Bringing Our New Home Home

Blog Post #6 - Written May 3, 2025



Bringing Our New Home Home


We bought our trailer in January. But we didn’t bring it home then for multiple reasons. One, we didn’t have a truck to pull it with. Two, it was still winter and so it would still need to be winterized for several more months. Three, I didn’t want it taking up our entire driveway for 4 months until we were ready to go!


So after we bought our truck and $700 hitch, we scheduled a pickup in mid-April.  Megan and I drove down and listened to the spiel again of all the dos and don’ts, trying to soak in as much knowledge as we could.  After an hour or so, we were ready to pull it out (or so we thought), only to learn that the weight distribution hitch we had neatly still in the box has to be installed on the truck and trailer and calibrated and they didn’t have any technicians available to do it that day. We thought about just taking it how without the WD part, and then installing that ourselves at home, but wisely realized we’d have no idea what we were doing and decided to just come back the next day.


We didn’t have a babysitter for the next day, so I drove down myself and they got the WD hitch installed and sent me on my way! It was a 30 minute drive back home and it actually went pretty smoothly, except for one part where road construction narrowed and shortened an on-ramp and I almost crashed into a semi. But I made it and parked the trailer in our church parking lot, just down the street from our house.


Megan and the kids walked over to celebrate with me. I was feeling pretty proud of myself and wanted to show them all I’d learned, so I started unhooking the hitch and lifting the trailer up. But the coupler wouldn’t come off the hitch ball… Keep in mind this is the first time I’ve ever towed anything in my life.  I figured I just had to keep raising the trailer. Eventually, Megan pointed out that the rear wheels of the truck were several inches off the ground and suggested I lower it back down haha.  Woops!  I lowered it until the tires were touching the ground and then used the spring bar lift handle to pry the coupler latch/lever up.  Poing!  CRASH!

The coupler unlatched and the truck dropped another 6 inches haha.

Luckily no one was hurt and hopefully the truck is okay too.

We got our first real world experience and lesson on unhitching :)


We live on a main road, and I didn’t want to block traffic while I figured out how to back the trailer into our driveway. So we set our alarms for 2:00 am, woke up at the unholy hour, and headed over to the trailer. We stuck a bunch of magnetic lights on it and hitched it up to the truck again.  Megan asked, “Did you want to practice backing up here in the church parking lot?”

I laughed, I was tired and didn’t want to spend anymore time awake at 2am than I had to. I replied, “I’ll practice in our driveway.”  Exactly, very macho and cocky and stupid haha.


I pulled the trailer out onto the street and got it in front of our house without a problem.  Then ensued about 20 long minutes of partially blocking the street, almost jack-knifing, entirely blocking the street, pulling into our neighbor’s drive across the street, and finally figuring out that if I just turned my head back (instead of trying to rely solely on my mirrors), I could intuitively steer it much easier. We got it backed into the driveway straight, and on one side so we could still park a car on the other side, in just about 30 minutes.  And no property damage!  Not too shabby for a newbie!




Comments

  1. Richy RichMay 14, 2025 at 8:59 PM

    Hahaha I wish you had video of the truck up in the air and crashing back down 😂

    ReplyDelete
  2. KarenMay 15, 2025 at 9:54 PM

    Omgoodness, this brings back so many memories. We brought our travel trailer home in February, with packed snow on both sides of our single driveway. Eventually John backed it into the driveway, but he had to pull into the neighbor's driveway across the street. Fortunately she's a sweetheart and allows us to use her driveway every time. And sometimes we run over her grass.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are We Doing This?

Image
Blog Post #1 - Written: April 20, 2025 Why Are We Doing This? Hi there, my name is Gary. My wife, Megan, and I are embarking on a 12-15 month (we think) adventure around these United States with our 3 young children: Z - 6 yo, Q - 4 yo, D - almost 2 yo. The first question people usually ask when we tell them our plans is “Why? How did you come to this [crazy] decision?” To answer that, I need to take you back in time a bit. Megan grew up in CA and I grew up in CA. We met and married in UT and then moved out here to OH for work after graduating college. We’ve lived here for 8 years, which was longer than we expected. But for good reasons! We’ve truly enjoyed our time here; my work/company/coworkers are awesome, the weather is nice (besides the gray winter), the people are good, and it’s so GREEN! Coming from the desert out west, we were blown away by the never ending forest and little rivers and streams everywhere! But all that said, for reasons I can’t fully explain (although likely du...
Read more

Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us

Image
Blog Post #7 - Written May 3, 2025 I don't have a great selection of photos for this 'misc' post, but here's one from the de-winterization process. Not pictured is the hour I wasted trying to figure out why the outdoor kitchen sink (above) wasn't draining...only to finally realize the strainer was also a plug and even after you take it out, it drains slowly... Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us The thing about uprooting your entire lives to become nomads and live the relaxing nomadic life is, it takes a lot of planning and work!  Our lives for the 4 months of January to April were so incredibly busy and exhausting, I felt like this trip wasn’t worth it many times.  Even before January, Megan was spending a couple hours every night researching where we wanted to go and planning routes and finding costs and details of like 700 places of interest. Mind, we’re only doing this for 12-15 months haha, so she then also spent hours paring down her list (with some input...
Read more

Choosing Our Ride - Trucks

Image
Blog Post #3 - Written April 20, 2025 Choosing Our Ride - Trucks Megan and I have never owned a truck before and our only experience driving one was driving a 26’ U-Haul truck towing our old Toyota Corolla from UT to OH in 2017. And the only time I tried backing that up I immediately jack-knifed and had to unhitch the car haha.  So when we told the RV dealer that we would buy a truck later, he understandably laughed and shook his head. But we figured, as we always do, that we’d figure it out along the way, like we always do. I talked to my boss (a big truck guy with lots of experience towing heavy boats and stuff) and a couple others and basically learned that we’d need a F-250 or bigger. They recommended we look for 3 things: Towing capacity: Our trailer has a dry weight of about 9,000 lbs, so once fully packed we estimated it would be about 11,000 lbs. So we needed something with a minimum of 12,500 lbs towing capacity to have a little breathing room. And the more breathing room ...
Read more