RV Driving School: Our Experience
If this is the first BOW post you're reading, let's catch you up. We took delivery of our 28-foot travel trailer down in North Carolina this past October. Our maiden voyage consisted of driving it the ~850 miles back to Massachusetts. Before that, we had never RVed before, nor had we ever towed anything. Talk about a crash course! And speaking of crashing, just two days into traveling with our new RV, we had a mishap pulling into a Harvest Host. We took a narrow turn that had ditches on either side, and, not knowing our trailer yet, thought we could make it. We could not, and we ended up, well...
Since then, we have learned a lot about our trailer. There were definitely many things we could have done differently to end up not going into a ditch. For starters, being more diligent about learning the space around our rig, and getting out and looking whenever we're in a tight space. We also discovered a few issues with our trailer that were causing towing problems, which led to stress, which led to more towing problems. Not a cycle we want to be a part of.
After our ditch sitch, we made it back to MA without a hitch (see what I did there?), but the trauma of the experience lingered in our minds. As fate would have it, back at home and tuning into the YouTube videos we missed for the week, we discovered that Liz Amazing had released a video on RV Driving School the day before our ditch sitch. We immediately clicked to watch it. The consensus was that RV Driving School was helpful even for Liz and Paul, who have years of RVing experience behind them, as well as Paul's former life as a CDL driver. For newbies like us, it was a no-brainer. We needed driving school before launching full-time.
If you're reading this thinking, "Wow, I didn't even know RV Driving School existed," neither did we. It is a national school that provides instructors all across the US. We booked ourselves a two-day course with the Massachusetts instructor for just after Thanksgiving.
Before setting out on the 40-minute drive to our course, there was a lot of worry and stress about towing our giant rig again. We could only hope that in two days, we'd be feeling much better.
We met our instructor Aaron and immediately got to work, not towing, but fixing our hitch. As we got used to towing, hitching, and unhitching, we knew that there was something wrong, beyond our lack of experience. Then, on the day of driving school, it took us 30 minutes to hitch up because our hitch was giving us so many issues. We asked Aaron to take a look for us, and he agreed that the hitch was installed way too high for our truck. He also pointed out that the hitch was missing spacers that provide cushion when we brake our trailer or drive on bumpy roads. Suddenly we realized that this issue was probably affecting our maneuverability quite a bit.
Aaron took us to one of his mechanic buddy's shops and got us all fixed. That two hours was well worth the price of driving school admission, because we knew that we could not practice towing until we were hitched correctly. Plus it was just a huge relief. Not only was our hitch fixed, but our gut instincts were correct.
We spent the rest of the day learning to tow on roads, something that Anthony had 850 miles of practice doing, and Nicole had zero. Aaron had us practice on all kinds of roads, from tight side streets (with people watching in horror from their houses), to highways, and everything in between. No trailer was left unturned!
On the second day, Aaron broke out the cones, and we practiced maneuvers: backing up straight, backing into spots, reverse lane changes, etc. Definitely more stressful than the day prior, but that's because we weren't experienced at maneuvering in general. Hours of practice did in fact make progress, but like anything else, we will get better with time. At least we feel more confident to hit the road knowing that we've put in some good man-hours.
Would we recommend RV driving school? Absolutely. Whether you're a seasoned RVer or newbie, the course is set up to meet you at your level. We were able to customize the course to work on what we felt we needed the most. In addition to getting our hitch fixed, Aaron also figured out how to remove the LED light covers from our ceiling lights - just because the topic came up in context. He really was open to any questions we had about our rig, towing, or RVing in general.
So if you're stressing about hitting the road in your 50+ foot-long getup, don't fear. There are some really legitimate ways to get practice so you can build skills and confidence with your towing.
We will be taking our lessons on the road with us, and hopefully they will give us a little more peace of mind that we can in fact tow, and get where we need to go - without feeling anxiously nauseated the whole time. We are putting the ditch sitch behind us and focusing on the road ahead!
