Where We've Been
Click the map above to view our trips and reviews in an interactive map format - or scroll down to just see all posts in chronological order.
Recent Articles
Mo Cars, Mo Problems
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We’ve just recently passed our 1 year anniversary of fulltiming but our past life in a stick house still constantly nips at our heels in the form of insurance bills, storage unit fees and other bits. We have just finally disposed of one of our problems, my 2002 BMW 540i. We are car enthusiasts and this is a special car. It has a ride that is soft enough to be supple yet firm enough to reliably corner at high speeds.
We Saw the New Oliver Travel Trailer!
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My significant other is quite the afficionado of molded fiberglass trailers. In fact before we got the Foretravel we looked at the 25’ Bigfoot trailer. Now we got the opportunity to see a brand spankin new Oliver IIS. Wow, it’s the first trailer I have ever liked. To me everything always seemed like a giant compromise the but the Oliver knows what it is and tries to be the best for the purpose.
Eternabond is an RV's Best Friend
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Because an RV just can’t do very much with diamonds. There is no single thing that can damage an RV more quickly and completely (except maybe a car accident or fire) than water. When we bought the Winnebago we bought it knowing that it had water damage. We made a calculated risk and it paid out alright but we always worried a bit about the side wall delamination. We never could tell if there was any structural issues.
Foretravel U320 Condenser Fan
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Buying a used older motorhome is not for the faint of heart. Things will break and more things will break. Right around the 10 year mark things really start to go wrong and the previous owner of our motorhome felt that for sure. Because I don’t have any certainty as far as when things were repaired I decided to do basically all of the routine maintenance at once.
Rewind back to when we bought the coach - the a/c compressor clutch was fried.
%$#& Fuel Water Separator!
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Today we tried an experiment. We tried to make a video… And we figured out that we are not the Wynns… We will never be YouTube stars. I can’t stop cursing long enough to make a video that isn’t all bleeps. Oh well. Of course I should mention that today probably wasn’t a fair shake due to the misery that I subjected myself to. You see I decided to change the fuel water separator and clean out the prefilter.
Replacing Coolant and Hoses
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For us buying a new motorhome inevitably means doing a large amount of neglected maintenance. Couple that with the fact that this is our first diesel and that means that this is quite the learning experience. Our new engine is the Cummins M11 Celect+, also known as the ISM. Ours is a pretty early (for cummins) electronic injected common rail diesel engine. This type of engine offers (typically) a bit better gas mileage and there is no lift pump to fail - BUT - it has expensive injectors and high pressure fuel pump to fail.
Carmel, Indiana
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On our trip out west we meandered from Sandusky Ohio over to Carmel, Indiana. Rather than being a tourist type place, Carmel is on our list of potential places to relocate. It is a smaller city that is 20 minutes north of Indianapolis. We stayed at a very affordable campground called White River campgrond which is a private campground that was taken over by Hamilton County. It’s actually located in Cicero, IN rather than Carmel but it’s pretty close.
Our new old RV. The interior
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Previously I posted about the exterior of the new old RV. In case you didn’t see it, we recently purchased a 1999 Foretravel U320 42’ motorhome. Now that we’re settled in and getting used to life in it, I feel more comfortable taking and sharing some pictures. When we originally started looking for a new motorhome I gravitated towards the American Dream/Eagle line of motorhomes. These are very decent but my better half found this Foretravel motorhome.
Our new old RV. The exterior
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We got a new RV! It’s a 1999 Foretravel U320 42’. It has a tandem axle, pantograph bay doors and a monocoque chassis so it is very “bus” like. I would say it has more bus features than non bus features. The thing that makes this decidedly not a bus is that it has a fiberglass shell and the skin is not part of the structure in a meaningful way. It took us around 6 months between thinking about making this purchase and finally making this purchase.
We are alive actually
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Rewind back to our last post. What happened? We were travelling and the dog and the kid got sick. Waking up every morning to a literal storm of poo combined with the child being hideously deformed enough that we felt that we shouldn’t take him out in public (he had something called hand foot and mouth disease) made us decide to call the trip. My mother thought someone beat him up after looking at a picture.