When you decide to live in an RV, one of the first things you have to do is downsize. We went from 1500 sq. ft. to 300 so we had to get rid of at least 1200 sq. ft. worth of stuff. Another consideration is the weight limit that RVs have; they call it “total capacity.” When you go over your total capacity, the RV does not drive well at all. It is harder on the engine, suspension, and increases your possibility of rollovers.
We quite enjoyed down-sizing our lives. This is part of the reason Andy wanted to do this because, as he says, “we have too much crap.” Before we left, we took all of the possessions we wanted to bring with us, laid them out in our parents’ garage to figure out how we wanted to pack everything, and then loaded it up. We filled just about every square inch of storage and we are quite excited that we were able to fit everything that we wanted to bring.
There is a very large difference between being able to fit everything and being able to use everything. Take for example, our ability to fit extra bags of dog food, stored nicely in the back upper corner of our RV “basement.” Last night, we learned the meaning of inaccessibility. Forgetting that the dogs were out of food and remembering where we put the extra, we both looked at each other and hung our heads. It was time to get to work. Finding that food was easy but actually getting it was a project. Nothing says “backbreaking” like moving about 200lbs. of tools, chairs, and miscellaneous fishing equipment on your knees in order to get a bag of dog food. Every time we take things apart, it goes together a little differently but at least it all goes together.
All in all, there is really nothing we can do about it. Lesson to be learned: get things from underneath the RV before it’s too dark out to see what the heck is going on.
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