5th Wheel Adventures

11/27/2025

Wishing everyone a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving today!

11/16/2025

While I was over in Palo Duro Canyon State Park in Texas, I managed to grab a couple of my avian friends on camera. These aren't very common in Florida:

White-wing Dove, and Western Kingbird.

11/16/2025

Not sure I mentioned this before when it happened but here's the story so far. Sometimes good guys finish last, or at least at the back of the pack.
There I was enjoying my trip on an old two-lane, winding road. I ended up getting quite a following so, being the nice guy I am, I pulled over at the next small town at a small gas station that had a parking area large enough to get into and out of easily. However, there was a hidden curb; hidden by some large overgrown grass and weeds. The RV really danced over that and I figured I'd have a lot of stuff thrown all over the floor when I finally opened it up. What I didn't count on was a flat tire. Yup, the TPMS went off showing a slow leak. Got out and looked and sure enough the forward passenger side tire was getting flat. Managed to find a tire shop literally right around the corner from where I had pulled off.

I pull in and asked if they could help. Of course they did! Small town friendliness. I was in and out within 45 minutes. What we found was the rim was cracked which was causing the slow leak. Decided to swap it out with the spare and kept on going down the road.

Eventually made it home and after much looking and talking with Grand Design and E-trailer, found out that that particular rim wasn't made any more so finding a matching one was out of the question. Found one that was "similar" so I wouldn't have to change all four just to make it visually match.
Took the old tire and new rim to Discount Tire to have them swap it out. Yesterday was the day to change out the spare for the new tire/rim. Try as I might, I couldn't get the lug nuts off. Went out to get a breaker bar. No joy! Not even standing on the bar would break most of the lug nuts loose. Called a friend who had a heavy duty impact driver. Eventually managed to get them off but it took quite a while on each lug nut, having to stop often to let the 5-gal air compressor fill up again. We ended up using so much force that a couple of the lug nuts were twisted! After all of this, the lug nuts wouldn't go back onto the studs without significant force.

After doing a little more inspection and trying to make some adjustments with a tap and die set, we decided that when the spare was put on, so much force was used to tighten it down that it deformed the threads on the studs. The only remedy at this point is to remove the hub and have the studs replaced. And I'll need new lug nuts as well.

Moral of the story - if you ever have someone work on or change your RV tires, make sure they use no more than the rated torque and use a torque wrench for the final tightening step.

11/02/2025

One of the things I enjoy doing when I'm out traveling and exploring our country is to find some interesting roadside attractions. Many are fun; a lot of them are quirky, but all are interesting!

Only in Texas 🤠 — meet the 2nd Amendment Cowboy in Amarillo! A 20-foot-tall muffler man turned cowboy stands watch over I-40 near Cadillac Ranch, decked out in boots, a big grin, and a shirt quoting the Second Amendment. Quirky roadside Americana at its finest.

10/17/2025

First post in quite a while. Been busy with several other things including trying to figure out how to edit and share the videos I made of our Alaska trip from last year. For the time being, I've decided to lump all of the drive videos together on a daily basis, cut out the dead parts, sp*ed them up by about 5 times and share them in their entirety. That way you'll get to experience the trip, though much faster than we did it, and see most of the interesting vistas and scenery along the way. I still need to figure out how to add information boxes to describe what it is your seeing along the way. I'm hoping to keep the length of the videos to under an hour; we usually drove for 5-6 hours and sp*eding up the videos on a 5 to 1 basis, I should be able to make that target.

Hope you will enjoy the videos and the trip this way. You can use Youtube's controls (Shift < and Shift >) to slow down or sp*ed up the playback if you've missed something.

This first trip was just a "quick" shakedown of a couple of hours. I wanted to stop at our "local" Love's truck stop to fill up with fuel and get the truck/RV combo weighed so I'd know just how heave we are. (The RV itself was around 16,200 lbs! Which is under it's 18,000 lb max limit.) After the weigh in we drove the 2 miles or so to our first stop, an RV park right next to interstate 10.

We're heading west on this first stage of the trip primarily to make it to Texas and an RV park smack dab in the middle of the solar eclipse track. But first we're stopping just north of Houston as we make our way over to the west Texas area known as Big Bend National Park.

Day one of our trip to Alaska in 2024. First day is always a shakedown cruise where we stop at a nearby campground to make sure we haven't forgotten anythin...

10/03/2025

It's beginning to look like fall in Florida. It's about as good as it gets!

09/22/2025

Word to the wise...

09/18/2025

Another Army Corps of Engineer campground. Not exactly what the picture looked like but it'll do. Being Thursday, the campground is a little empty. It'll change tomorrow...

09/01/2025

A few images from our recent stay at Doll Mountain Campground outside of Ellijay, GA. We were the only ones in our camping loop (actually, the majority of the campground!) except for our last night there. This was a really nice Army Corp of Engineer campground.

08/29/2025

Yesterday's trip was not uneventful. Diesel prices are really high in Illinois so I was hoping to use my aux tank to transfer fuel as I needed it. I wanted to get diesel in Iowa which is close to 50 cents cheaper (on average) than Illinois. Except - the control box for the aux tank wasn't working. Sometimes all it takes is to turn off the truck (remove power) and restart everything and it'll all work. Pulled off at the next rest stop (only about 30 minutes down the road). Turned off the truck, "rested" a few minutes, and started everything back up.

Aux tank control still wasn't working; now what? Started listening to the music on my iPhone while traveling down the road. There was another truck stop about an hour farther along the way. In the mean time, I noticed the GPS receiver on the truck wasn't working! It was receiving no satellites which meant the truck's navigation map wasn't working. Did I somenow blow a fuse to the satellite receiver and the nav system? That'll have to wait.

Just before I got to the next truck stop the aux tank controls started working again. So I started transferring fuel saving me extra $$$ from buying fuel in Illinois.

Made it to Iowa finally and then the cat decided shw had enough and had to do her business in her cage. Found another truck stop we could pull off at to change her p*e pad to make her happy for the finaly 45 minutes to the campground. As we started the truck to move out, XM Radio started working again as did the GPS receiver! So the truck was back to "normal" again.

The bottom line is I have no clue why all of this happened so there's no way I can "fix" anything so it won't happen again. I guess the next step is to just carry on.

08/26/2025

Good news. Found a mobile RV tech who is actually staying in the same RV park I'm in and is just a few sites away! They're going to be able to get to me later today!! Which means we'll be able to get back on the road headed to the Antique Airplane Association fly in starting tomororw! Yipp*e!!!!

08/25/2025

Not a happy camper right now. Just extended our stay at this campground two more days. Out of the two mobile RV techs I've called, NOT ONE of them has called me back. So I'm trying an RV tech who's staying at the park to see if they can help. If not, I'm leaving Wednesday with or without brakes. After all, it's not like I've never driven through half of Canada and most of Alaska without RV brakes. The drive through the flat lands of the midwestern US should be relatively easy.