First Shakedown Trip (10/15-10/19)

Before we went to purchase this rolling home, I had indicated to my spouse that I thought we needed a name for our new coach.  People name boats, cars, guitars, pets...stands to reason right?  Anyway, my SO was not too keen on naming our coach, thought it was silly.

However, she will be referred to as Ruth from here forward.  Now Ruth happens to be the name of my very lovely grandmother on my mother's side who lived to be 90+ and was a very bright light in my life until she passed away several years ago.  

In truth, the Ruth we are referring to when naming our coach was inspired by Ruth Langmore from the Netflix Ozark series.  A friend of ours suggested that she is the sexiest, hottest, bad-ass, sophisticated, street-smart train wreck he's ever seen.  She also has a very colorful, potty-mouth at times.  We felt this likely characterizes our first "big rig" experience in our 40ft traveling home.   In the immortal words of Ruth Langmore...  On any given day she may be Ruth Langmore or my sweet grandma Ruth, and possibly both in the same day at times. 

After loading her up with everything we anticipated we needed for a month trip and a rather harrowing experience backing Ruth out of it's parking spot we were off on our first adventure. The hubster did a great job driving and keeping us rolling on up to have our new coach weighed.  This is done to ensure proper weight distribution once you fill the thing with half you belongings from home and intend on driving it down the road.  This weight data also inform the proper tire pressure for your coach wheels.  We were declared "not overweight" so have some flexibilty for more stuff, but will need to monitor additional adds to the coach inside and out. 

We continued our journey on up to Three Flags Camping Resort in Wildwood, FL, mostly highway driving.  We pulled in and learned a couple of new lessons right away.  First. sites with trees are nice for shade, but also leave a significant amount of debris on your slide toppers which needs to be cleaned off before traveling.  Second, Ruth is equipped with auto-leveling capabilities so the blood doesn't rush to your head while sleeping an a wicked angle from an unlevel campsite.  This is good, but you need to make an assesment at each site to understand where all your slides will extend to and your entry step especially if there is a cement pad.  We missed the step hitting the pad by a very small margin once the leveling took place.   We will certainly learning things everyday about Ruth. 

We had an exceptionally fun time with our best friends who live in The Villages while staying here.  They were the first to preview our new rig.  If they thougth we had completely lost our minds, they were very good at hiding it.  It was nice to have a soft place to land near friends for the first leg of our journey.  

Our next stop is St. Augustine for an 8 night stay. Time to relaxxxxx.