768 Mile ROAD TRIP! You Won't Believe the MPG (4x4 Class C RV)

Somehow we managed to sell the fifth wheel, sell the truck, move into this RV, all in three weeks. Which means today we get to head back west. Travel day! This is going to give us a great opportunity to check out how this thing drives, what kind of fuel mileage it gets, what's it like to drive a 34-foot Class C. 350 to 450 miles per day. Is this going to be easier in a motorhome than the fifth wheel in the truck? I'm going to say yes, just for the sake of not having to go back and forth between the truck and the RV. Having one vessel, that's something that we've been really excited to get back to is just, okay, down to the, down to the cockpit. So you've heard us over the past two years kind of complain about the 31-gallon fuel tank in our Ram truck, and I'm really excited to go to the twin tank of this Ford, which is 66.5 gallons. So just that in itself is going to, you know, eliminate half of the truck stops that we've been doing. We're still figuring out the dogs and where they're going to travel. We used to seat belt them into the back of the truck. We don't really have a great spot to seat belt them yet. So they're going to have the couch here that they can go onto, or we're going to put a little bed in between the seats. We'll figure out which one works best. Okay, the wet van. This, I'm still trying to figure out. I got a few different things going on here. I disassembled my clear source triple filter that had the big black heavy, uh, metal cage around it so that it's smaller and can fit in here. You can see this hose is dripping. I'm now, I think, done with the zero-g water hoses. I've had about seven of them, and only one hasn't leaked. The one that we very first bought back in the van days. It's like six years old, doesn't leak. So I'm gonna try a new style hose or at least a new brand. It comes with a little sewer hose holder that only fits a five foot sewer hose, which is pretty small. So ours is a 15 foot. You can see, you know, that stretches out almost the entire way. I would say 15 feet is what we use 95% of the time. And then the other five percent, we might need an extension. So I have a 10 foot extension to put on, which we've had to use a few times. So neither one of my hoses fit in that carrier. So I think what I'm gonna do is get a five foot extension, put that in the carrier, get rid of the 10 foot, and then I guess the 15 foot hose is just gonna have to sit inside the wet pay here. Maybe I can find some type of skinny tray to go in there. But for now, it's just gonna have to go on the floor. That's it for the outside. Sometimes I feel bad when you're out there working and I'm just lounging. Well, I actually like to see those guys sleeping and relaxing, you know, on a travel day. They're not too wound up. And at this point, all we need to do is bring in the slides and lift the auto level, which we can all do from the inside, and then take off. In a previous lifetime, we'd have to start the hitching up process after I finish all of the sewer hoses and all the outside stuff. That's right. So this is the extra step that we get to skip, which is the anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes, if we're unlucky, on the hitch up process and pulling out of the campground. Some days we were spot on and it would just be fast. I'd nail that lineup on the first try. Other days, if you're on uneven ground and there's, you know, wake up on the wrong side of the brain, it could take a little bit longer. So that's the travel mode for the bed. Kind of looks like that. Like I said, the dogs don't have access to jump up. They can go behind it. And you can move this and like squeeze by to get back to the closet and the sliding door, which works. Okay. I hung up our Dyson vac and we'll see if this is going to clear it. Oh my gosh. That was so close. Well, we can still vacuum on travel days. Five hours on the map, 340 miles. Let's see if this is an easier travel day than what we've had before. Our stop tonight is in Iowa City. It's called the Highlander Hotel. Sorry, babe. I did not get you a hotel suite for the night, but we get to stay there and I'm excited to see how the electrical system is going to work on this rig. A lot of you have asked, am I going to add solar and do a bunch of stuff to it? Not yet. Let's see how this factory system does. It's pretty beefy. It's a thousand watts of solar, 600 amp hours of lithium batteries, and a 3000 watt inverter and an 8k generator. I think our bases are covered, but we're going to find out. So we're going to have three full big travel days to really test out the fuel mileage, see how that all works. Like I said, 66 and a half gallons. Excited about that. And, you know, since we're not towing anything, I would expect to get north of 10 miles per gallon. Maybe, I don't know, 12, 13 as like a, as like a, oh yeah. 14 miles per gallon, you say Chris? Yeah, I was going to say, well, right now it jumped up to 14. It's kind of bopping around a little bit, so. Yeah, I'm going to guess between the 10 and 12 range. We'll really find out here shortly. A little windy today, and that's much different than in the fifth wheel and the dually truck that handled the wind like a champ. We barely ever felt it. And I think in a motor home, we're going to feel it a little bit more. Well, we are pulled over at a truck stop, but we're not getting fuel for the first time ever. We always pull into Loves. We usually go to the bathroom and then get fuel every like 200 miles. So we're at the 100 mile update and we've got some pretty good news about the fuel. You're happy with it. I'm happy with it. Are you happy with it? Yeah. This Loves is super slammed. We're in South Chicago, so it's nice not to get out and get in line. And it's nice not to have to get out and go inside too. Like when you're in seedy areas, not that this is necessarily a seedy area, but. Any truck stop near the big cities are, are busy, really busy. So the fuel mileage we're getting is 14 miles per gallon, which is, I think a lot better than, than what I really thought. I mean, if you think about it, we're around 22,000 pounds, we're not towing anything. And, you know, I thought we'd get somewhere 10 to 12 miles per gallon. So 14, you know, on a big 66 gallon fuel tank, she has something. That's almost 950 miles, close to a thousand miles for the tank. June, what you playing with? Might be that, um, that plastic thing. So a little bit of a slow start this morning, but now that we're on the road, we're moving quickly, we're going to get out of the cities and things are going pretty good so far. Yeah. I mean, it's a, it's a totally different feeling driving this thing. We had a couple of quick trips in the Elkhart area, but this is our first day taking it on the interstate. Um, it's definitely a different drive. It's a lot floatier. So just holding the steering wheel takes more physical work. It kind of makes you a little bit more tense in general, which I suspect as I get used to it, that will get a little bit better. It's just a, it's just a change from what I was used to before with driving the Dually truck and towing. Like that Dually truck was so, so over trucked that it was just solid, right? Like you didn't have any of the floating in it or anything like that. And also just the views in the mirrors are different. So I'm trying to get used to my, my new views, my new scans, and it feels really, really comfortable. But I would say like the first hundred miles is good and I'm more comfortable even with just a hundred miles under my belt. Oh, and one thing I noticed right away when we started driving was this very distinct rattle. It was kind of metal and you know, we're obviously going to have some noises in a motor home, but we're going to do our best to, you know, get rid of the, the real obvious annoying rattles. And it took me a second, but those built in metal shades in the square style windows that we have, those were rattling in the down position. So I moved them up or closed. I should say I closed the shades and then the rattle stopped. Aaron is on mission. Eliminate every noise that I can. I know it makes a big difference. I know it's not going to a hundred percent happen, but if you can get rid of the obvious big rattles, why not? Yeah. Because when we were on a smooth after the road construction on the new road, that's dead quiet. Smooth roads are quiet. Barely a peep from back there. On a nice road, it is dead quiet in this thing. Us Midwesterners, you know, we're from Minnesota, Wisconsin. We like to joke and say there's two seasons. There's winter and there's construction. We are definitely in construction right now, squeezing through some tight barriers, squeezing through some bumps. I'm getting some practice in. Hopefully we'll be out of the construction zone soon, but it's probably everywhere in the country. On to Iowa. We have about a hundred miles left to go. And on this particular drive, we are changing some habits up and we're getting Aaron behind the wheel starting from the very beginning so that we both can imprint equally on this new RV. And travel day is going to be a shared experience. So here we go. Here's Aaron driving. I did it. See, I got a driver's license. I know how to drive. I must admit I'm a little bit nervous, but this passenger role is so far so good. I got to eat my breakfast and I'm relaxing and I can do anything I want. I could scroll my phone. I can work. I can pet the pups. I can just lolligage out the window. I think I could get used to this. I think it drives like a truck. When you're looking forward and even using your your mirrors, it feels pretty much like a big truck. Very easy to drive, but it does have a very floaty kind of non-Corvette type of feeling to it. But I like it. I like it a lot. It's very easy to drive. Now do you believe me about the Ford turning radius? Okay, I will say the turning radius is unbelievable. It's probably my favorite thing about driving this RV, easily. Not probably, hands down, without a doubt. Yeah, it makes it really simple. It's really nice for getting into tight campsites, like the place we just left. It was pretty tight to get in and out because the road is so narrow. I love it. All right, so this is our first fuel up. We have like 500 miles on this rig so far. Overall average, it's like 10 miles per gallon. That includes a bunch of, you know, the early stuff before we actually started driving. But just on this trip alone, 300 plus miles, over 14 miles per gallon. Pretty impressive. And this thing has two tanks on it. 40 gallon and like a 26 and a half. And I'm not sure exactly, like when you go fill up, do you do fill up the front one first and then the back one? I think the back one is a small one and that pushes into the main one, but I don't know for sure. Don't ask me because I did not, I do not know either. Okay, valuable lesson learned on the fuel. The twin tanks on the Ford. The rear tank is the main tank. That's the bigger 40 gallon tank and the front tank is a 26 gallon and it always keeps that front one full. I think, you know, I don't know. I gotta read up because it doesn't... You started so confident. What I do know is that I spilled, I over spilled. You smell like diesel a little bit. Yeah, I spilt a little diesel. It's your new cologne. So that one was full and the large tank took almost 40 gallons. So it was, it was empty. So you did have to fill both though? No, the one was full. So you just always fill the front one? The rear? No. Maybe I wasn't listening very good. It's not complicated, but it's complicated. Anyways, we got 22 minutes to go. We're gonna get to the Highland Hotel. Chris is gonna take a nap or something. I just finished my first round of driving. I'm energized. See, this is how... I'm high on diesel fuel. When you got into the driver's seat, you were like what I'm doing. I think being a passenger is home sweet home. Yeah, easy, easy peasy. So this is the Highlander Hotel right off the highway and all we need to do is put down the auto level, kick out the slides, walk the dogs, and then we get to go in and enjoy a fancy little dinner in the hotel. Aaron has been dangling this nugget. He said he's gonna take me on more date nights to Harvest House. And I said, that's good because we don't have a car to go anywhere else. Okay, auto level. Yes. Sorry for the beeping, but I did want to say who has the EQ auto level system? We're used to the the Lippert standard one that comes on most fifth wheels. And what I liked about that one is is it showed you a little dot which side you were down in. So if it was, you know, in the front, to the back, left, and right, it'd have a little dot. And then on top of that, it also had a degree with how far you were off. Now with this one, as far as I can tell, it doesn't say yet. And basically, you just got to hit the auto level and hope that there's enough room for it to level you out without having to use ramps or blocks. I also noticed that the EQ levelizer comes out of the chassis battery instead of the house battery. And that might be normal for motorhomes. We've always had, you know, fifth wheels, travel trailer, and it would obviously come out of the house battery. So that's the big lithium bank. That is the two Ford batteries. So I know you can connect the two as well, but interesting to think about. Did it level up? I don't know. I think that's it. Since we do need the bedroom slide out to get the bed down like that, and they're both on the same side, we'll just put this slide out as well. But you could see plenty of space. You don't actually have to take it out. What do you think with the slide in? No need to put it out? Well, I mean, since we're literally just sleeping over and then leaving right away, it makes sense to just leave it in. It's easier. All we really need out is this slide here. So we'll see how it goes. Well, once you talked about the wind, I thought it was a really good decision because it is windy and we don't know, we haven't checked what the overnight might be. But when we were driving here, it was gusts of 28. Yep. 20 to 30. We're just so used to putting out all the slides in the fifth wheel because you kind of need to, to even function in the downstairs, especially. Yeah. So with this one, I mean, I really want to get used to the slide being in and that way we're just a lot more comfortable driving around and doing overnighters and things like that. You hungry? I'm so hungry. Are you hungry? I'm there. They almost opened the window. They did open the window. The dogs, June, June, they opened the window. They used their implausible thumb on the window? This was like that, which is open. They opened the emergency exit. Good morning from our first parking lot sleep. It was good. You know what? It rained all night long. I'm not exaggerating. So it's been raining for 12 hours straight. And all I could think during my sleep was, oh, I'm so glad we're not parked in dirt somewhere because it would be messy. That actually would have been really cool. Most, not most, a lot of harvest hosts, you park out in the grass and it rained so much. I was looking forward to using the four by four. I know you were. Go figure. Like I was relieved and you were like, dang. But I also thought, so I was glad we had the slide in because there was a period at like 2am where I woke up throughout the night from the noises. I heard the slide toppers rattling a little bit. The fabric toppers were rattling a little bit. So this was our first experience since not having our true toppers that we had in our previous RV, which we really loved. And all in all, I said, well, I'm just glad that the big slide was in. So it was just isolated to the sleeping slide. Oh, I wanted to talk about the battery situation a little bit. So I woke up this morning at 84% and this unit has a 3000 watt inverter. So no problem running our water kettle. And after this morning's, you know, activities, we're at like 79%. Pretty good. Solid number. Yeah. Solid C's. Today's drive is the big one. It's 450 miles. We're headed to Nebraska all the way through Iowa. We're staying at a Cabela's tonight. And this is really going to put us to the long drive day test. And if we get miles per gallon, like we did yesterday over 14, it's going to be a good day. We just filled up fuel before we got here, which means we don't need to get fuel at all today. The range on the tank, I think said like 900 gallons to empty. And that is just crazy to think about. And you know, the other model that we were considering was the Europa Super C on the freight liner that has the Cummins engine. You know, I wonder what kind of fuel mileage that gets empty, because if that only gets like 10, 11 miles per gallon, and this Isata 6 gets 14 miles per gallon, you know, that's a big difference and something to really consider. Combined with the four wheel drive, I'm digging it so far. So today's drive is 422 miles, six hours on the Google map. It's literally straight down highway 80. So we're going to find out if that 14.5 miles per gallon yesterday was a fluke, or ideally, I mean, since we're on the highway the entire time, I think we're going to push 15. And if we hit 15 miles per gallon in a 22,000 pound, 34 foot four by four class C, I think that's gonna be, yeah, that's gonna be crazy. 11 ton vehicle. Our first rest stop breakfast. Aaron's putting me to work already. I was just getting going in the driver's seat, and then he wants to switch gears and have breakfast, which yeah, we only made it 50 ish miles, which isn't very far, but we were kind of slow going this morning with the rain. And we walked the dogs like a mile and a half. I thought I could hold out a little longer. I had my cold salmon, so I ate and Aaron did not. But it's okay. You know what? I'm so happy to just be able to cook on the road. I always say one of the benefits of having an RV is you have your kitchen with you everywhere you go. So there's no need to stop and get truck stop food or gas station food because you have your kitchen with you. You have your fridge with you. It's really the most convenient way to travel from a eating good perspective. And this is one of the reasons we switched to a motor home so that we can do things like this a little bit easier. Obviously, you can still do it in a travel trailer, but not all towables are designed to be able to use the kitchen. I mean, this is fully functional with everything. Yeah. Our last RV, we couldn't use the kitchen with the slides in. I'd say five to 10 minutes, we'll be done and back on the road. So this morning we left at about 75% and it only charged up about 6% going down the road for that hour. And you can see 150 amps are coming out of this thing. And you've heard me talk about DC to DC chargers and things like that where, you know, we had so much solar on the last fifth wheel that we did not need to have that. But on really rainy, super cloudy days like this, it's nice to have that alternator charging. And this particular RV has a lithium BIM, which will do alternator charging. So it's similar to DC to DC charging, but it's not using a device. It's just using the truck's alternator. And basically that BIM will turn on charging and turn off charging to protect your alternator. I've calculated it out before because it cycles on and off. It's, I think, around 30 amps per hour that it's charging. But really nice to be able to use things like the microwave, air fryer, and all that with the 3000 watt inverter. You know, you see we're pulling 2000 watts here just using the air fryer. Well, that's the end of day number two. We did 450 today, 350 yesterday, and a long day. We just parked at Cabela's and we put the slide off for the first time in two days. And it's kind of weird when you get used to the slide in and then you put it out, you're like, whoa. Holy Maximus space. This is crazy. It's big. I knew that I was going to feel that way too when we were tucked in. I said, when we push the slides out, it's going to feel so big. And it does. So good travel day today, extremely windy, very, very windy. I was expecting a big bump in the miles per gallon because it was all highway today, 450 miles down 80. But we ended up getting 12 miles per gallon today, which is still an improvement over what we were getting before. But we're hoping that when the wind dies down, we'll get back to that 14 ish. Oh, and the batteries charged all the way up. Actually, the sun came out a little bit more today. So we got a little bit more sun, but you know, because it was such a long travel day, I think it was six and a half hours. The batteries fully charged from 75% back up to a hundred percent. That is a good feeling. And we're excited to land at full power here. We got a nice little farm view here in Nebraska. I like it. It's a nice spot. I love Cabela's here in Kearney, Nebraska. Ever wonder where the name Irene Iron Travels comes from? It's actually named after my online fitness and nutrition coaching business, Irene Iron Fitness. 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