RV Lessons Learned after 3 years: Roadtrek Zion Campervan

Hi everyone so we're here at the Edgewater Bar Campground at Derby Reach Regional Park in Langley BC and we're just here for one night. We were here actually a year ago almost exactly and we'll put a link to that video if you're interested. It was a it was a fun trip. Yesterday was National Banana Cream Pie Day as I recall. We didn't celebrate but we thought we thought we'd come out spend one night here on the river and just enjoy early spring. I guess we're in meteorological spring now as it since we're in early March and we wanted to just get out and get some camping in. Yeah so in this video we're going to because it's been three years now since we bought our Roadtrek Zion camper van and we were brand new newbies and now it's been so far yeah and we've learned a few lessons along the way so we wanted to share that with you and we also wanted to share with you some clips of recent hike and Gordon's paddle so we hope you enjoy this video. As Mickey noted we're at Derby Reach and right on the Fraser River which you can probably see behind us. It's a beautiful spot we you know we came in yesterday we had some nice mountain scenery and what's really interesting and what I really enjoy about being here is it is the Fraser so it's a working river and so during the day when we we saw you know tugboats going up the river we've seen trains across the river can be loud here at night because the trains continue on through the evening and during the day you can hear some of the road traffic but it was really fun to watch the you know the boats go up the river and then there was a tugboat and it was taking a log boom and we'd never I'd never actually seen that happen on the river before so that was kind of fun to watch and we filmed that and we'll share that with you. Regarding the lessons that we learned in the last three years I think we can divide that up into a couple of categories. The first one major one is dealing with some of the issues with maintenance and the dealership so Gordon will talk about that. More the RV industry as we've experienced it. Yeah and then the second main category we wanted to talk about was just some of the myths or impressions that people may have about RVing that are new to RV. You see a lot of footage in movies and commercials and things like that and so there's some things that are realistic and some things that aren't quite realistic so we will discuss those points as well. At least from our experience. And then thirdly we're going to share some footage again in a video montage at the end of the video. Some scenes from a paddle I did recently and then we had our one week of winter here a few weeks ago where we actually had below freezing weather and had a little bit of snow and that resulted in you know some of the local streams and creeks freezing up and so we did a hike about a week after that up to an area called Swan Falls that we thought we'd share with you. Okay so I wanted to just share a little bit of the learnings that we've had working with the RV industry as owners. A couple things surprised me it's not like buying a car. When you need to get work done what we have found is a window for booking is usually four to five weeks and that doesn't appear to just be us. Other RV owners they have a similar experience. In the case of the van we've had to take it into the Dodge dealership I've been able to phone at 11 o'clock in the morning and in one case get an appointment at noon or I phoned at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and another I was able to get an appointment the next morning. Pretty much throughout our RV ownership we've had to make four to five week bookings to get any kind of work done. The second thing I would suggest that if you are looking at an RV or particularly if you look in a class B van make sure the RV dealership does sell a large number of them and they're very familiar with doing the work. That will save you some time and trouble. I think in many cases class B vans are a very small level of sales for any kind of an RV dealership and instead they sell you know trailers and and maybe truck campers and the more they're familiar with the class B I think the better it will be in the long run. In our case Roadtrek is very good at reaching out to help dealers do any work but I'm not sure that is always the case across the industry. The other thing too that I wanted to reference and this is more around customer service focus. When we were looking at getting some of the more recent work done I reached out to actually six either RV dealers or RV repair centers to ask about the the work and if they would be something that they've done in the past and if it's be something they were interested. We were just looking at maybe seeing if doing some work in a different dealer and what I was really surprised at was the lack of response from the industry. So I think I sent out six emails. One Roadtrek dealer got back to me and said they weren't interested in doing the work they were busy enough kind of thing. I sent an email to two RV dealerships in the Abbotsford area nobody responded. I sent an email to two RV service centers that just they just do repair work nobody responded and I think I had one other vendor who contacted me that said that they were really unfamiliar with the work and would suggest that I go somewhere else. They didn't want to do the work if they weren't going to be able to do a good job and I appreciated that. But it's quite different again compared to the automobile industry where you could probably take your vehicle to any dealership and they'd be able to do the work. So a bit of a bit of learning for us I think that the takeaway would be recommend that you if you buying make sure your dealers are very familiar with the product they're selling and ideally they're pretty close to where you live that would probably serve you in a long term. The second part of our lessons learned and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the myths about RV travel and also just some current situation related to COVID and the changes in the in the industry and what's happening with travel. So first of all we did get an update from BC Parks and starting March 8th this year they are accepting reservations but they're only accepting reservations from BC residents and for camping you can do that online. I think there's also a call number that you can phone and they're doing a two-month rolling period so if you're booking on March 8th then you're able to book only up until May 8th so that's kind of the way it's working this year and that's because of COVID again. And that two-month rolling window continued throughout the season. That's right yeah. Subject to any COVID travel restrictions that may still exist non BC residents can start booking reservations as of July 8th if I recall. Yeah currently right now they're still encouraging BC residents to stay local and we do have some parks opening sort of mid-March a lot of the parks in southern BC will start to open. March and April. Yeah and in Vancouver Island a lot of the southern Vancouver Island parks are already open they've been open all year. When we first got our RV we had a certain idea of what RV travel might look like and a lot of it was based on impressions we saw in movies and in commercials where people would just kind of drive up to a lake, park right next to a lake or maybe drive up into the mountains and be surrounded by mountains and just basically boondock there. It appeared that you could do that anytime and of course the reality isn't quite like that. At least in a more urban centered part of the province. Yeah. Certainly there'd be those examples if you're in parts of northern British Columbia where yeah those opportunities exist at least in our experience and traveling through most of southern BC and Alberta yeah there just isn't that kind of opportunity unless you're prepared to sort of you know be stealth camping in the middle of a city it just isn't really as easy as accessible option. Yeah there's a lot more restrictions than we actually expected you're not allowed to park on the side of the highway for example and just stay the night there are certain. Not that you want to anyway. There are certain highway rest stops that you can stop and they do allow you to stay for a certain period of time I think a maximum of eight hours. Yeah some they don't say no camping but they say you're limited to eight hours so they're trying to restrict you from that. And there are public lands in southern BC that you probably could boondock but they're limited and also they're limited in terms of access so we're going to talk a little bit more about the type of RV you have as well because you know it really depends on what you have to be able to access some of the more remote areas which involve you know driving up steep logging roads with lots of rocks and and potholes and water bars and and not every vehicle. Which our van is not particularly good at. The type of camping that we've been doing is we've been staying at provincial parks and I think BC is wonderful for that because there are a lot of beautiful provincial parks that you can stay at and the only restriction is is that a lot of them are reservations only which means that with the popularity of camping a lot of the popular parks especially the ones that you can camp right on the water on the lake or something like that. You need to have reservations. You do you have to have a reservation and sometimes it's really hard to get a reservation because you might log online on the first day over the reservable period and it's already full. We've had several examples whether we've where we've signed on and either provincial park or a national park and Mickey's tried to she's been in in the first two minutes at seven o'clock in the morning and already it's very difficult to find any popular weekends there are it's just booked up. We've been able to get sites but only when we've been able to choose non-popular times or maybe we've had to stay a shorter period than we'd originally intended. We prefer not to plan and kind of take us where the weather you know suggests we should go and we've been successful at times but we're always very careful if we are going to go anywhere where we anticipate it's going to be very busy so a national park or some BC provincial parks that everyone knows their name then we have to make reservations. A lot of the time the some of the best camping spots were found for us just by chance so we never actually really scheduled them and we just took our chances but of course you know you've got a little bit of nervousness too as to whether you're going to be able to find a spot for the night so you have to that's kind of the trade-off if you don't have a reservation but quite often when we plan trips months in advance a lot of the time it doesn't quite work out for us and I think it's the nature of traveling on the road if you have a lot of factors that come into play so one of the main factors is weather and some of the mountains are beautiful but they can get very cold even in midsummer so even in August the overnight lows could go down below freezing and of course then you have to worry about some of your systems whether the water lines will freeze or your tanks will freeze and and so there's a lot of considerations and we have had a couple of instances where we plan to go someplace we've booked a campsite there and then we we just couldn't make the reservation. Yeah for example we had one with I think we were in sometime in September we planned on going or maybe late August and we planned on going up to the Jasper area and the weather changed and they had like four days of well below freezing weather and we just really didn't want to go in that case so we just kind of shifted our direction now if we'd been staying in a hotel we probably would have gone anyway there's just other things that will change your travel that would not normally have probably impacted you if you're traveling in something else other than an RV. Yeah and there's some wonderful experiences to be had when you have an RV but also you have to have realistic expectations as to what you're actually going to get. This leads to the choice of RV that you want to make when you are a newbie. It's really important to consider what kind of camping you really want to do whether you are happy to just go and stay at provincial parks or private campgrounds commercial campgrounds. You know you want to be realistic in terms of what you're looking for if you're looking for you know that opportunity to be a much more remote area you probably do want maybe a four-wheel-drive pickup with a pop-up camper you know one of our one of our friends Henry Wang also has a YouTube channel he has a camper and a four-wheel-drive truck and he has certainly more accessibility areas than we would do so just be realistic when you're looking at your RV and where you can and where you can't go. We've gone to a lot of great number great places and have never had a problem but we're always you know very cautious and probably the most extreme that we would drive on is a logging road that's relatively bumpy nothing much more than that so just be aware of that. So if you follow our channel you know that we've considered potentially our next RV might be something different we've looked at everything from a very small trailer like an armadillo backpack where you can leave your travel trailer at the campground and then you can take off with a four-wheel-drive vehicle and go to some of the more remote places to hike. Yeah to something like a four-wheel-drive truck and a camper on that probably that would provide the most flexibility. And then we've also talked about something a little bit bigger maybe a class B plus or a small class C where there's a lot more room inside and a van is very small and even with two people it can be pretty crowded and you're typically doing a lot of your living outside instead of inside and you know we've talked about maybe it would be nice to have a little bit more space for us and that might involve a slightly bigger vehicle motorhome maybe. So back to the situation with COVID and what's been happening and the changes in RV travel and I think this is really important too because three years ago when we first started RVing things were very different and things have really changed a lot. So just in the time that we've had our van it's been interesting in terms of just the demand for people going outdoors and camping. The first year that we had our van we found that we didn't really have any issue in being able to go just about anywhere if we were not in the main season. So before July and after August we had a lot of accessibility without and even then during the main months unless we were going to a very busy well-known park we could pretty well find a spot to get into. But in the last I guess two years and particularly last year we've noticed that even off-season is is very busy and even some of the parks that were probably not as popular have become very popular. If things get back to normal in the world people may go back to the habits that they had before. Shopping on weekends. Yeah and international travel but I think a lot of the people may have discovered something new. Is that I think during the pandemic we really felt like it was important to be in nature and it was good for our mental health and I don't think that people will get away from that. I think people will continue to enjoy the outdoors. You know given the current demand and the sales in the RV industry last year and from what we can see this year as well we think that's going to continue to grow. So it's going to be just that much more challenging to find you know parks or rec sites and we've had examples of individuals who've gone to what would normally be fairly remote locations somewhat off-season and they've let us know when they've come back that you know it's Wednesday raining in the middle of a week in September and this remote location was actually full of other people. So you know it's definitely getting to be more of a demand and they're not adding at least here they're not adding that many new campsites. What we learned was avoid the weekends as much as possible. If you can take time off during the week in the middle of the week. One day that's great is Sunday. You leave your home on Sunday to start traveling then you'll be able to find camping spots because everybody else is packing up and leaving that day. So we hope you found some of this useful. Our lessons learned from three years owning a Roadtrek Zion camper van. So we thought we'd close the video with a couple of clips from the trip that we did here yesterday and our walk up the river and just some of the beautiful scenery. It was just just really pretty. And also a paddle that I did just a couple of days ago up to an area some dikes near Pitt Lake. And then finally with a short trip we did up to Swan Falls. Try crossing the dike see if there's a better water path on the other side. Okay another waterway. You can see it's flowing reasonably fast which is because the tides going out. Low tide is in about three hours. So I thought I'd risk it. So I think I'm gonna move to another area. Comes off one of the rivers and try a paddle there. So gorgeous here. And I apologize for the airplanes. People taking flying lessons. So this will be another trip when the tide tables work in my favor. Anyway gorgeous. Pitt Lake's that way. There's some bodies of water open this way. And the airport that that guy's flying from is kind of behind me right now. Okay back to the car. I think I'm just gonna walk it. I could paddle but I think it's easier just to roll the boat up and walk up here on the dike. Okay this looks a little easier. Only about a five-minute drive. I don't recognize the same mountains over there from where I was. That little channel right ahead of me is clear there but actually full of ice further on. Just look for a spot I can get in really easily. You still see the flow of the current because the tide's going out. A little bit of the ice. That's the direction the current's going. However I'm gonna try going up this way. Current's quite light here and I haven't really explored this way. So hoping it'll be an enjoyable morning. More airplanes. So this would be interesting to explore again if the tide tables were in my favor. It's gonna get too shallow. Ice on the side of the creek bed here. By the way before we close the video we're just laughing because it's just been constant different noises whether it's an airplane flying by or suddenly they're doing some construction across the river or just geese suddenly making a bunch of noise. Or somebody's turning on their generator. Yeah it's been more of a So hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please be sure to give us a thumbs up and subscribe to our channel HikeNRV if you haven't done so already. And we'll see you next time. Until next time. So we also thought... I don't like to... We thought we'd close out the video just sharing. Oh there's cows out there. This could be good for bloopers.