Our First Time RV Camping In a PARKING LOT! Creepy Door Knocks & More Engine Trouble 😱

You guys, there's kind of a creepy guy out there and I may or may not have a knife in my pocket. And then we turned the fan on and immediately it sucked in all this McDonald's smell. Yeah, so it smells like McDonald's in here. We were sound asleep and somebody started banging on the door. I might look really tired but I am awake and my heart is pounding. Yeah, I don't know about staying in these parking lots. This might have been a horrible idea. Well, good morning adventurers. So today we are back in Clementine. If you guys caught our last video we made a minor upgrade and ended up staying the night in a castle here in Arkansas. I guess we got a little tired of the cramped space. Yeah, plus it was just freaking beautiful in the middle of the secluded woods. It was a very nice relaxing stay. But today we have everything hooked up to get back on the road. We are ultimately heading back to Poplar Bluff where our families live to see them for a little bit since we're gonna be on the road for quite a while. That's about a four-hour drive and you know, we are not wanting to do more than one or two hours a day in Clementine. So we're gonna stop halfway at a gas station. Yeah, it'll be our first overnight stay at a gas station. Yeah, we have a Love's picked out and they allow you to park overnight. Plus they have conveniences for people who are doing what we're doing or truck drivers more so. I don't know, it might be a horrible and terrifying idea but we're gonna do it. Yeah, the idea of it's a little creepy but you know. You're just sleeping in the middle of this very busy bustling area. All right, first things first, windows down. Nature's air conditioning on. I've officially made it to our third state of Missouri. So that means it's time for a good old-fashioned map scratching pretty soon. We got to get to our spot for the night first before that. But it's only about an hour down the road so we'll be there in no time. We made it to our campsite for the night. Home sweet home. I don't know if it's quite what I was expecting. It's very very exposed. There's literally these spots. Very obviously marked RV which is cool but we're the only ones there. We're the only RV here. We kind of stick out like a sore thumb. Yeah, I think most people probably arrive here later at night and then they would just be here for like eight hours to sleep and go. But we're gonna be here like 12 hours plus. Yeah, maybe some other RVers show up and give us some company. We don't have any AC because we need to be plugged into shore power for that. So first things first, we're gonna put our little sunshade thingy on our front windshield. Keep some of that heat out. And of course, give us a little privacy. Much needed privacy in this spot. Next up, we're just gonna keep all of our vents on. Pretty much full blast exhaust mode. Try to keep the temperature down at least a little bit in here. Oh yeah. So we've got that one over there. We're gonna set this one to blow in. Hopefully get a nice cool breeze going through here. Cool-ish. Really one of the only good things about the direct sunlight is that it is charging up our solar. So our batteries are pretty much full right now and it's generating enough to keep all of our lights, our fridge, our fans running. We will see how it does overnight though when the sun goes down because we're gonna have to keep both of the fans going, the fridge running, the toilet has a vent on it. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how much it depletes. We have 300 amp hours of battery so it shouldn't deplete at all but we've never done this before so we don't know. Yeah, not with all of these things running at once. So we were gonna stay in the RV for the night and like cook and just chill but it is entirely too hot in there and we would have to turn on the oven or the stove and add to the heat so we're not gonna do that. Instead, there's a little steakhouse literally like right around the corner here and we're just gonna go there. This stuff is all very easy to mess with and take so we're gonna store it. So we're just gonna unhook, drive down the road, hopefully let the sun go down a bit. Yeah, enjoy some AC, eat some food and then we'll be back to our little camping site for the night. Yeah, sorry Clementine. This was exactly the right call. I got myself a little steak burrito here. Oh yeah and I got steak tips which is my favorite thing because it comes with some grilled veggies so I pretend like it's healthy steak. We had big plans of cooking in the RV and everything but it's just too dang hot although it should cool down pretty soon. Yeah, but it is nice not having to do all that work and then making a bunch of dishes since we realized we also don't have much water in our tanks so that would have been annoying trying to clean up with limited resources. So much happier that somebody else did the hard work for us. Steak cheers, huh? Steak cheers. Ding! I mean... So the real question is are we able to get Wi-Fi out here? I think Lowe's usually has Wi-Fi, right? They do actually. It's showing up on my laptop. Well, I've got McDonald's free Wi-Fi that seems to connect because there's a McDonald's like attached to the Lowe's. Okay, so Lowe's does have Wi-Fi. It's free if you remember. Otherwise, it's four dollars for four hours, six for 24 hours. Yeah, so this is nice. So we can just sit here, chill, and work. We got some internet. The only downside is it's still a little too hot in here but I think it's going to cool down pretty quick once the sun goes down. We'll report back. But for right now, I am wet from sweat. You know, the nice thing about being in a Lowe's parking lot is that you have access to the Lowe's. We're going to go in there and just get some snacks and supplies and we need some water. And another really cool thing is we don't really want to fill up our toilet if we don't have to. So we can just keep using their facilities. Yeah. It's a pretty nice little setup. Yeah, and it's air-conditioned in there which is going to be so nice because I just cannot stop sweating now. One thing you can always count on at Lowe's is that they have a much bigger selection than most other gas stations we stop at, especially the local ones. They never have sparkling water. I thought it was catching on. Lowe's is really the only one we found on this whole trip that has Topo Chico and they have a few other versions. They also have fruit and some other semi-healthy options which, again, you can't ever find. Maybe you could find an apple. But never pineapple, strawberries, cantaloupe. We're going to feast tonight. Uh-oh, I think we found our Missouri magnet. We're actually putting these magnets out in our little grill area because there's some metal there that they attach to. This one's handily a bottle opener as well. So we'll have a bottle opener out there as well as our little Missouri memento. You know, we forgot to scratch Missouri off the map. Let's go do it. Third state down, baby. There you go. We've done it. Slowly but surely, we are going to knock out all 50, you guys. Hopefully. We got a nice little clump here in the middle. It's making a good dent now. It is intimidating though. I mean, we've only done three states. There's so many more to go. We're going to do our best, dang it. The sun is starting to go down. So our plan now is to just black out this thing as best as we can. We're going to keep the lights down low and try to chill and just pretend like we're in our cozy little living room and not in the middle of a bustling gas station where people are constantly slamming on their brakes and opening and closing the doors and yelling at their friend in the car when they're up at the door to the gas station. We've heard a lot of weird conversations going on outside our window. Yeah. But first things first, we've got to get ourselves looking a little bit more cozy. Oh yeah, loungewear to the max, baby. It might still be really hot in here, but at least we're way more comfortable. So now it is time to chill. At least try to chill. Someone's looking pretty good. Are you talking about me undies? Well, I was talking about your pants, but I wouldn't mind talking about your undies. No, silly. My loungewear is from me undies and we want to give them a huge thank you for sponsoring today's video. Y'all, we are huge fans of me undies. We have actually been wearing their stuff for two years now. And you know, every time we come into the RV at night, we immediately change into our joggers to get super chill and comfy. They're super comfortable and really well designed. And one thing we love about their joggers is in addition to the deep pockets, they also have this cheeky little internal pocket so that when you're running around, you never drop your keys out. So whether you're chilling like this. Or this. Or like whatever the heck this is. You'll always be comfortable in your undies, which are me undies. This got so weird. I don't even know what this is. I don't know. So you can head to meundies.com slash endless or you can use the code endless and treat yourself to the ultimate comfort and get 20% off your first order at me undies, baby. Can you imagine if all these people on this parking lot knew what the heck was going on in here? It's so ridiculous. It's been like a frenzy of like changing clothes and rearranging everything in here and filming us in our underwear. Yeah, it was pretty fun, but also pretty hot. We got to get this fan going again. We have to turn the fan off because it's so loud. I need air. I feel like Ace Ventura when he was caught in that rhino. Kind of hot in these rhinos. We have all of our blackout curtains down and we have all the lights on. And we're really curious what it looks like to the outside world. I wonder if everybody knows that we're just in here and can see a lot of things. Yeah, let's go find out. You know, it's a lot brighter out here than I thought it was going to be. Yeah. Okay. Well, this is making me feel way better. One, because they have so many lights. So if people come and try to mess with us, everyone can see them. And two, it's definitely detracting from our lights. You can't even tell that they're on, I think. Well, that's really cool. I thought it would just be like a beacon. All right, nice. Everyone saw everything inside of there. Yeah, check out how lit up the parking lot is. They just got lights all around. I mean, I guess that's good, you know, because it makes me feel a little bit more secure considering we're still the only people here. The only thing that we definitely still have to sort out is this window. But we have found that there is an interior little cover that should fit this frame exactly. Yeah, that'll black it out. We just need to get that. Yeah, and then we'll be really blacked out, baby. Guys, there's kind of a creepy guy out there. We were out there doing stuff and this guy just started driving around staring at us and then parked right over there. It's kind of freaking me out. Now we just ran inside real quick and I may or may not have a knife in my pocket. I don't know. He was looking very menacing and he did a whole lap around the parking lot. Yeah, suddenly I'm not too excited about sleeping in this parking lot. Not gonna lie, we're a little bit on edge now. That guy kind of creeped us out and then now we're just looking out and seeing all these other people that are just kind of meandering around. I think a lot of them are just kind of taking a break from the road and some people are going in, I think, that might work here. And then a cop showed up and he was parked over there for a while so it made me feel a little bit better. But you feel very exposed, you know? So we're just sitting here in the dark just in case people can see our light coming out. We want to be as inconspicuous as possible. We've got the window open so we can hear anyone sneaking up on us. We were being too goofballs. We were outside like taking photos of us with the RV. Like, I don't know, so it was something to stare at. So I'm sure that's why he was staring but it's just weird that he did the whole loop and then he parked right there and now he's still supposedly in his car and it's been like an hour, y'all. I don't know what he's doing. So I'm not gonna sleep well and I'm probably gonna wake up very early so we can get the heck out of here and maybe I won't be a huge fan of parking lot camping anymore. No, I don't know. This is in a bright well-lit parking lot. It's open 24-7. I mean, come on. It's funny because I should feel safer that we're in the middle of it and not like on the outskirts but for some reason, I don't know, I feel like people can come at us from every angle or something. But now we're gonna watch The Witcher which is totally not gonna put us on edge more. Yeah, and it's the final episode of season two so it's gonna be probably pretty intense. Yeah, the dreams we're about to have. Yeah. Oh, I'm not sleeping. Bed is all made. We are down to 87.6% already on our battery so it remains to be seen how low that's gonna get throughout the night but I mean, I don't think it's gonna go to zero but it'll get closer than I thought for sure. Yeah, I didn't expect it to be that low so quickly actually. It's mainly this fridge that has to run in here. Oh, we did turn the freezer on. Yeah. Didn't we? Oops. It's gonna be fine. It's a good test, right? It's such a weird feeling watching. We were just sitting watching The Witcher. All of a sudden it would occur to me, I'm in the middle of some parking lot where everyone can see me. It's kind of hard to get over. Yeah, just start honking or something or a motorcyclist would drive up and you'd be like, oh yes. Yeah. One really goofy thing that we didn't anticipate is that every smell from the outside makes its way in through the vents. So someone was over there smoking and all of a sudden we're like, what smells like smoke? And it was just someone puffing clouds of smoke over there. And then we turned the fan on and immediately it sucked in all this McDonald's smell. So it smells like McDonald's in here. We decided to sleep down here in the pullout couch because we just feel a little too exposed up there and we thought maybe it would be cooler down here. I don't know. Or maybe not exposed enough up there. Just if something happens, we want to be quick. We don't want to be like falling off of a ledge to our demise. In general, we just felt like we'd be more comfortable sleeping down here. But let's be honest. We're not going to be comfortable at all tonight. Too much stuff's going to be going through my head. And mostly I just hope that nobody messes with Ruby out there. Yeah. And of course, we got the RV locked down tight, but there's always extra security measures. You could have like a security cameras or like a proper deadbolt from the inside and all kinds of stuff. Feel free to let the tips fly. I'm sure you guys are going to have a lot of tips about how to properly secure an RV, but we're open to it. All right. Because we want it to be as secure as possible to ease our minds. I will say one security upgrade we did was changing the window on the door so that the screws face inward and not outward. We didn't realize when we got this thing and traveled in it for the first while. The screws are facing outward, so you could literally take them out. Any guy with a screwdriver could just walk up and do it. So we promptly flipped those around. But anyways, I guess we're going to try to sleep and I'm going to have dreams of people knocking on the door and probably wake up and be like, did somebody knock? What happened? Fingers crossed that doesn't happen. No, we're going to sleep soundly and wake up. It's going to be beautiful and perfect. Wish us luck, y'all. You guys, it's 7 a.m. We were sound asleep and somebody started banging on the door and Eric is just running out there to see what the heck's happening. Whoo. I might look really tired, but I am awake and my heart is pounding. I wonder if that was going to happen. It was just a fan. He said that he drove by and saw our RV here at five in the morning. He was like, well, I think I'll give them a little bit more time. So we waited till seven and they came and pounded on the door. Oh, boy. He was a really nice guy, though. Yeah. Oh, I'm awake. Yeah. I told him he scared the heck out of us. He was like, oh, sorry about that. Oh, my God. Yeah, I don't know about staying in these parking lots. This might have been a horrible idea. Holy cow. I did not see that coming. That really woke us up. Before that, we were fast asleep. It got freezing in here last night, y'all. In general, I slept okay, though, in spite of all that, until the pounding on the door woke me up with a fury. So this is something we thought might happen, that if we're in a really obvious area, our rig is very identifiable. I'm starting to see the benefit of stealth when you do what we do. Every campsite we've gone to, a fan has come up and chatted with us. This is the first time somebody's knocked, but we figured it would happen. We've been preparing for it. It's really making us rethink these exposed parking lot stays. I guess on the plus side, it was a free night stay. Which is really nice, considering how much gas is, how much campsites can be, especially when you do the hookups, how much castles can be. We probably shouldn't be staying in those so often. I do think, ultimately, we're going to use Harvest Host a lot more. I don't know if we'll necessarily feel safer, but usually those are a bit more off the beaten path because you're staying at a brewery or a winery. Last time we did it, there were other campers there. I think it's feeling like you're on somebody's private property and not in such a public space with so many people coming and going. Just personally, I think we're not to the point where we feel comfortable doing this. I know it's a great option for a lot of people. You always think that it's going to be so whimsical. You're going to be on the road and you can park and camp anywhere, off the land, in a Walmart parking lot, in a gas station parking lot. The staying on grid is more of our jam. Maybe if we had a white Sprinter van, it'd be different. But we have big old Clementine and tiny little Ruby, which you can see from miles away. Anyways, we're going to head into Love's and grab a quick breakfast and then try to get everything all set up and get back on the road, baby. When we woke up, our battery capacity was at about 81% when we checked. And one thing I totally forgot is that we leave the solar on overnight. As the sun sets, it stops charging. But then the minute the sun comes up, it slowly starts to charge more and more as the sun gets high in the sky. So it was charging probably for a good hour or so before the guy knocked on our door this morning. So I'm thinking we probably used about a quarter of the battery overnight. So that's not too bad. You thought maybe half or all. I mean, that's that's good because between that and solar, we can as long as we're not running the AC or anything, we can have pretty much infinite power as long as it doesn't get cloudy. Well, I hate to say it, you guys, but we got more engine trouble. It happened. We were doing so good. We were driving along and then we just smelled this strange yet familiar smell. And it's all this gunk. This is a transmission fluid. And this is a problem we've had before. There's a little vent way deep in there that gets stuck. And the transmission fluid shoots up through this little dipstick here. I think when we had the mechanics looking at it, they were checking the levels of the trans fluid. It might have put some new in there, but it got stuck in this tube. So it's just like burping out and getting all over everything. Secondly, we got a giant coolant leak. I think it's leaking out of some lines in the heater system. So I'm going to try to close them off because there's a little valve in there that might be open. But I just have to wait for the whole thing to cool down. So far, it's not too serious because we can refill the coolant. We can always try to trace down the leak. But for now, there's just coolant and trans fluid all over the frigging engine. We were doing so good. Clementine was doing so good. Why? Yeah, we drove hundreds and hundreds of miles up so many hills. And then today, the lightest day we've done so far. We're 20 miles from home. Disaster strikes. Should we just put it into neutral and let it roll down this hill? Let it roll right into that pole and then leave it. I'm tempted. Frigging tempted. OK, here's the plan, y'all. The coolant's a little low, but it's not like dangerously low. And I have some antifreeze, but it's not diluted. So I don't have any distilled water. And they don't have it at this gas station for some reason. Even though it's a truck center, you'd think they would have something like that. But so I have to go seven miles down the road and try to find some distilled water. I mentioned that valve was open. So I closed that valve. And I think that's I think there's a leak in the heater lines. But closing that valve, hopefully no coolant is flowing through the heater lines now. And we'll check it after seven miles and see if it's leaking. Also, just a little disclaimer. I am no friggin mechanic, you guys. I just have some slopped together knowledge from all this crap we went through with this RV. I was about to say we had to learn on the go. And I don't know. We're doing the best we can. OK, the gas station down the way had distilled water. We got our antifreeze here. So I topped the whole thing off. It really wasn't all that low. And I think that turning that valve in there did stop the leak. There was a little bit still dripping that was probably still in the line. But I think it's going to be OK. I still need to have someone look at it, obviously. But we only have 10 more miles to go, you guys. So let's just friggin do it. All right. So we ended up making it back to Poplar Bluff. And we just took Clementine straight away to the mechanic. We actually had a guy, I think we mentioned this, but he was going to work on our AC lines because our AC isn't working. But now he's just going to work on so many more things. Sorry. Yeah. So we've got that transmission fluid issue and then all that coolant leaking. But he's already kind of diagnosed the whole thing. And I think he has a pretty good handle on it. He's thinking about a week or so. But we know, and you guys probably know from our experience, that you usually add one to two weeks, maybe months, onto whatever a mechanic says. Yeah. So our hopes aren't super high that we're going to get her back really soon. But for now, it's just us and little Hotbox Ruby. I'm already sweating. We've just been in the car for like a minute. We just got in. Yeah. All right. First gas station stay and probably last gas station stay in the books. We'll try it again. Maybe we'll see. We'll get back on that horse. All right. Goodbye, adventurers. We'll see you on the road.