Guess what we did Monday ...

On Monday morning we went to the RV America place and spent over two hours walking through the new Fifth-wheel with a very knowledgeable fellow named Levi. He had this down to a science and we got all our questions answered. I was advised to, and so I did, video the 'briefing' and when I ran out of tape I hoped I could retain what was left of our education.
Wow, there's a lot to this thing .. systems, balances, procedures. It's going to be like runinng ... umm ... a sailboat???

Well, we couldn't just do all that and not try to pull the thing around, so we hooked up and put Fordzilla through it's first paces with 36 plus feet of trailer behind it. The first place we went was non-stop to Johnson's Corner for lunch ... a distance all of about 6 blocks ... still, it was a 'first' so I felt accomplished to some degree. After luch we drove the whole rig onto the truck scales there and got weighed in, just so we had a feel for what we were pulling, and the truck and coach weighed in at (gulp) 21,580 pounds! Wow !! I'd not considered that there are bridges out there that will have to be circumnavigated if they can handle more than 10 ton of RV :)

We drove straight back to the house, circled the block and parked blocking two yards and a driveway and a half. We had to cut some tree branches down in order to get the front door open and before we even had things cleared out the neighbors came out to see the new house on wheels.
Now, this is a beautiful rig. It's impressive from the standpoint of live-ability and it is deceptively roomy inside for a pull-behind trailer.
I heard, without fail, "Oh my God" from each person that climbed aboard. It was cool.

After we did show-and-tell, Robin and I whimsically decided to spend the night aboard the coach and threw in some overnight stuff and pulled it down to a campground near the county fairgrounds. We found a spot and I managed to get us parked relatively parallel in our space. We got unhitched, hooked up, connected up, powered up and water-pressurized in about 30 or 40 minutes. Not bad for a first effort and the coach behaved nicely for us in all aspects. Later that evening we shared a little time with family and slept in our new bedroom.
I got chiily early in the morning so I set out to figure out how to light the furnace up. It came right on, but the odor of a brand-new furnace was overwhelming to Robin and just as I shut it down it set the smoke detector off. We let that one lie for the rest of the morning and will run it again later; longer to burn off the dust and packing goops and make it into a normal furnace some time later this week.

Tuesday morning we broke camp, buttoned up and had our first experience hitching up, draining and flushing various holding tanks into the dump pipe at the campground. All went pretty well for a first effort and we met some experienced campers from North Carolina who were readily sharing their own techniques with us.
It all worked great and we dropped the unit back up at the dealership for them to take a look at some stuff we noticed or had questions about.

I can't wait to get back up there and hook up again. We are thinking of spending a couple more night aboard locally, to keep learning and searching for things that might not be perfect. Then we hope to take off and travel for at least a few days. Better to shake it down here than to have something break while way far down the road.

This is going to be fun!