Extreme Makeover: Motorhome Edition

“That there Clark, is an RV!”

We have been looking for about 2 years for a pop-up camper to pull behind the van. Every time I call a phone number in the paper in the price range we could afford, no dice, already sold! My dad has some friends that own a car/RV dealership in Springfield and helps them drive Cars/RVs back from auctions. He has “been keeping an eye out for something” for quite some time and finally found something for us. But “it needs a little work” to quote him. A little work–how about a lot of work? There is a reason why he got such a smokin’ deal on it!

It seems that it had a leak or two or twenty and had some water damage. It had a pretty foul smell to it. On Mother’s Day evening, we ripped all of the carpet out and over the next several weeks, I put laminate flooring down. I actually enjoyed that quite a bit. Any time you get to use power tools and a tape measure . . . pretty cool!

We had to replace the refrigerator with a used one that works. It has all new tires (not by choice) because the old tires were rotting out and kept having blowouts. (The most exciting blowout was on Mother’s Day with dad driving and Taylor riding with him. It sounded like a shotgun blast. Taylor was freaked out!)

We have been cleaning like crazy and got it ready enough to “try it out” this past weekend in Branson. Our friend Guy came and cleaned up the upholstery for us and we were on our way. (We were going to go on Thursday night, but weren’t ready, so we just made it a one-nighter.)

We had a classic camping dinner of Mac n’ Cheese (Taylor’s favorite) and Hot Dogs. After our carb fest, we had a good time relaxing until bedtime.

Bedtime–a different story. The beds are like sleeping on a concrete slab. The boys were sleeping together for the first time, so they wouldn’t go to sleep. Plus I was up half the night concerned that Tucker would fall off the bed. We need to remedy the hard bed issue before we try it again, but overall . . . pretty good trip.

It has been a long time since I have camped with my parents in an RV. Jenny and I have been backpackers/tent campers our entire marriage, so I forgot a few little things about the RV–such as sewer and “gray water” tanks! While taking a shower, Jenny screamed, “David, this isn’t draining right!” No it wasn’t. I hadn’t hooked up the sewer hose to drain the water out of the tank. Oops! After about two minutes of hooking up the hose, the water level went down and all was well. Pretty funny stuff.

Hopefully we can use this for some family time off, but Jenny and I really have a heart to use it for missions, for other people to use it too, etc. How cool would it be to be able to go on a family mission trip in the ol’ RV?