So let me recap this story, just so we're all on the same page.
About a year and a half ago, Carrie and I picked up a Class C motorhome. We'd been wanting one for awhile, so we could travel in comfort to fun riding destinations with the bikes trailered, and then do the fun riding once we got there.
The motorhome we got, which we traded my Ninja 500 and some cash for, was a 1986 Itasca by Winnebago, or Winnebago by Itasca, or however the heck that works, on a Ford E350 chassis. It was old, but well maintained, with meticulous service records. It ran very nice and rode comfortably for something so lumbering, and we were pretty happy with it.
Until, that is, we tried to take it for our first big long camp. There's a place out here we really like called Soapstone, it's about 90 minutes away up in the mountains. Beautiful camping, cool at night even in the summer heat, maybe a little rainy. GORGEOUS place. Well, about half an hour into the drive, cruising along at a comfortable 55 mph, the motor suddenly loses power and we start to slow down. It didn't die completely, but I couldn't get it to go any faster than about 35mph. We limped it home, bought some tents, loaded up our little enclosed trailer and headed out to do our camping as we intended.
The motorhome sat until we could put together the money to fix it. I sent it to my mechanic, who doesn't normally work on motorhomes but made an exception for us, and he ended up rebuilding the carb. We took delivery and it was excellent, ran strong and accelerated fine and just did great. We planned another campout, this time in Mantua, the little town featured in the very first post of this blog.
Narratives being what narratives are, I'm sure you know what comes next. On the way up the canyon road to Mantua, the motor again started to miss and lose power. Not as dramatic as before, and thankfully we were almost done climbing, but it did it again. We had our campout and drove home, and on the way home that old Ford 351 ran fine.
We talked to my mechanic and decided it may have been vapor lock, or perchance the carb had some unseen defect and made it eat jets. I have 100% faith in my mechanics skill, and he offered to take another look at it, but by that point we were several $1,000s into it and tiring. There were problems with the coach too, water leaks and poor charging on the house batteries and a few other things that meant it just wasn't worth investing more money in. We parked it with notions of selling it at the beginning of this season for whatever we could get out of it.
In the interceding time we had looked half-heartedly at new motorhomes and even driven a few, but never pulled the trigger. This last fall though, we had some investments pay off and made a lot of progress with our finances. Because of all that, we decided about a month ago the time was right to revisit the idea of a new motorhome. We attended a big RV expo two weekends ago, and really got an idea of what we wanted, and after the expo visited a local RV lot and had a look around. Then we had a drive around. Then we had a sit down. Now we have a motorhome.
Now, of course, we have a new problem. We can finally tow our bikes around like we've always wanted, but we have larger bikes than we did when we bought our trailer. First world problems right? We need either a larger trailer, so we can haul our big bikes around, or a pair of Z125s to put in the smaller trailer. We could deploy them like TIE fighters.
I'll even do the pew pew pew sound effects. So if you know someone from Kawasaki, please tell them to get in touch. So that was the Saga of the Motorhome. We've achieved a three-year goal with this one, and we couldn't be happier. For our TMW coverage, this will mean we can cover a lot more events, because even with that thirsty 6.8l, driving will be cheaper than flying, car rental, hotel stays and eating out. So follow the link to the YouTube channel below and get subscribed, because this season is going to raise the bar.
Thanks for tuning in!
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