Hey friends, welcome back to Grand Adventure! I'm your host Marc Guido, and if you're one of our
regular Grand Adventurers you know that normally right where I'm standing right now, when we're
home there's our trailer, our RV sitting right here. Now if you saw our recent episode from
The Wedge you know that we're dealing with some structural issues in that trailer, and how are
we going to deal with those structural issues? We'll share that on this episode, so stay tuned.
So we brought our 2016 Evo travel trailer down to Kyle at Straightline RV, our trusted RV mechanic,
to figure out what our options are, and they basically come down to two choices:
spend $7,000 to $8,000 to repair those walls that support our slides, or cut our losses now.
Now choosing to replace the Evo rather than repair it, as one of our potential options,
does present a unique opportunity for us. For one thing, we have talked for the past year or two
about the prospect of actually going full-time in our RV 12 months a year. It really makes
no sense for us to pay for this house for the six months a year that we are traveling
around the country and not occupying the house. However, there are some shortcomings to the Evo
that have prevented us from making that leap. For one thing, while it's a great trailer for us to
travel in six months a year it is a little bit on the small side for us to call a full-time home.
For another thing, we're not like RVers who would run to the sunny warm, climates as snowbirds
to escape the winter weather. Rather, ski season is far too important to us and we would much
rather seek out the snow during winter, and the Evo really is not an effective four-season design.
It's a great three-season design. It's not a good four-season design. So that left us with
the option of maybe trading in the Evo instead of repairing it, and if we did that we could use
that as an opportunity to pick up something that we could actually live in year-round.
Once we got back to Salt Lake City, that meant it was time to go shopping.
We needed to make as informed a decision as possible. We realized that no matter what we would
decide it wouldn't come cheap. We were either going to have to spend thousands to repair the Evo
with no guarantee that we'd avoid similar or additional problems in the future,
or take it in the shorts by trading in the Evo. We could have lessened the financial damage by
selling our Evo outright, but i didn't feel right selling that trailer to someone who
might not fully appreciate what they were getting themselves into. If we decided to trade it in we'd
also need any replacement to be something that we could tow with our Tundra, for even though we
might trade up to a three-quarter ton or a one-ton truck in the near future, we didn't want to take
on two large purchases at the same time. It was a tall order that we weren't sure could be filled.
So behind me you can see what we decided on! Come on, I'll give you a quick tour.
This is our new 2020 Durango Half-Ton 283RLT fifth wheel from KZ RV, soon to
be our new year-round home that we purchased from Motor Sportsland in Salt Lake City, Utah.
We looked at what seems like countless fifth wheels and travel trailers,
and compiled a list of what models could be towed by our Tundra from every single RV manufacturer.
To analyze our choices logically, we put a list of trailers in spreadsheet form,
with columns for each "must-have", "want-to-have" and "don't-want" item learned from our four
full camping seasons in our Evo. Each feature got a positive or negative numerical weighting,
and in the end this Durango earned our highest score. To top it off, we appreciated Motor
Sportsland's no-pressure sales environment that proceeded smoothly from start to finish.
I'll start you out with a tour of the outside before we head inside. The basement storage
is massive, especially compared to what we came from, and as you can see we already have a Xantrex
pure sine wave power inverter already installed. That pass-through storage goes all the way to the
front panel as well, with no divider in between to try to separate things out. We have a full
auto-leveling system, and one absolute requirement of ours for winter camping was to have all our
connections inside a heated wet bay. Already on the roof we have 190 watts of solar, and plenty
of real estate up there to be able to expand our solar array before we hit the road in the spring.
I'm optimistic that an upgraded suspension system will help us avoid some of the axle issues we
experienced with our Evo. Now let's head inside and take a look at the interior. Another big
requirement of ours was having lots and lots of massive windows, so that way it brightens up the
inside during the day -- even in this case with a skylight over the kitchen sink for added light.
The main living area features an electric fireplace,
LCD television, full galley with range and three-burner stove, an eight-cubic foot
two-way refrigerator, and lots and lots of cabinet space.
Just below our solar charge controller sits Lippert's
OneControl system for touchscreen handling of just about every function inside the RV.
Now let's take you upstairs to take a look at the bath and bedroom areas.
The shower stall is quite large at 36 x 30 inches -- plenty of room for us to
take a shower in this bathroom. Also in the bathroom they've put a huge linen closet,
deep with lots of room for extra towels or sheets or blankets. We love this unique window right at
eye level as you come out of the bathroom that lights up the hallway and gives you a nice view
as you enter the master bedroom, which has a three-door closet slide for plenty of storage.
We'll be purchasing airbags before we hit the road, but still
I really expected the Tundra to squat quite a bit more.
We took delivery of our new fifth wheel on a Friday afternoon, and by Friday night we were
at the Salt Lake City KOA giving the new rig its shakedown cruise to familiarize ourselves with its
systems and look for any issues that would need to be addressed. This KOA isn't in the best part
of town, but it's conveniently located just a few blocks from downtown via a short light rail ride,
and the park itself is rather attractive. We didn't spend much time exploring the campground
as our purpose was to become acquainted with our new home. We're now busy organizing our
lives and downsizing in preparation for our planned full-time date of January 1st.
So what does this mean for Grand Adventure? Well, for one thing we're definitely going to
have to update our channel trailer because it's no longer applicable. However, that's something that
really has been coming for quite some time and is now long overdue.
We're going to spend this winter sharing with you what it's like to transition to full-time life.
We're always scratching our heads trying to figure out what we're going to do for video content
during the off season anyway, so this gives us the chance to also share with you some of the unique
challenges that we're going to face trying to winter in an RV throughout the cold months. Now
we'll be resuming our normal travel content coming up this spring, so stay tuned with us because we
also have a few extra surprises in store for you coming up this winter, so if you are not yet a
Grand Adventurer this is the perfect time to go smash that little red "subscribe" button -- the
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love to hear from you. So until next week as we embark upon this latest chapter of our own Grand
Adventure, please remember... life is nothing but a Grand Adventure! We'll see you then.