The plan was to head to Oklahoma for our first adventure. We would meet Molly's parents at the Fun Town RV Park, next to the world's largest casino, WinStar, on Friday afternoon. We had reserved two sites, and hoped we would get close to each other, but we wouldn't know until check-in at 1 PM.
Of course, we didn't leave our house until 3 PM. I've been struggling with the weight distribution hitch, trying to make sure that I have it 100% correct. I had worked on Friday morning and hadn't been able to mess with it until the afternoon. After basically working through the entire instructions again, I felt that I had successfully hitched up the trailer. In fact, we had brought it to our house the night before so that we could hook it up to the 120V power and start cooling our two refrigerators. Now that we were packed, set to leave, and hitched up, I measured the distance to the ground from the frame on front and back ends of the trailer. The idea of the weight distribution hitch is to help 'distribute' the weight evenly over the truck and trailers' axles, help with trailer sway, and keep it level. My measurements should have been relatively equal. They were not.
My measurements seemed to align with the bottom right picture above. BAD. But I had followed all the instructions exactly, and being that we were already approaching 3 PM, I figured we would be okay and off we went. We made it the few miles to the freeway without any problems, but things got a little scary when we got on the freeway. The trailer wasn't swaying, but it felt more like the trailer was pushing the truck and the truck was pulling the trailer. Less than two miles down the road we exited the freeway and pulled to a safe spot to re-access our setup.
Following the instructions, I had increased the height of the ball on my hitch until when putting the entire trailer weight down on the ball, it was less than 1 1/2" difference to the ground from the front to the back. In fact, I had increased my ball by two sets of pins. Seeing that we were closer to the bottom right picture than the top left, we lowered the ball by one pin, and set off again. This was a great fix, but I still found a way to mess it up. When we were back in the truck, I had undone a setting in the trailer menu on the truck that said, "Sway Control". Thinking that my Weight distributor was doing that job, I didn't think that the truck needed to do that as well. Wrong. According to Ford, that's a very bad idea, especially at high speeds, as the "Sway Control" helps brake individual wheels and sort of take over if it senses we are in fact in a sway. These are the things Molly is reading to me from the manual as we're driving down the freeway at high speed.
So, we stop for the second time a little past Denton (less than 25 miles from home) in order to reactivate the "Sway Control". Of course, this setting must be done while the truck is in park. After that, we were set. We cruised on up to Oklahoma at 65 MPH with no issues. However, we now were not headed to Fun Town RV.
Molly's parents had arrived earlier than us and found out the pool at Fun Town was under maintenance. Would have been nice if this was disclosed before we made the reservation, but they were kind enough to allow us both to cancel and figure out another plan. That turned out to be the Red River RV Park, only a few miles away in Thackerville, Oklahoma.
Jerry (Molly's dad) had called and made sure the pool was in working order then reserved us two 50 AMP spots next to each other. The park was not crowded at all, so we were able to turn our camper to face Jerry's and hook up to the utilities at the spot behind us. Leveling the trailer, bumping out the slide-outs, and hooking up to power and sewer went just fine for my first time. Then it was time for a great spaghetti dinner in CC and Papa's RV.
We had waffles, bacon, sausage, eggs, and fruit for breakfast the next morning. Shirts were optional, and that went for most of the weekend. The boys rode their bikes around like it was going out of style. Reese found out how to climb out of her highchair. We found that we need to address an issue with our door. The latch seems to be almost impossible to open and requires a hard slam to close. We'll need to figure out why that is before we go next time.
The kids loved the back bunkhouse. In fact, when they weren't out riding their bikes or swimming, they the four older boys were inside causing mass destruction by building forts, hiding in the closets and storage areas, and creating all sorts of racket.
Saturday evening, we grilled out on our outdoor kitchen. We made hamburgers, hotdogs, corn, and veggies, but as the grill was limited on room, we had to space it out. The kids ate as fast as they could (if they ate at all) in order to get back to the pool. It was the one thing that we required for which we had cancelled our previous reservation.
We went twice to the pool on Saturday. They enjoyed showing off their abilities to do cannonballs, collect torpedo toys from that sank to the bottom, and shoot out of the water cannons. We did end up losing a torpedo down the drain of the hot tub, but I'm sure it will turn up somewhere. Luke learned to hold his breath longer under water, though that took a few times of getting some water down his lungs (later developing croup). He also learned that you must check for TP before you use the outdoor restroom. I still hear in my head, "Can someone come wipe my bottom!" being yelled from the restroom through the thin curtain doorway to anyone in attendance at the pool. Looking at what we had available, I ended up using my t-shirt, which he pointed out would end up with poop on it. Thanks Luke...
It began to rain on Saturday night and did not let up until we were almost done packing up late Sunday morning. The thunderstorms that blew through were no joke. We had noticed that there were many trees throughout the property that looked half-dead, which we chalked up to some type of tree disease. After we witnessed the lightning that evening, we realized that trees were getting struck, not dying from disease.
It was a challenge to try to pack up wet tents, chairs, and towels we had set out to dry the night before. Everything was soaked and/or covered in grass. We were able to find a bit of a leak from the ceiling fan in the bathroom, but we're not 100% sure if that was user error or not at this point. We checked on the camper the day after we got back to see if any water from storms that came through on that Sunday night had leaked in, but it was dry. Hopefully we can blame that on us.
Subtract the rain, and we had a very fun first time in our trailer. We learned a little more on the hitch for next time and some issues with the trailer that we need to address before heading back out. We can’t wait to go again.