ALONE with my DOG - WINTER CAMPING in a DIY Travel Trailer with a WOOD STOVE by a RIVER

I had about four spots picked in this location. I've had them picked for years. I've been meaning to come to this spot and haven't been able to. Finally I got the chance to get out here and the first spot which would have been awesome just couldn't get down the road with the trailer more like an ATV trail. Checked out some of the other ones they weren't the best. I didn't care for them so much that I was willing to drive another hour to another spot when I literally stumbled across this one. I drove by it, walked down here, checked it out, realized it's a little sketchy so I didn't know if I pulled the trailer and if I'd actually be able to kind of do a three-point turn and pull it out of here. So what I did was I backed it in which was a little challenging. Tested my skills. I'm getting better I'm proud to say. All right this is uh this is going to be Scout's first time in the trailer ever. Come on Scout here you go. Obviously he doesn't need that. What do you think huh? What do you think eh? There you go. Got the hardwood floors for you. Just hoping there's nothing sharp in there you can cut yourself on. So uh thanks for joining us Scout's first trip in Eddie. Not sure how effective those will be with the snow the way it is. It's a pretty uneven spot but the weather's supposed to get very cold so it's certainly not going to melt. Chains are frozen solid. That's why you always bring a toolbox. You never know what you're getting. So I had Eddie in my driveway um you know even though it looks priceless to me but I don't really have this in my head that someone might think it's worthwhile and try to steal it. So in my driveway I had a lock that's a very common one you can see at kind of hardware stores and stuff. It's a ball. It has a bar that goes over top here. All the reviews on it. It was the first one I bought. The reviews on it you know basically say it'll keep an honest thief away right. You really could cut it with some bolt cutters. Now that I'm taking Eddie and leaving it on public property you know I could be gone for a few hours maybe a morning maybe an afternoon fishing. I'm pretty nervous about leaving it. So I did some research and this is the lock I settled on. I think this is pretty much as heavy duty as you can get. It's uh AMP makes it. Probably weighs about 10 pounds. This is the ball that goes in here. I mean this thing is solid and this goes around the coupling and the ball goes into there. And again like I'm not exaggerating this weighs about 10 pounds. So how it works is this goes in and then you shut it and then this goes over top of the lip and I'm talking it looks like you know maybe a half inch of steel or wrapping around there. So all this does this goes in here and clips in and then you push the the button down there and that is it. Really really easy to to do. So I mean in theory if someone's going to steal something they're going to steal it but you would really need to work to get this lock off. And then as far as picking a lock goes I went on that website locksmith doctor whatever it is I'll put a link on it and he picks basically every lock possible. And he did pick this one but he did say that he had to use a basically a custom tool that he built himself and it took him a little while and he recommended this lock. He basically said that you know the average person is not going to have the equipment that he has. He's got like millions of subscribers so obviously he's at the high end of the talent level for picking locks. So the average person is certainly not going to be able to pick this lock. So anyways that's what I'm using and I'm also going to put a lock in here. Security is a big thing for me and I would be I'd be pretty devastated if I came back and the trailer was gone. So especially you know if you've watched this all the work I've done to build this trailer. So then we're going to put this in here as well and I put some washers in the gap so you know if you had a you know whatever you were going to cut it with the washers would spin around so you wouldn't be able to get any traction on there. This is fairly solid so I mean you know there's there's locks you can put right on top of the whole thing but to me I think this is uh this is pretty solid so this is what I'm trusting it with. So a lot of people in the last video asked about the fire pit. I was cooking over it and I really have dialed it in. It's a great setup for cooking over the fire but I've actually modified it and by modifying I've really actually removed sections. I don't use this panel anymore and this is the whole reason why my buddy made it for me. You put my logo on the grill on top so this this goes on there and when there's a fire going it looks it looks pretty cool. I'll show you some clips from a video that I did on it when I first got it. But cooking on top of this actually is problematic. It looks nice but I really don't use this very often unless I'm just sitting by having a fire but to cook on it just take it off and you saw those steel bars that go across it and that's how I cook on it. This fan really really circulates the heat in here once it gets going. It's very very nice to have. Well camp is roughly set up now. I have the fire pit outside put together. We got a nice fire going in here. Scout's finally getting used to her environment. It's warm in here but she's still kind of like not sure what's going on. This is the bed which I'm going to try to work on. I'm going to try to frame it. Last video I had these black totes. I had three of them under there with some scrap pieces of plywood. Well under here now is the slide out for the the rails for the slide out and then the piece of plywood for the slide out and I wouldn't mind starting to frame the actual height of the bed. So the coming time when this is a little more organized but eventually this will be my kitchen counter. I'm still going with this little table and the cooler underneath here. Pretty much in my head wrapped around that I'm going to relax and just kind of organize Eddie tonight. Hang out with Scout. Just kind of get everything organized and go at it hard tomorrow and make the most of tomorrow for a day and the glass for my beer. I'm a bit of a princess. I like drinking my beer out of a nice beer glass. Not that this is a nice beer glass but when I'm backpacking and obviously camping in other areas you know you can never carry glass and cans and stuff so one of the luxuries of being with Eddie is having beer in a glass. I love it. Last video a lot of people have watched it which is great but I took a lot of heat from whipping out a plastic fork so on this trip I was joking that I would maybe bring a triton or some crazy steel fork but ultimately I forgot and I'm using a plastic fork again so feel free to type the comments. I promise I will get a more masculine It got really cold overnight snow and it's beautiful. A lot of ice is now floating down the river. It's pretty amazing actually because when we got here there was no loose ice floating down the river so it's one of those things fish when you can right. Minus 19 out there right now it's pretty brisk so now I get to start to enjoy the benefits of having a trailer when I can stand up and have a wood stove eventually a little countertop. So instead of building a fire this morning you know I do like to cook outside and get a nice big fire going but as I get a little more organized with my trailer I'm going to really enjoy the benefits of being inside it makes it warm. So I'm going to take this fan off here so you got to be careful taking this off this gets really hot. I'm just going to use my cutting board and put it on. I just don't want to damage it by grabbing it the wrong way. I'm going to put that up there and then this will be the first time I'm actually going to cook on the stove. I'm just going to boil some water for coffee right now as you can see my water was starting to freeze so put it on here and let the test begin. Just for fun we'll run a timer and see how long it takes to boil that water. That'll be good to know actually. I can't tell you how nice it is to to be able to first of all stand up. I think a lot of things on YouTube right now it's really popular these teardrop trailers and everything else which is great. Whatever works for you you got to do what you got to do. This is a pretty remote campsite right by a river and I was able to get Eddie there with a little bit of work but got him there and that's the whole idea of why I built Eddie the size that I did. I wanted him to be big enough that would be comfortable. Shower, wood stove, good size bed. Biggest thing for me I want to be able to stand up. I want to get up in the morning, stand up, and walk around. I'm not going to walk around. It doesn't have to be a lot of space but I want to be able to get up, stretch. I want to be able to get dressed, putting my pants on, standing up. Camping in the back of my pickup truck was great. You know there's a lot of benefits to it but one of the things I disliked the most was getting dressed in the back of my pickup truck. I'm 6'2 so and I'm not very flexible at the best of times so this is probably the biggest benefit of building a trailer like this. To me it's the best of both worlds. I'm going to try to warm up some bagels so maybe just try to put them on here. Get them warmed up a little bit. See if that's a good idea or not. We'll call that a rolling boil. Half an hour, a little longer than I thought it would be. Just got to warm them up a little bit. I'm just going to go with some peanut butter jam and coffee this morning. I normally put my coffee in my Yeti mug but I thought I'm going to use my Jetboil because the Jetboil mug, the way it's designed, has a metal ring around it that will elevate the mug off of the wood stove. So I think it should be the perfect thing to keep my coffee warm. I should be able to put it there and it's not going to damage the mug at all and it's elevated almost an inch off so it should be the perfect coffee warmer. Some coffee. Of course I get Scout's attention. It's about the biggest coffee mug you can get. So eventually when I get things done in here I think I'm going to have a toaster on the kitchen counter because you know my trips are going to go from once in a while to you know I like to live in here part-time and filming for you guys making big breakfasts for videos is sometimes complicated and time-consuming just not possible. So you know my goal is to show you how this can be a real life residence and living out of here on the road and I think a toaster is going to be in the future for Eddie. This might seem like a little bit of overkill for just cutting some firewood but when you're out by yourself in the middle of nowhere a cut from a chainsaw could be a big problem. So for the few minutes it takes to put these on I got them and it gives my family some peace of mind when I'm out in the woods. You know it seems like a reasonable safety thing. People think I'm a little too safe tying up my ladder and things like that but there's nobody to come save me quickly anyways if something goes wrong. So I mean I got these chainsaw pants you know hopefully I never need them but what's it hurt to do that right. I also bought this setup here because I wear glasses and this has got like a mesh screen, a wire screen and it's not that the electric chainsaw is very loud but it comes with these but uh yeah safety first right. And you guys uh in the last video I had a 12 inch DeWalt chainsaw that was pretty good but I gotta be completely honest with you um it was okay for small and then I didn't even realize DeWalt made a 60 volt uh 16 inch chainsaw. So um I sold the other one and got this one and to be honest with you this thing is the bomb. I absolutely love this thing I'll never use a chainsaw again. I did have a 20 inch chainsaw it was a Remington and a lot of you guys asked me about the case that I was putting the 12 inch DeWalt in. To be honest I just swapped out the gas chainsaw so that was actually the Remington case that I was using. Unfortunately it doesn't fit this one this one's a little too big but uh I have all DeWalt tools so going with DeWalt chainsaw just made sense to me and actually just bought a lot more. So um the battery you know just makes sense once you're in a certain ecosystem you just stick with that right. little bit of that framing. I gotta clear some room to actually work in there. This is my food and cooking bin. So all my all my pots and pans are in that one um so I'm going to try to get a little bit of framing done on the uh the bed. Nothing too fancy I just used my uh jigsaw which I pretty much used for the entire build of this uh trailer. And uh Scout more than likely will have to go in the truck for a little while. I'll run the run the heater for a little bit because beauty of uh vichlas is they they like to be with you all the time. A velcro dog right. I hope you enjoyed the video. We're gonna wrap it up here Scout and I. Thanks for joining Scout on her first trip with Eddie. It's been beautiful. I hope you enjoyed it. This is just the beginning of my adventures with my trailer. There's gonna be lots to see and it's not even built yet. So subscribe if you haven't already done so and if you like the video I really appreciate if you gave it a thumbs up. Cheers!