As I mentioned on one of my last posts on the main blog, we are now the proud owners of a 35 foot Heartland Big Country fifth wheel RV.
Hitch Installation
As the only thing I had on the truck that could pull anything was a standard bumper hitch, towing a fifth wheel would be out of the question.
Fifth wheel hitches can go for upwards of $1,500 for the hitch alone, then the added expense of installing it would likely make it a $2,000+ expense. Luckily, the fella we bought the RV from had a gooseneck pin box on the trailer so I just needed a ball installed in the bed of the truck. All told, it was still $1,200, but at least the ball is removable and can even be flipped over to maintain the flat bed if needed.
I picked up Craig at 8:30 am on Tuesday and headed in to Pella to have it installed there. After about three hours, the truck was pulled out of the garage and we were on our way.
As we headed to the seller’s house, a slight drizzle started, making me a little wary about the upcoming trip home. As I may have mentioned, I’ve done ZERO hauling on this level before and contending with rain and wind on my first drive isn’t something I was looking forward to.
We arrived at the seller’s house and he walked me through the last few ins and outs of the trailer- electrical stuff, plumbing stuff, hydraulic stuff, and so on. He fished through his massive mound of keys to find the ones that belonged to this trailer and with four keys in hand, I back the truck up to the trailer, dropped it on the new ball, plugged in the 7 way electrical connector and the breakaway cable and and were immediately greeted with a light fault. Turns out, the right rear indicator bulb is burnt out and will need to be replaced.
God, I wish that was the worst of the problems we had…
So It Begins
I had hooked the breakaway cable to the tie-off in the front of the bed, right behind the cab. The seller told me to make sure there was plenty of slack in the cable otherwise I might pull it on tight turns. He also warned the the pin box was a little low for my truck and that I might need to drop the coupler a few inches otherwise it might hit on tight turns too. I thanked him, shook his hand and off we went.
We exited his property onto a lonely dirt road and as we got to the stop sign at the end of that road, the trailer’s brakes engaged and wouldn’t let me go. Right then, the seller drove up on an ATV with an unrelated question, something about “Did I give you…[something]?” When I confirmed that he had given [something] to me, I mentioned we were stuck. We looked in the bed and, sure enough, we’d pulled the breakaway cable. I repositioned it on the rear-most tie-off, right inside the tailgate, plugged it back in and we were back on our way.
We slogged through Pella along the shores of Lake Red Rock and to highway 163. I got on the highway and eventually managed to get Clyde up to 65 MPH. We were cruising along for a few miles when I looked in my right side view mirror and noticed the door to the battery compartment was open. Apparently, we had failed to lock it. I pulled over on the shoulder of an offramp, locked the door and we continued on our way.
We finally made it to near home. Now came the part I feared the most: Trying to back this beast up into our driveway.
What A Mess
I pulled up with the driveway on my left (easier to see out of the left side view mirror than the right), passed the driveway a bit, then made my first attempt. I inadvertently began aiming for our neighbors’ driveway and failed to correct so instead, I pulled forward and into the parking lot of the school across the street from the house. We turned around, pulled out of the parking lot, passed the house again, and started heading toward a nearby funeral home where we planned on practicing my backing up technique. As I was giving her the ol college try, I wound up at a fairly acute angle to the trailer and started hearing some awful noises. We stopped and hopped out to look and, sure enough, the pin box was ramming into the bedrail. It completely destroyed the rail for my tonneau cover and may have done some damage to the bed; I have yet to make a full damage assessment. It was determined at this point that the coupler was indeed going to need to be dropped a bit.
We straightened the trailer out, dropped it off the truck, took the coupler out and took it to Craig’s house were we worked on lengthening it a little. We took it back to the trailer and I commenced my reversing practice. I nailed a nearby driveway into the parking lot in short order which significantly boosted my overall confidence, but my circumstantial confidence was still basement level. I pulled up in front of the house and tried a handful of times and came damned close a couple of them, but I just couldn’t get the thing in the driveway. Craig said, “Hop out and let me do it.”
Now, Craig has ample experience with backing trailers. He had no experience with fifth wheel trailers, but still, his general trailer experience is monumentally superior to mine. It still took him a handful of tries to get the trailer into the driveway.
See, the biggest problem is the fact that our street is very narrow. There’s no parking allowed on either side of our street so it’s only two travel lanes wide. No bike lanes, no parking lanes, nothing to make the street even a little bit wider.
Anyway, he got the beast into the driveway and started backing it in, when…
From Bad to Worse… But Not TERRIBLE
I was guiding Craig back and was so focused on how close he was to the garage and making sure the trailer didn’t hit the cab of the truck that I didn’t pay any attention to the low-slung power lines draped across our driveway.
As he backed up, the power lines leading to the neighbors’ (presently unoccupied) house hung up on an exhaust vent of some sort. I noticed at the last minute, screaming “STOP!” just as the staple holding the coaxial cable, which was hung right by the power lines, to the house popped. Both cables were tangled up on the exhaust port. I didn’t want to do anything with it, so Brandy took Craig home and I called Alliant Energy to report this and ask them to send someone out to assist. I was on hold for half an hour and when the rep came on the line, she qualified the incident as an emergency so she dispatched someone right away. Before long, a technician showed up in a bucket truck, evaluated the situation, and went to work.
He took down the cable line altogether from the pole and unhooked the power lines from the RV, tightening the slack from them while he was at it to raise it to fit the RV under. He did express some concerns about how tight the line was but, meh, not my problem.
He left, I backed the RV the rest of the way into the driveway and disconnected it from the truck, thus ending the ultra-eventful day.
First Plans
Just this morning, Brandy, eager to get a trip in under our belts, mentioned wanting to take a shakedown trip to Lake Wapello and get our feet wet (literally and figuratively). This trip is in the process of being planned quite expeditiously, seeing us departing on April 27, a mere two weeks after getting home from the week we will be gone in South Carolina.
We have so much to do, and buy, before we take that trip but hey, that’s where my obsessive research will come in handy.
But first, let’s get this pesky trip to South Carolina out of the way.
Pics
Before I sign off on this post, here are a couple of pics of Brenda* in our driveway (*this is what the seller had named her, will keep that name as a matter of honor).
Now, I’m off to get her leveled out so we can get her cleaned up.
-Phil