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And We’re Off!!
We made it! Our RV is usable but unfinished. But enough is back together that we can take it on a trip. My family made plans for a fall trip to Utah to visit Zion National Park and Bryce National Park. We had a deadline to hit with finishing the last few things.
Yes, we need to finish a few things. We don’t know what we are going to do with the section behind the passenger seat. And we need to finish some trim and do some touch-up. But, we are going for it.
Down to the Wire
The shower needed to be finished, and we were leaving in the morning. It was a scramble to finish. We finally made the decision to just go. We will just take the things we need to finish on the road. After all, that’s how you want to finish an RV remodel. So that’s what we did. We still needed to pack. Also, we needed to go get our mattress out of storage.
At 10 PM the engine was warmed up and we were ready to go get our mattress. We decided to make the bed frame bigger so we could put our California King-sized mattress in the back. But we didn’t think to measure the door or the hallway. Luckily, memory foam compresses and we squeezed it in there. We got it in.
Throw it in and Go
You don’t normally go into an RV remodel and think, “you know what would be fun, leaving in a scramble out the door.” That’s what we did. We had so many things left to do on our remodel list that we just couldn’t finish it all. And our reservations were looming. We were planning to make it all the way to Ely, NV the first day. But the morning hours ticked by and we were trying to get everything into the RV. At the last minute, we finally just boxed everything up and threw it in. We had stuff lying everywhere and figured we could get it all situated when we arrived at our first stopover.

Unfortunately, that stopover was hundreds of miles away, and we were getting later into the day. We set off around 11 AM. We didn’t have any food yet, so our plan was to stop in Reno, NV on our way. We pulled into Reno as the sun was setting. Significantly later than we had hoped.
Plans Change
We were tired. We decided the best idea was to get a place to stay in Reno. Luckily, there is a casino with an RV park. It was a great decision and we got the chance to get a little more organized.

On to Ely
The next day, we woke up to a cold sunrise. But it was time to continue on.

We made it to Ely, NV with only minor problems (luggage door latches breaking, etc.). From there, it was on to Zion and Bryce. But I’ll leave those exploits for another post.
Fire in the Freshly Remodeled RV
The days spent in the National Parks were great. When we were on our way out to our next spot in Death Valley, we had some issues. I had installed some diode isolators with the hope it would some battery charging issues we were having. While it may have solved some issues, it caused other, more devastating issues. Our new RV remodel now smelled of smoke.
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