?” Theresa agreed, with a caveat that if there’s a snag, she’s hopping on a plan to see Noah before his birthday.

So here we go, we were thinking we’d go through a room a month before the end of the year, but now we have about 10 weeks. We picked a realtor with a plan, and go to work.

I rolled on, the sky grew dark
I put the pedal down to make some time

There's something good waitin' down this road

I'm pickin' up whatever's mine

I Ain't Drivin' in No RV, Hannibal

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Sat, 29 May 2021 17:08:35 GMT

Picking the Vehicle for our next Adventure

When we sat down to think about how we would do this, one thing immediately came to mind: I didn't want to drive an RV. The idea of living in your car (or driving your house) didn't appeal to me. If your car breaks down, so does your home. A traditional (Class A or B) RV was too large a vehicle for me to comfortably drive, and you'd have to end up towing a car behind to get around once you get to a destination, and that seemed too much. So I started thinking, "What is the smallest car that would pull the largest trailer?" We never owned a truck, and never really wanted one. I found a list of the towing capacity of every vehicle and began looking for the unicorn of vehicles.

There's just one problem, how do you go about buying a truck that's not even out yet. We started looking into this process and visited a Tesla store in Scottsdale. The person there was very nice, but we really didn't have much to go on other than what was online. The more we looked into it, the more we didn't think that the Cybertruck was our vehicle. It wasn't out yet, so it's untested, uncertain, and really =unsure if it would work. Every RV salesman we talked to looked at us like we have two heads. As we looked into what we would be living in, we came to the conclusion that a fifth wheel was really our best bet, and the shape and design of the Cybertruck really wouldn't work for that. I came across another electric Truck company called Atlis , and they have a "traditional" looking truck (they even had a Dually version), but same situation, it's not out yet. So untested, uncertain. So we resided that we would need a truck.

Now that we decided on a traditional truck, we began our search for the largest truck we would feel comfortable driving.

"Baby you can drive my car

Beep Beep Yeah"

Sell it All!!

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Sat, 29 May 2021 14:59:48 GMT

Everything Must Go!

Soon came the daunting task of sorting through 24 years of accumulation to determine what we we were keeping, storing, selling, or donating. If you've lived in the same place for that long, you collect a lot of stuff!! Our house was (for the most part) fairly tidy. We have what we called appendixes of the house. Places where junk accumulated that were mostly unnecessary, but that seemed to rotate around the house. Some times it was a closet, sometimes the garage, sometimes the shed.

What we weren't prepared for was the emotional connection we had to a lot of this stuff. We would go through a box or a room, and it would take a lot out of us just trying to decide. It became apparent that the more we thought about it, the less we felt motivated to go through it. but as the plan accelerated, we realized that we had to get into the headspace to go through a lifetime of accumulation. As we were watching Netflix, I happened to stumble across the Minimalist documentary. We watched both movies that afternoon and that put us in the mindset to address the mountains of stuff.

The main takeaways were that stuff had to bring us Joy, or have a purpose. If it didn't have either, it went in the sell or giveaway pile. Theresa's craft room was probably the hardest part because it brought her face to face with projects that she started but never finished. She had to make the tough decision in the face of wrestling with the thought that something remained undone. The amount of projects that were started, but unfinished was a difficult decision to make, but she was able to take the lessons from the Minimalists and put them into practice during this process.

Once we had gone through all of the stuff we wanted to keep or take with us, we wanted to work with an Estate Seller to get rid of the rest. From what we found out, a lot of them would come in and take care of everything. We deliberately chose a seller that was tied to a charity because it meant a lot to us that our stuff would be able to help other people. We went into this knowing it was not the easy route, but we really had no idea what would ensue.

"Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Turn and face the strange"

Why Are We Doing This?

dan@danwidth.com (Dan DeLong) — Sat, 29 May 2021 04:08:55 GMT

What In The World Were We Thinking?

A lot of people have wondered what we are up to. Amidst the pandemic, Theresa and I found ourself empty nesters. Within a matter of weeks in October 2020, one child got married and the other enlisted in the U.S Navy and went off to bootcamp. Our home of 24 years had served its purpose. We purchased the home prior to having children for the school district, and now that chapter was complete.

We found ourselves in an interesting predicament: we didn't have kids to look after, our house was bigger than we needed, and we were in this limbo of where life will be taking us next. Theresa mentioned, almost jokingly, that we should sell everything and drive around the country in an RV. She certainly didn't expect me to entertain the idea, but I did. Here's the thing, we like to travel, and we can't. We don't know where we'll end up (at least not for the next 2-5 years), and we both have jobs that will allow is to work form anywhere. So why not sell (mostly) everything and roam around the country in something we've never done before?? Sounds perfectly normal, right??

The decision was easy, but the hard part was yet to come. What happened next was a series of events that put us to the test in every possible way. So we wanted to share our experiences as a warning, an explanation, an education, or just plain entertaining. We really have no idea what we are doing, but one theme has repeated itself over and over in our lives. If not someday, when? We want to take this journey now, while we can, and if we can help someone along the way, all the better.

"Get your motor runnin'

Head out on the highway

Lookin' for adventure

And whatever comes my way"