It's been 9 months on this crazy journey of ours and we are starting to figure out how we'd like things to work. We may be doing this for awhile.
We bought our little 31' Class C RV about a year ago and we've definitely outgrown it. The main issue is that Cathy and I cannot sit in the living room after the kids go to bed as it disturbs Hali. Her bedroom is located over the cab, which is essentially in the living room. Therefore, around 8pm or so we are relegated to our bedrooms or outside.
When we were in Texas for Christmas we decided that we wanted to switch things up and get a Fifth Wheel RV. We found one we really liked with the master bedroom in the front and a room with 4 bunks in the back separated by the living area. It was perfect. We found a truck to pull it with and had a buyer for our Jeep. Unfortunately we couldn't get a good trade-in value for our RV so after a couple of weeks the deal fell through.
As we've made our way west I've emailed dealers looking for specific RVs and haven't found anything we've really liked. We were close a couple of times but it never really felt right.
We sold our last rental house while in Las Vegas last week so I blasted out a bunch of emails to dealers in San Diego and one came through. The same dealer we bought our RV from has their HQ in San Diego and they had one that looked very promising according to the Youtube video. We headed over last Friday after work and fell in love with it. It has essentially everything we need including an actual tub in the bathroom and reclining sofa chairs in the living room! Two of the things that Cathy and I really wanted. We wrapped up the deal in a couple of hours and were the proud owners of a 36' Heartland Gateway Fifth Wheel!!
Here's a video of the RV if you are interested.
Our next steps were to sell the Jeep and buy a truck to tow it with. Friday night and Saturday morning Cathy and I researched trucks on the interwebs and came up with a number of possibilities.
I sent out email for the trucks we were interested in and headed over to Carmax early in the morning to get a price for our Jeep. They ended up offering us $5,500 for the Jeep which isn't that bad of a deal. I would prefer to keep it and have someone drive it to FL for me but that's too much of a hassle. The girls didn't want it to go either.
After Carmax, I headed back to the RV, picked up Cathy and the girls, and headed north to Carlsbad to a dealer that had an awesome internet price for a truck that looked like it would fit the bill. It appeared to be $5K-$10K less that any other truck we could find. We spent the afternoon at the dealer and finally drove away with a 2015 Ram 2500 with a 6-speed manual Cummins diesel. It's big and awesome. Cathy and I love it! She looks super-sexy driving it.
We take the truck down to the RV dealer tomorrow to have the hitch put on and then pick up the RV on Wednesday evening. We'll have to transfer all of our stuff over but it's a great reason to do some spring cleaning.
There's a lot of work to do before Wednesday but everyone is excited!
