RV Life Season 4

Did we really travel 2,700 miles scot-free?

Nicole Anderson

18 Mar 2025 • 9 min read

When we meet fellow RVers on the road and tell them about our blog, we always say the same thing: "We don't seek out the drama, but somehow the drama always seems to find us." The drama does make for some good stories, but sometimes we just want a smooth journey without constantly doing damage control. Unfortunately, the longer and faster we need to travel, the higher the chances that something will break, an accident will happen, or we'll simply burn ourselves out. So, when we left our home-base 2.5 weeks late and knew we needed to make a quick cross-country road trip, we planned for delays.

But, to our pleasant surprise, we hit the plains of Texas before we knew it. We had only a few hundred miles to go before we caught up to our Season 4 plans in New Mexico, and were a week and a half early! We took advantage of our good timing and planned an extended stop in Palo Duro Canyon, followed by a few days in Roswell, NM. We welcomed 6 nights of camping in the canyon, enough time to settle in and truly enjoy our surroundings. We breathed a sigh of relief as our travel days shortened from in the 300-mile range to the 200-mile range.

We've talked about how our blitzes usually go. We've gotten flooded out of our campground, caught in dust storms, and stuck in mud. We've had some of our scariest drive days. We've dealt with vehicle problems. Only this year, you may have noticed that our posts stayed relatively quiet in the drama realm. Did we really travel 2700 miles unscathed, or did we purposely keep the drama out of the blog?

Let's face it, our Season 4 travels didn't get off to the best start. We battled winter weather that wreaked as much havoc on our rig as it did our morale. We were forced to roll with the punches, booking campsites spur of the moment, depending on where seemed safest. We also had a little flood scare in Louisiana. But, as we made our way west, suddenly the blog became less action-adventure novel and more storybook.

It is true that, for the most part, we frontloaded our issues. Once we crossed the Mississippi, we turned a new leaf. However, no long drive is 100% smooth, so there are a couple of things we left out of the blog. Sometimes, we have experiences that simply don't fit within the overall frame of our blog stories at the time, and so they end up on the cutting room floor. This happens either because, A, we don't have time to share everything, or B, the experiences just don't fit the mood. When we spend post after post talking about problems and then finally have a great, uplifting story, we don't want to bring that story down by talking about yet another problem! And so, the problem needs to wait. That's what happened here.

We wrote about having a drive day that reminded us why we love RV life. We woke up at a beautiful Harvest Host in Oklahoma, surrounded by the friendliest animals. We took our sweet time driving through Texas, even stopping at a Buc-ee's with our rig for the first time. Then we ended our day descending into Palo Duro Canyon at sunset, and the views were extraordinary.

What didn't make the blog post, was that during our night at the Harvest Host, we had issues with our furnace. Again.

Read about our almost-year of furnace problems

The night dropped down to the 30s, and so we set our heat to come on, which it did. However, we could hear the igniter clicking, as though it was trying to light the furnace over and over again. We needed to decide which was the bigger evil. We could either continue running the heat, be warm, but risk the furnace completely dying. Or, we could stop running the heat and hope we buy some time for when the temperatures dip even lower. We decided on the latter, and settled in for a cold night on the farm.

At this point, we had had enough of this furnace. We already knew back in the fall that we should have replaced it then and there. The repairs ended up being more expensive than just buying a new one. We tried to see if we were missing anything that perhaps jostled loose during our bumpy travels from Louisiana, but we don't have easy access to the furnace components, so there's never been an easy way to check the parts. Anthony ordered a new furnace and sent it to the UPS in Canyon, TX, just outside Palo Duro Canyon State Park. He then began contacting mobile techs along our route who could possibly install it for us.

A stich in time saved nine, because our one cold night on the farm meant that we were able to run our heat during some of the below-freezing nights in the canyon. The igniter seemed to be fine, and the furnace ran properly. We still didn't trust it one bit. Plus, we had to face the fact that our furnace was old, and given our frequent winter camping stints, we probably ran this thing a lot more often than some other RVers. We found a mobile tech in Roswell, NM who had availability, and we made an appointment the day after we were due to arrive. Thankfully, our furnace held out until then.

Turns out, our distrust of the furnace was warranted. When the mobile tech took it out, he found a dark spot, which is evidence that the combustion chamber was overheating. He said he's only seen this previously from a wasp nest, but none of us think that was the culprit. We don't entirely know what it was, but because we can't easily access inside the furnace, you can only imagine how much dust and hair was in there. Could it have all formed a clump? We guess it didn't matter at this point because it was getting replaced anyway.

While we had the mobile tech out anyway, we had him attach our new fresh tank heaters, which we had been patiently awaiting an opportunity. When our heaters busted back in MA, it was too cold to adhere the new ones, and so we needed to wait for milder weather.

This was probably the biggest issue we had, at least once we got through our "no running water" situation back east. However, you may recall that during our drive between snowstorms, we didn't just have issues with the cold, but we also found a gash forming in one of our tires. We've been driving on bent axles for over a year now, which is why we've decided to head west again this year. We have an appointment to get our axles replaced under warranty in March, but we need to go to Utah to do it. Until then, we've been keeping an eye on our suspension and tires, and we knew that we'd run the risk of uneven wear.

Read about our over-a-year of axle problems

The gash was looking relatively shallow, so we didn't feel the need to immediately find a tire shop. However, we wanted to get this problem dealt with as soon as possible, because we had a lot of long drive days in our future. We found a shop that had our tire in stock, located just minutes from our campground at Kerr Lake State Recreation Area – our NC state park where we waited out the artic blast and Gulf Coast snowstorm. The guys were great. They told us to pop by on our next drive day and they'd get us squared away.

We pulled up to basically a junkyard of tires, most of them huge and meant for semis. Everyone was super efficient, having us pull on the side of the building, jacking us up, and replacing our tire. While we were there, we asked them to check our remaining tires, just to get another set of eyes on them. Sometimes when we check them every day, we can't see the increasing wear because it's so gradual. We also never quite know when the tires reach the point of no return. One of the guys pointed out that we had some wear on the inner sidewall of our front driver side tire, but it wasn't enough to be of concern yet. We weren't at all surprised because this was the only tire that hadn't been replaced since we did all 4 tires back in Utah in 2023. We hoped it would hold out until March, but we'd have to keep a close eye on it.

Season 4 has been eye-opening for us so far. We're astounded by how second-nature this life of travel now seems. We theorize that, once you get through the "3rd year slump," you come out the other side very close to veteran-status. There is always more to learn, but we don't sweat the small stuff anymore. We think that's why these little issues end up being less of a big deal on the blog. They're never convenient, but we just handle them and move on. With our eyes on the prize of getting to New Mexico on time, we didn't want to make a big deal of them, nor did we feel like we had to. These issues were small blips on an otherwise seamless drive. We never take a smooth drive for granted. After our previous blitzes across the country, we were due for a win. We're extremely grateful that we finally got one.