Maiden Voyage—Day 0
May 18, 2016A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
A journey in a new RV begins with a 2 ½-hour orientation.
On Tuesday, we arrived at Colonial Airstream in Lakewood,
NJ, to take possession of our Nest on Wheels and begin learning how to live in
it. There’s a lot to learn, as evidenced by this daunting stack of instruction manuals.
The super-thick one is “Operator’s Supplemental Manual, volume 1 of 2.”
No, we haven’t read them all yet. But I’ve put them on my
Goodreads list.
Fortunately, the basics are pretty easy to pick up when a
real-live person shows you what to do and answers your questions. (I had a lot
of questions.) We now know how to hook up to water, electric (and we even have
an adapter that allows us to take electricity from you, should we decide to
park in your driveway some night), and sewage (the first two are to be
received; the third to be dumped); what to do with generators, inverters, water
pumps, and a dozen other devices; and a bunch of practical little tips like “Make
sure you have a vent or window open when you use the stove, because your RV is
a small enough space that the burner could use up enough oxygen and produce
enough CO2 to asphyxiate you.”
We also learned a few things all on our own:
- After 36 years of marriage, we still have to work on our communication. (This will come as no surprise to our children.) I thought Steve was loading the box of dishes to take along; he thought I was. The result is that, despite my aversion to disposable paper goods, we are dining with cloth napkins and . . . paper plates. And two of those styrofoamy coffee cups you get at takeout places.
- Cardboard will work as a cutting board if you happen to have forgotten that, too.
- We really do need a rug on our first trip. We’d decided not to buy one because we couldn’t really remember how much floor space there is by the door; we figured we’d wait till we got the rig and see whether we really needed one. We really needed one. Like, after about an hour. Tuesday was a rainy day, and what with going in and out to move stuff in (bedding, clothes, no dishes) and the various people who came in to fix and adjust things, the floor was pretty puddly in short order. Newbie tip: get a rug for inside the door.
- Sleeping in the parking lot of an RV dealership isn’t as weird as you might think—but showering there, even in the privacy of your own motorhome, is just a little too creepy.
1 comments
So entertaining...and you haven't even left the parking lot yet! :-)
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