How I pack an RV for the first time

Only one pic to click, hopefully there will be more in the future.

My daughter's neighborhood in the Denver foothills starting to show touches of Fall.

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Thanks to Barney, The Old Fat Man, for commenting yesterday inquiring as to how I go about packing up a small RV like the Lance truck camper, and giving me something to write about in my blog post today.

The first thing you have to do of course before you would even attempt to pack such a small camper is get rid of almost everything you own, including things you think you can't live without. Because living in a truck camper your not only limited by the amount of things you can store in it, your weight limitations are even more extreme, so you have to be absolutely ruthless in deciding what things you can carry; and if you don't have a tear in your eye when you're getting rid of things... you're not doing it right.

Once that's done then you can start packing, and this is how I responded to Barney's comment about how I pack a camper for the first time.



 Unfortunately Barney, I have a unique way of packing up an RV for the first time that is not conducive to being photographed and probably shouldn't be copied by any normal person.

But I will be more than happy to describe the process to you, and here's what I actually do.... And its not the first time; I loaded the Arctic Fox this way, the same for the little bronco, and now the Lance. I'm putting things from the Arctic Fox into cardboard boxes or plastic storage containers and piling them inside the Lance. You can see the beginnings of this operation in my blog post from the other day showing you the interior of the Lance with boxes and containers lying around.

Whenever I see something in the Arctic Fox that needs to go into the Lance, I throw it in a cardboard box, and when that container gets full, I take it to the Lance, put it out of the way, and get another empty cardboard box for the Arctic Fox. I keep doing that until everything I need to live is out of the Arctic Fox and boxed up in the Lance. This process might go on for a month and makes it less likely that I will forget something important because I've got plenty of time to think about it, locate it, and take it to the Lance.

Now here's the problem with taking pictures. Sometime in October, I will drive away headed in the general direction of Arizona, with all those unpacked boxes still sitting inside the Lance.... And as you might imagine, I won't be able to find ANYTHING. I can't find the can opener; I can't find my slippers; I can't find anything. And it's my inability to find anything that motivates me to start finding a permanent place for everything and start putting stuff away.

I have found it very helpful to find places to put things as I'm using them since I try to find a more convenient place than when I'm just trying to get stuff out of the way. And I'm more interested in putting things in their proper place while traveling, because it gives me something to do that makes my life better every day as more and more stuff gets put away.

I know that sounds like a strange way of doing it, and that's why I don't recommend it for anyone else because normal people with even a modicum of ambition and not beset with terminal procrastination would want to put everything away on a weekend and get it over with, but that's not how my brain works.

Now bear in mind this only has to be done once when you're moving from one RV to another. And if the new RV is bigger than the old RV, just move EVERYTHING into the new RV, same deal if they're both the same size. But when you're trying to move from a 30 foot fifth wheel into a camper that fits in the bed of the pickup truck, and everything in the fifth wheel won't even physically fit into the truck camper, moving is a lot more difficult, and a lot of painful decisions have to be made.

Now once I get everything put away, which will probably be somewhere in Arizona before Thanksgiving, I'll be glad to take pictures and show you where it all went. But right now your guess is as good as mine.

Tom