3 Lessons RV Pros Taught A First Time RVer

In June 2022, Go RVing hosted a Media Summit at the Harpers Ferry Kampgrounds of America. The event was attended by a diverse group of journalists, including Victor Aziz, a first-time RVer and a correspondent for Taking The Kids, an information resource for family, multi-generational, and group travel. Victor describes below his journey to Harpers Ferry and the advice he received from fellow RVers. 

My wife and I recently bought our first travel trailer on June 3rd, 2022. We had been waiting for the trailer to be built for months and we traveled from Colorado to Ohio to pick it up.

Serendipitously, a couple of weeks before we would go pick up our trailer we were asked to attend a GO RVing Media Summit at the Harper’s Ferry KOA in West Virginia. You can imagine our excitement when we were invited to an event that would teach us the ins and outs of owning, driving and enjoying an RV or Travel Trailer.

The circumstances and chances of being able to meet and speak to experienced professionals in the RV industry just days after we picked up our travel trailer was for us, a beautiful threading of the Fates. As first time owners of a travel trailer we were given a unique opportunity to pick the minds of engineers, representatives, brand ambassadors, and more. These are a few of the lessons we learned from our experience…

Becoming a first time RVer is a major life choice. The money going into the choice reflects that. As with all major choices, though, the truth behind the money is the mindset. It takes a certain grasp of understanding to owning an RV. It takes another level of insight to want to live or travel for long periods of time in an RV, which, like many Americans, we plan on doing within the next year.

We left Ohio on June 4th and began our way to Wichita, Kansas before traveling out to Harper’s Ferry. In the almost 1000 miles to Wichita we had some time to learn our trailer, from how it drives to the processes of living in it overnight. We took our time at the dealership testing everything, yet even though we did there was sure to be tons of things we didn’t test (let alone know). In those 1000 miles we tested, or learned from experience, as much of our trailer as we could.

The funniest moment happened on the first night of our stay when we were trying to take a shower. In our trailer there is a tank and then there is the hook up to the city water. These, we learned, are different. How we learned was we connected the hose from the trailer to city water and thought it was going to fill up the tank. When we checked the gages after a minute, our tank wasn’t filling. We disconnected the hose and water was coming out. We then reconnected the hose to the trailer. Back to the gage, nothing. We spent 20 minutes doing this before we realized that when we tested our trailer at the dealer he filled the tank from the other side of our trailer.

Needless to say, by the time we got to the Media Summit I wrote down a plethora of questions I wanted to ask. Many how to’s and what to avoid’s? I love to understand how things work and the days after receiving our trailer the list only grew in size. When my wife and I sat with some of these people at the Summit though, the questions all stayed in my note book and were tabled to the side of my thoughts. Between talks, demonstrations, and test drives I became captivated by something more than the information which was being shared. I tried to listen and seek out what was between the words of these experienced RVers. What I noticed most in all of these situations wasn’t the information I was being told, it was the demeanor in which each person operated.

Read the full article from Taking the Kids here.