Broken Heater in the Airstream Van? 🤦‍♀️ #vanlife

Okay this might have been a really bad idea. To bring you up to speed we are on a cross-country journey from California all the way to Florida to attend the RV Super Show which is the biggest most epic RV show in the country. It happens once a year and we're doing it in a 2023 Airstream Interstate which we bought in the summer which was a total cluster cuss. There are tons of videos that you can watch about that but it's been in the shop for the last five months. We found out a couple of weeks ago that it was ready so we decided we wanted to come out here and find out for ourselves if it was really working. We've been driving now for four days I think and last night was rough but the views are beautiful. Now if you're if you've been following along for long you know we've had some issues with the power system on here and we believe it is fixed and the team at Airstream Adventures of California specifically Sean and Matt were so communicative the entire time it was at the shop and I really do feel like they gave it their absolute best effort. We're just not willing to test the power system on this journey so we are hitting campgrounds and skipping campground and campground. The reason being if we're boondocking at any point and the power system fails well then we're stuck and we have the baby and we have the baby we have Dash and it was 23 degrees last night it was 20 it was 20 degrees last night 20 degrees so that is something that we did not want to tackle on this trip because the weather is dropping it is dropping fast but then so as we explained it is roughly 20 degrees at night which means we are using our Timberline heating system. This is since in the six months that we've owned this we've only been in cold weather a handful of times so in reality this is kind of like it's a maiden voyage of the Timberline system. Specifically after it was fixed we had a leak and it flooded the back of the van that's another video that you can find also so really I guess in reality this is the first time we've used it since it's been fixed. Now most of the night it was we're as snug as a bug it was absolutely amazing we're using the heating system it's uh it works off of the diesel it doesn't have propane or anything like that and it was working great and then around 2 30 a.m Lauren woke up and she smelled the diesel fuel uh in the back area when we're sleeping so we don't really know what that's about we immediately shut it off and there's an element only like an electric only version that we switched to after we kind of aired out the airstream at like 2 30 in the morning with the door open and the vents open that was fun to get some of the smell out from the fuel but uh yes that's where we're at with the Timberline system we don't really know what's going on with that I know so many of you told us like don't do it the van is a lemon like just take it back we had to know um and granted we don't even really know if that's well I mean I think you can probably agree with us you're not supposed to smell gas right diesel you're not supposed to smell diesel or any kind of fuel when using the system because it ran for hours without smelling and as soon as we turned it off the smell started to subside um granted we opened the windows and vented it out a bit but uh that led us to believe there's definitely potentially something wrong with the heating system at least the diesel aspect of it it's still a new system for us we're still learning our systems um on this trip because this is essentially kind of again kind of our maiden voyage like take two so yeah that's where we're at with that the good news is is that the electric version of the system was able to keep the van warm enough to get us through to the morning um so that being said it was pretty chilly so we've decided that we're not going to run the system again with the gas until we can talk to an expert about it diesel i'm playing okay diesel sorry daniel's correcting me like every five seconds unfortunately it's sunday and tomorrow happens to be a holiday aka new year's day so we don't know if we'll be able to talk to anybody for the next two days which kind of sucks we're gonna try but it still kind of sucks so we decided that for tonight just to keep things simple and because poor dash has a cold and it sounds like i'm getting it too we're gonna just crash at a hotel in albuquerque which has given us another four hours towards nashville which is a win and kind of go from there now one thing that we have not yet talked about which we kind of took for granted when we pick up the van um is the fact that vinny and ivan the great over at uh fixed all the dings from the hail damage and honestly because they did such a good job we didn't even it didn't come to mind to pick up the van i mean they legitimately it looks like it came right off the showroom floor they did that good of a job and just to bring up the speed there were roughly like 17 little dings from hail all fixed all perfect looks like it came right off the because when we saw it at first i thought there's no way it is impossible to get it back to like looking like it came from the factory and they did so i'm gonna start with that positive because that is absolutely awesome did an awesome job on the end when we park and show you a little bit more but you're probably wondering what the heck has dash been doing for this whole time i guess if there's one positive mood dash having a cold right now is that he wants extra food the entire time we drive one really really noticeable change from the time we dropped it off at the mercedes dealership to get fixed there's a bunch of fixes i'm not gonna go over all those but we dropped it off the mercedes dealership for some stuff they updated the software and a bunch of other stuff and now it is getting better gas mileage now a bunch of you were telling me that you were getting better gas mileage out of your sprinter vans than we were and the reality is you probably were because i think we were averaging somewhere between 12 and 13 miles per gallon we're essentially taking the exact same highways and as it stands right now i'm getting 14 and a half miles per gallon so that's two miles per gallon more than we were getting before that and i don't know if i'm more excited about the hot shower because i didn't want to mess with our system the way it is right now without uh figuring out what's going on with that i think i'm the only one who's even actually ever taken a shower in the van and like it is not super functional y'all you need to be able to do some pretty serious yoga to do to take a shower in there okay back to daniel's list second thing is it has to be a comfortable bed um while this does provide a pretty wide bed space when you lay down everything there's even the extenders now that are i think new to 2023 models of interstates which provides a little bit more headroom or legroom however you want to you know position yourself at night but um it's just not super super comfortable we're kind of swell because in the other rv we have our brooklyn bedding mattress and it is amazing so it's hard to compare that with you know seats that you're essentially just reclining so the caveat to that is we could technically get some kind of like mattress cover or something to make it a little more comfortable but it would take up more room which kind of brings us to daniel's third point the third thing is that when we left florida originally in june we were headed to the airstrip international rally in wyoming and because of that we brought a lot of crap um and unfortunately all that crap that we were brought with us to use the rally is still in the back so every night i've got to unload everything in the back and put it either on the the camper table the picnic table or up front here when we go to bed now in the future with the van we would just bring less stuff and then we can just recline the back easily without having to unload everything but as it stands right every single night we have to unload the back of the van but we hide and with it hitting 20s it's pretty cool it's pretty cool to be sitting outside you know unloading stuff and going through all that stuff at night it's already cold when you're like hooking up at night when it's that cold so yeah and by all that stuff he means we've got like a pop-up tent we've got multiple chairs we have a pop-up uh eating a high chair for dash so there is quite a few things back there we also have our starlink system that's back there right now which we're not even using as of right now we're using our verizon hotspots people ask us about that a lot um so yeah there's that that's but at least we're getting close to the hotel we're just making it to albuquerque new mexico and it's a bit bittersweet uh one happy that we've made it this far we're making some good progress but two i'm a little sad because we were supposed to be here this past october for the balloon fiesta and we had reservations locked in which are so hard to get uh but we also had to cancel those reservations because of all the van stuff so hopefully we'll be able to get another balloon fiesta reservation in the future but uh until then this is the first time visiting albuquerque ever not gonna lie the sun is starting to set and it's already getting gold in the van so considering the low it's 24 tonight here in albuquerque i'm really not mad about that being said i don't know but since we started rving anytime or anywhere with the rv and we end up booking a hotel i kind of feel like we like lost for the day um like we're cheating or something um have you had this experience have you booked a hotel on a night that you expected that you would be staying in your rv and how did you feel about it do you feel like it was cheating or is it just kind of like part of the journey leave a comment below what are you doing i was making a phone call part of your hotel rituals dash it's calling for room service good news is this room comes with a view of the van so if anybody tries anything i'll be down there in five to seven minutes you need to help up what's your game plan here dude that's for you yeah will our cross-country trip get better from here oh i guess you'll have to tune in and see next week but until then my friend make sure you wander local because as you know it's good for the soul