Is it over?

The price of inexperience can be costly at times. Back when we started this journey Emily, and I were employed by a grocery store, working 50 to 70 hours a week, remodeling the grocery department at the original location while planning for an opening of a brand-new second location. Outside of that we’d spend all our free time sleeping or trying to research this upcoming dream trip of ours. After work we’d rush down to RV dealers before they would close and look through their inventory to get a feeling for the type of RV trailer that we wanted. Pretty quickly we settled on the manufacturers that we liked. Forest River seamed to use better quality materials in their construction of their trailers from what we observed. We then narrowed it down to a fifth wheel as we liked the celling height (especially for me being 6’1”) and they are built on a stronger, sturdier frame which is great for full time living. Travel trailers on the other hand are generally built with cheaper lighter products as they are targeted more at the weekend camper and need to be towable buy someone’s daily driver SUV. From there it was a matter of sifting through dozens of different brand lines that Forest River sells and half a dozen different floor plans that each line offered. We decided on Rockwood Ultra Lite fifth wheels as we loved the floor plans and they checked a lot of the boxes including being winterized meaning the plumbing is insulated so it does not freeze during the winter.

Out of all the floor plans, the one that called to us the most was the Rockwood 2881S. It was almost perfect except for the weight of the trailer was a tad on the high side. Fully loaded with fresh water, gray water, black water, and all our stuff the trailer would exceed 4600kg which is the legal limit for towing a trailer without a Code 7 (house trailer) or Code 20 (commercial trailer) endorsement on your driver’s license. To get an endorsement you need to have a full driver’s license and take a knowledge and road test, which is fine for Emily but unfortunately isn’t for me as I have a novice license and need to wait 2 years before upgrading it to a full license. We did the calculations and determined that we’d be within our limits as long as we didn’t drive with our tanks full and that just in case Emily would get her code 7 endorsement for the times, we needed to move the trailer overweight.

After thinking we were safe, we went back to our sales rep and started the ordering process, added a few options such as an additional AC unit and double panewindows for the summer and winter elements. Then we waited for out unit to be manufactured and delivered. In early January we got that news that our unit had shipped and would be here by the end of January and on the Friday the 29th I called the dealership and they confirmed that it had arrived. This is where things started to through a wrench into our plans. Our dealer listed our unit on their website to encourage others to come take a look before we took possession and looking through the specs listed on the website, noticed that the dry weight was 4318kg instead of the anticipated 3972kg we were expecting. This immediately started causing concern as we’d almost definitely be overweight.

At this point our options have become limited. We can sell the truck and cancel the trip or completely rethink our trailer. The option of factory ordering something is no longer feasible as the lead times is 3 to 5 months. We found another Rockwood fifth wheel that wasn’t a terrible floor plan (2445WS) and there is one unit located in BC but it’s from a different RV dealership and getting reapproved for financing maybe tricky without a full-time job. The dealership that we are currently working with has different Rockwood floor plan (2442BS) but the this one isn’t ideal although it’s quickly becoming one of our only options. Alternately we could go with a travel trailer which is well within our limits and then some but then we have a three-thousand-dollar hitch in the back of our truck that’s of no use to us and the materials used to keep the trailer light aren’t ideal for full time living wear and tear. I drove up to Parksville today to look at the Rockwood 2442BS and although it has the same Rockwood build quality the floor plan is not ideal for living and working out of full time. While talking with the sales rep about our concerns around trailer weight he offhandedly mentioned that the second heaviest component in an RV after the frame is the glass in the windows. This is why travel trailers tend to have tiny prison windows in order to keep the weight down while fifth wheels which aren’t as concerned about weight have nice large panoramic windows. This comment immediately brought me back to the double pane windows which we added to our configuration and made me realize the mistake that was made that cost us our trailer. The sales rep in Parksville was a lovely, retired man who has been in the industry for the past twenty years and came back out of retirement to work two days a week has he loves the job and sharing his knowledge. He even gave me his personal card so if I had any questions, I could email him and leverage his knowledge to help our trip get underway. Additionally, he’s memorized how much kraft dinner, cans of beer or cases of wine (red or white, doesn’t matter) the trailer can hold for any given cargo carrying capacity to help his customers visualize the weight limits. This apparently comes from a time once when he had a customer insisting that she needed 3,000lbs or kg (I can’t remember) of cargo capacity for her and her three boys so while she was looking at something he quickly went inside and did the calculation in terms of kraft dinner to help her understand how much weight that was and why it was more then she needed which lead to her being more realistic about what to purchase.

In hindsight we both really wish that we had first made contact with a sales rep that was more interested in finding the right solution that fit the customers need and point out any potential issues with the configuration that we chose when from the bigging our biggest priority was the weight of the trailer which was made clear. What we got was someone who was more focused on closing the deal which makes sense based on fact he’d won top salesperson of the year for many consecutive years running. Ultimately though it was our lake of knowledge at the beginning and not enough research that led to this hiccup in the plan. Like all things in our trip planning prosses there is a lot to learn and the more we research and gain experience, the more we’re able to apply our learnings to future planning and decisions.