Episode: 3890
Title: HPR3890: Lessons Learned
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3890/hpr3890.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 07:30:29

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,890 for Friday the 30th of June 2023.
Today's show is entitled Lessons Learned.
It is part of the series' travel.
It is hosted by Ahukah and is about 13 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, what we learned from this experience that will make the next one better.
Hello, this is Ahukah, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio
and another exciting episode in our ongoing series on RV Travels.
And what I want to do today is take a look at what we learned from our experience
traveling the southwest of the United States in the winter of 2021-2022.
So I'm calling this Lessons Learned.
Now, in my professional life as a project manager,
we were all required to do a Lessons Learned review after each project
and file it with the project management office.
Now, I always suspected that these studies were rarely have ever consulted by anyone,
but it is merit in just doing it because at least the people involved in writing it up learned something.
So from our first major RV trip, what conclusions can we derive?
Well, here's a few things.
First one, speed kills.
Now, this is something that Mark Leach from Keep Your Day Dream,
which is a YouTube channel on RVing.
Mark always emphasizes this, and it's true.
When you're in a hurry, you make mistakes.
You should always plan to take your time and be patient.
For example, our little problem on arriving in Topak, Arizona,
where I ran over a small tree in a utility box,
came at the end of the day after driving from Flagstaff.
We just wanted to get some propane gifts settled.
As I was turning the corner, people were waving and pointing, telling me what I should be doing.
What I should have done is covered by an acronym, Goal, G-O-A-L.
And what is that an acronym for?
Get out and look.
That mantra is now a part of our routine.
When we get to, like, we need to back into a tricky spot,
Cheryl will tell me, get out and look, and I take that as a royal command and get out.
It is never wrong to take a moment, stop, get out of the truck, and see what's going on.
Mirrors can only do so much.
And I don't have the experience, anyway, to just rely on mirrors.
I need to get out and see everything in perspective.
On this particular day, of course, after the accident with the tree in the utility box,
we got our propane, went back to the campground,
and proceeded to dump raw sewage on the ground while emptying our tanks.
Again, being in too much of a hurry contributed.
We just had a stressful experience.
It was the end of a long day, and we just wanted to get settled and relax.
But by not taking a few more moments to be careful and pay attention,
we created yet another stressful problem,
and that meant we had to clean up a big mess before we could do any relaxing.
That illustrates the old saying, the hurryer I go, the behinder I get.
Next lesson.
Drive less camp more.
We learned we should do less driving.
We put ourselves in a less than ideal situation,
because we had to do five straight days of driving to get to our reservation
in Topak, Arizona on time.
Now, that wasn't the original plan, of course.
We were going to leave sooner, but my medical issues caused a delay.
And we had planned to spend a few days in Albuquerque and Flagstaff on our way out to Nevada.
And now, with a later departure, we made them one night stops as well.
In the case of Flagstaff, that might have been just as well,
as it was cold and snowing there, and we left Michigan to get away from all of the cold and snow.
But it still was stressful having to do all of that driving.
On the way home, we again had five straight days of driving,
and it was just grinding out the miles.
On this end, we were done with our trip and looking forward to getting home again,
but we still would have benefited from a more leisurely pace
with a few days of relaxation thrown in.
I think in the future we should look at no more than maybe two or three days
consecutive of driving before a rest stop of a day or two.
It was also worth pointing out that the day we hit the tree in the utility pole
and then dumped the raw sewage came at the end of five straight days of driving.
I don't see these as unrelated.
We made up spending a day sitting in the RV at an RV park just resting, but that's okay.
Another lesson, drive less each day.
I started out with the idea of 300 miles per day.
In practice, I was letting it go to 340 or 350 on some days, and that was a mistake.
Towing a big RV is not like driving a car.
I can easily drive 400 or 500 miles a day in my car,
and in fact we do that each year when we visit family in New England.
But towing the RV requires more care and attention, turning corners you have to be careful.
And you have to be even more careful changing lanes because you have so much behind you.
Together our truck and RV when hitched up are like 45 or 50 feet in length.
And you have to be able to account for that when judging whether it is safe to change lanes.
And being up high in the cab of the truck changes the way you see a joining lanes.
I remember one time when I was about to change lanes and Cheryl yelled at me to stop
because there was a car there which I had missed.
Now there might have been a mirror that would have shown me that.
Probably is, but you know if so I missed it.
You know I'm still learning how to use the tools that are available to me.
No doubt a professional truck driver would have handled all of that stuff a whole lot better.
But you know I'm not and I don't plan to become one anytime soon.
So in practice 5 hours towing the RV is tiring as 7 or 8 hours driving my car,
or maybe even more tiring.
Now when we plan the next trip and we've started on that, we'll turn the setting
and the RV trip wizard from 300 miles to 250 miles and be a little more strict about not going over.
Now one reason to keep the total miles down is that you should, if you are smart, drive slower when towing.
One of the most common problems that RVers run into when towing is a tire blowout.
There is an expert by the name of Roger Marble who I follow closely and he has a blog where he discusses tire safety.
So here's an excerpt from his blog. This just gives his qualifications.
He says, I am retired and have 40 years experience working for a major manufacturer
developing tires for applications in North Central and South America.
During my career I worked on many kinds of tires, heavy truck passenger, light truck and indie car types.
I hold two design patents. I developed failed tire inspection procedures.
How to inspect a tire that's failed and do the analysis.
And taught classes to more than 300 engineers and technicians in the tire and car industry as well as to engineers of the US Department of Transportation.
This guy knows what he's talking about in other words. He's a real deal. So you can see he has the qualifications.
One of the things I've learned from him is that tires age out long before they wear out.
This means that the tires become unsafe over time and need to be replaced even if they seem to have a lot of tread left.
The danger is a blowout at highway speeds and that comes from several classes.
The first one excessive age.
The tires start breaking down over time whether or not you're driving them.
That's just a fact.
Another danger overloaded tires carrying more weight than they're designed for.
Tires inflated to the wrong pressure. Tires driven too fast.
Now if you want to know more I'd suggest checking out his blog and there is a link in the show notes for all of these things.
Even on interstate highways where the speed limit may be 75 or 80 I never drive more than 60 miles an hour.
I get over to the far right line and stay there.
Now anyone who's in a hurry is free to pass me.
And when we're towing Cheryl and I frequently say to each other we aren't in a hurry.
Tire blowouts can cause accidents and even in the best case are likely to cause significant damage to your rig before leaving you on the side of the road waiting for roadside assistance.
So just take it slow and steady.
Another lesson.
You don't need to do everything.
Now I know we're not the first person, first people to make this mistake.
But earlier on our trip we were looking for things to do every day.
Our trip was all about going places.
We had never been and seeing things we had never seen and while that's all well and good.
We're about senior citizens and we need to rest up as well.
I noticed that as we got closer to the end of the trip we became more willing to say forget it or take it a day off.
We did a lot.
It was a fantastic trip all told.
But it would have been a fantastic trip if we cut out a few things.
It's a big world and we'll never see all of it anyway so relax and enjoy the journey.
Along with that is the idea that a shorter trip is fine.
I think we started out with a plan for a four month trip.
When we got delayed it became a three and a half month trip.
But as we were driving home we thought you know a three month trip would have been fine.
We may shoot for that next time.
Another lesson. You still need entertainment.
Now one of the best decisions we made is buying a serious XM receiver for the truck.
We never had to fiddle with the radio trying to find a station we liked and as we drove we never had to worry about losing reception.
So you're driving around the wide open spaces of the U.S.
Having satellite radio is really sweet.
We also brought along books and DVDs.
I actually got through a massive Mark Lewis book on the Beatles called Tune In.
It was like somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 pages.
Along with some other books on my list.
I brought along some Doctor Who videos that I wanted to watch on a portable drive.
We developed a very nice habit of watching TV programs from the DVDs.
We brought while we were having dinner each night.
We got through several collections of Neural Wolf, all of Picard season one,
parts of the original Star Trek and the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes.
Then I planned to get more DVD sets before we set out for the next trip.
Also I brought along a computer that I used for playing games, something I enjoy doing.
I didn't spend a lot of time doing it, but it was a nice break when I did.
I probably spent one or two days a month, you know, gaming.
Finally, if you want to see what the trip looked like, there is a map.
It's on my web page, which is linked in the show notes.
The map is just going to show you all of the stops that we made along the way.
You might find it interesting or then again, maybe you won't.
But either way, that's up for you to decide.
And as for me, this is a hookah for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and encouraging everyone to support free software.
Bye-bye.
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