We are one week away from the first of two short “shake-down” trips in May. We decided to take a couple shorter trips in May to 1) ensure we’re prepared for longer trips this summer, i.e., did we remember everything?! (thus, “shake-down”), 2) settle into our new rig (we only had a month in the fall to travel in the new rig before having to winterize), and 3) travel to beloved shore towns (Outer Banks, NC and Cape May, NJ). It just wouldn’t be summer without visiting these two special beach locales.

In preparation, Joe has been busy de-winterizing our RV. It is quite a process to flush all the antifreeze out of the plumbing lines, sanitize the plumbing system and descale the Truma hot water heater, which requires a trip to the closest dump—East Bound PA Turnpike, Valley Forge Plaza.

He also installed a proportional pressure water pump controller which greatly reduces the noise of the RV’s water pump. We installed one in our Ontour and it was one of the best upgrades we made. RV water pumps only run at a “full on” setting so with low water flow, such as turning on the tap to brush your teeth, the pump would literally make a loud hammering sound.

Our new RV has required us to “redo” some of the changes we made previously to our Ontour van. We wrote about this in a recent post.

We also had to redo some of the decorative “bling” elements we had added to our Ontour Van. We adorned our rig with stickers purchased during our first two years of travel across the US. Sadly, some of the stickers may be hard or impossible to find again. Photos of the stickers on our Ontour:

Luckily, a few of our favorite stickers come from a company called Rock-Art Stickers, which has reproduced many actual petroglyphs and pictographs found on the Colorado Plateau. While we have not visited petroglyph sites in Colorado yet, we viewed many petroglyphs and pictographs in Arizona and New Mexico (see Three Rivers Petroglyphs and Newspaper Rock in our Painted Desert -Petrified Forest posts) and are mesmerized to see messages and artwork that were carved and left for others to see many centuries ago.

We also needed to replace our US State map that marks the states where we have camped overnight. We look forward to filling in a few more this summer!

In case you are wondering about the image at the beginning of this post, it was taken in the lobby of the Doylestown Inn in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Sue only wishes she could bring that many suitcases!

Let the 2024 travel season begin: first big trip, crossing the northern border to PEI in June….

Thanks for checking in and reading to the end.