Day 1

🤢

I was sick to my stomach. Not sick sick, but very much ready to throw up with an overwhelming mix of anxiety and terror.

Did you feel that way when you took the leap? Or if you haven’t hit the road yet, are you feeling the stress in advance?

For years, we had eagerly anticipated “Day 1”- finally hitting the road on what was obviously going to be the most epic adventure ever.

Maybe that was part of the problem- I was definitely too invested. Emotionally, financially, physically, this just had to work.

We were dirt poor to begin with, so getting to this point took all of our savings plus some. We were starting out in the red, credit card in hand 💪, hoping to live cheap and have fun, while building back up my old web business.

Man, was I naïve. 😂

I had been crazy excited and secretly scared as I looked forward to this day.

We packed the last of our stuff in our little 28′ Capri, said our goodbyes to skeptical (but kind) family members, piled in our 14-year-old 4×4 Expedition, and we were off.

Yeehaw…? 😬

We hadn’t gone very far when we started to feel some weird shaking each time we climbed a hill. Like any good wannabe fulltimer, we pretended not to feel it.

Soon it got worse…the Expy was really struggling to pull the camper up any incline at all, and the oil pressure started dropping fast.

It was beginning to sink in that my worst case “wouldn’t-it-be-awful-if” scenario was actually happening.

I had no idea what to do. This had to work. I couldn’t turn around (on Day 1!) and prove that we really had been idiots after all.

So we kept slowly rolling south. At least south is downhill, right? (Homeschooler here. 🤓)

We missed our first carefully planned reservation, and got our first real taste of boondocking. It would’ve actually been pretty neat, but I was nasty sick by now and was not enjoying any part of this new life.

Somehow our poor Expy sputtered all the way down to the coast. By then we were doubt-free…she was clearly a goner. It was just a matter of seeing how many miles we could cheat destiny, nursing her along until she wouldn’t go any farther.

Smart Brad would have called his brother to come tow him back home, tail tucked humbly between his legs. But smart Brad doesn’t exist. Real Brad was running from things, and searching for peace and quiet (literally, thanks to hyperacusis).

The original reason for RVing with the fam was that we planned to move overseas long term, and we wanted the kids to see and know as much of the US as possible before leaving. By now though, there were a whole pile of factors involved, and it felt like we had passed the point of no return.

After letting Expy rest for a couple of days on the coast (grasping for straws, but we read that ocean air at times had the power to extend lives 🤞), we began limping toward our next reservation.

We did make it- holding our breath- and this was a bit of an extended stay (for us anyway), so we had a chance to regroup and look at our options to try to resuscitate our infant journey.

After an absurd amount of brain racking, Googling, dry heaving (j/k…maybe), and emailing used car dealerships, we found an Expedition that was almost identical to ours in every way. We were a little suspicious at first- it cost several thousand $$ less than everything else in its class. 🤔 But there was some minor hail damage visible, and supposedly this was the reason for the low price. If we could get away with putting it on a credit card, we might just be able to swing this.

The downside was that it was two states over, and I wasn’t sure we could make it that far. So we agreed that Joy and the kids would stay with the camper, and I would see how close I could get to Dallas before the dying Expy bailed on me.

Well whaddya know, Expy and me crawled all the way to Dallas, and soon I was test driving the clone. It ran great, until right before I pulled back into the lot, when a familiar light popped up on the dash.

Seems this Expedition had the same issue with low oil pressure that the one we were ditching had. 😱

But it felt fine to drive, and the salesman vowed on his life, wife, and a few more things that it was absolutely a sensor issue they had already taken care of, and it just hadn’t “cleared” yet. He even pulled out his fancy diagnostic tool and very helpfully interpreted what I was seeing on the screen.

I appealed to his humanity, explained my family’s predicament, and asked what he would do in my place. Fortunately, he assured me that while he had to officially mention that it was my decision alone, personally, he could verify that he had seen the work done and the problem was taken care of. ♥

This is the point where you’re watching the horror movie and you KNOW what choice the poor soul is about to make, and there’s nothing you can do to stop him. Like the Geico commercial.

So, yeah…I believed him. Sorry. 😞💔

They generously agreed to take a couple hundred $$ off the price just to make me feel better about the “uncleared sensor issue”. They were also happy to take a credit card, although there was a fee for that, which came to the same amount as the discount they offered.

So…we were now dangerously close to maxing out our credit, but at least we had a running, reliable Expedition that would breathe new life into our very, um…epic adventure.

After dropping the other Expy off at a salvage yard for $500 (yesss!), relieved that everything had worked out, I began the trek back to my wife and kiddos.

It was long after dark by now, and I was a few miles down the road, when this thing started making the most adorable sounds and feels…so perfectly aligned with what I had felt driving into Dallas that I had to double check to make sure I had dropped off the right one at the salvage yard. But yeah, the VIN matched the new paperwork, this was definitely the new one.

I eased to the shoulder of the interstate and the Expy stopped shaking, but I sure didn’t.

The rest of that night is a miserable, sick, I-hate-Brad-so-much kind of blur, but it eventually ended.

We rented a truck, towed the camper over to Texas, and got our newest pile of trash to a mechanic’s shop, where they confirmed: “Yup, your engine is blown, there’s no fixing this thing.”

They were actually honest and genuinely helpful. They didn’t want to work on it, and said the dealer needed to make it right. We spent a couple of weeks calling and calling and calling, and the salesman would always say the same thing- I can’t do anything to help you, and the owner doesn’t want to talk.

After a couple of weeks of this, we gave up on calling and drove the rental to Dallas, pulled up at the dealership, and walked in before the owner could hide.

I sat across the desk from him, shaking like a leaf, looking at pictures of his sweet family (no sarcasm here), and poured out my heart and sob story. I guess it was probably TMI.

No exaggeration, it was like a movie- he literally threw back his head and laughed so hard that I almost cried right in his office. He didn’t seem to be putting on an act- he said I’d been duped and he sincerely thought it was funny. After a lot of back and forth, he offered me $200 (the original discount) to disappear. Airhead Brad turned it down on principle 🙄 (what was I thinking?!, we now needed every single dollar we could get).

As I was leaving, I overheard a lady asking about a light showing on the dash of the car they were test driving, and heard the owner himself give an explanation very similar to the one I had gotten a couple of weeks earlier. Not super smart of me, but I gave the lady a 10-second version of my experience. This understandably resulted in the owner telling me I needed to leave right now (which I did).

Side note that I’m proud of- this new Expy went under the radar for ages…years later our family had no idea we weren’t still driving the same Expedition we started out with. 😇

Little wins…

The mechanic did end up putting in an engine for us, which we had to split between four different payment methods, fully maxing out all credit options we had available (credit cards, bank line of credit, PayPal credit, etc.).

So now we were toast. We had a Thousand Trails camping pass, but couldn’t even afford the campgrounds in between our two week free stays.

It was during this discouraging time that we had one of the most heartwarming and memorable experiences of our entire time on the road to date.

So far, our Day 1 experiences have not been good:

• Day 1 of our “adventure”, we picked up the (used) camper from the dealer and the slide out floor mostly plopped out. So that’s why there was plywood lying on the lot where our camper had been sitting (and why they “needed some time” to get it ready for us).
• Day 1 of our trial run with the camper and (first) Expy, the camper blew a tire, which destroyed the plumbing underneath, and also ripped a hole in the floor.
• Day 1 of our actual hitting the road (officially fulltimers!), after replacing the slide and bathroom floor, overhauling the interior, and fixing a bunch more stuff, we blew an engine.
• Day 1 of Expy #2, we blew another engine.
• Day 1 of getting Expy #2 back after the engine replacement, on the way back to the campground from the mechanic’s, a random sheet of plywood flew off a trailer in front of us and smashed our light and bumper.

Man…this RV with the fam thing is not epic. Not at all.