Sure, we have camped and RV'd for years. The confines of those spaces was not much to think about really. But now we have to conduct our everyday life out of these confines. Every drawer and every cabinet of the sticks and bricks that was chock-full of things that we had collected in our 34 years of marriage was going to have to be divided into "can't live without it" and "find somewhere to go with it besides us".
We thought we were doing really well in thinning out to just the must-haves but there came a point when the loads of stuff from the house we brought to the camper each night would not fit any where. There was a little mountain growing in the floor space between the chairs and TV.
At first we just chalked it up to inefficient storing. And sure enough, after organizing the storage space we were using and taking advantage of storage space we had never thought to use, we got it all put away. Well, almost all.
There were a few large items like a 6qt crock pot and an upholstery and spot carpet shampooer that had to be taken to the store room. But even after finding a place for everything, I had concerns that went beyond finding storage space in a 400 square foot condo on wheels.
After all, this is a recreational VEHICLE. It is on wheels and it travels down the road at highway speeds. It is hard to imagine the forces at work on your "home" as it is repeatedly exposed to 70mph wind and the g-forces of pot holes and mis-matched pavement-to-bridge jolts. You actually have to pay attention to technical issues like, "am I too tall to go under that overpass?" or "are the tires at the right pressure for the weight of the camper today?"
Weight is now my big concern. As weekend and vacationer campers we never worried about weight, there was so much empty space in the camper there was no way we were close to any limits. And I actually got on a commercial truck scale a couple of times to make sure. But now there is no empty space, everything is full to the point of bulging.
Our next trip was only a few days away. We were making a 900 mile (one way) drive to Oklahoma for a 4th of July family gathering. The first order of business will be to access a scale.
We started our maiden voyage as full timers on a weekend before the 4th of July, which was on a Wednesday. There was a heat wave in progress, thousands of records for maximum temperature were being broken daily from the Gulf, to the Bread Basket to deep into the Northeast. Temperatures in the Atlanta area were hitting 107°F. We got an early morning start to take advantage of relatively cooler temps and made our way out to Interstate 20, towards Birmingham.
It did not take long for our first opportunity to get on a scale. A few miles past Six Flags Over Georgia there was a Flying J with a CAT scale. We rolled onto the scale, pressed the call button for the attendant, got our ticket number and went inside to see what the weigh ticket had to say.
You have to do some math to figure out how much you have put on board, sooo, total weight on the scale, subtract weight of the truck (I knew this from previously weighing the truck without a camper attached to it), subtract the weight of the camper when it is empty (this is a weight put on a sticker when it rolls out of the factory) and ta-dah, you have your cargo weight. Now, take that weight and compare it to the CCC (cargo carrying capacity [also on the factory sticker] and, uh-oh.
When the math was all done, we were 1,200 lbs over the maximum carrying capacity!! I don't remember putting any lead bricks on board. How can clothing and household items weigh so much? I don't know, but they do. I guess we did much better than I thought at making efficient use of storage space.
We were not exactly in a place where we could do anything about it at the moment. The decision was to continue our trip, take it slow and easy and make frequent stops to check tire and bearing temperatures. I have an infra-red "gun" that will read surface temps. It works great for a quick walk-around to check these temps.
No comments:
Post a Comment