We spent the last 3 weeks of May scrambling to get everything ready to start our journey. Sue worked on packing items destined for the storage locker, donating others, and cleaning the house preparing it to be rented. I worked with Bill to complete the work on the truck and camper (Bill doing the work while I tried to stay out of his way 😊). It was definitely more than either of us thought it would be, but Bill is an amazing guy, he put his head down, got to work and completed everything on our list and then some. I can’t say enough about the work that he
did and the solutions/ideas that he came up with.
For those of you that have built out a camper you’ll know what I mean when I say that nothing is easy. Nothing just arrives, you throw a few bolts on and if fits exactly as you expect. We would joke that everything on the camper is custom. Mounting the privacy curtain, mounting the roof rack to the roll bar, mounting aluminum angle to the Yakima tracks, mounting the solar panels to the aluminum, mounting the X-Deflex anti-roll bar, etc. etc. etc. Also, on more than one occasion I ordered the wrong part/accessory and on more than one occasion the company I was dealing with sent the wrong thing. Btw, how can they ship an auto part without a washer? We are talking 10 cent washers here, and once you get the part try and find, and order the correct washer, ridiculous! Call it a kit and charge me the extra!
The whole process was rather stressful complicated by the fact that although I sent my passport renewal in over 2 months prior to our departure date, 10 days prior to our trip I still hadn’t received it back (it’s supposed to take up to 5 weeks). Long story short I started calling daily and after initially being told that someone would call me (they never did) I was finally told to go to the passport office. I lined up at 1:30am (#3 in line) and received my passport at 4pm that same day, 2 days before our departure (catastrophe avoided😊).
Regarding the build of the camper, Bill was soldering together parts for the connection of our truck batteries with the camper at 9:30pm the night before our ferry. We didn’t leave it till the last minute it just took a lot of work and time to complete the build. We tried to get our camper sooner but from the time we ordered our Four Wheel Camper to the time we received it was 1 year. We received it at the end of February and booked the ferry for June 1st. We lost some critical time when Home Depot lost our countertop and the only thing that saved us was the fact that they sent the countertop that I had ordered and cancelled. That delayed that part of the build by a week and put some additional pressure on Steve who had kindly agreed to do the carpentry work on the camper.
Sue and I are extremely happy with the way everything turned out, thanks Bill and Steve, we will spend our first night in the camper in Juneau Alaska. 😊Also a big thanks to Barb and Rose who let us stay at their house while we were getting everything ready for our trip.
