This was it—the real shakedown trip for our 2008 Tiffin Allegro Open Road. We embarked on a three-night camping trip to Glamis for New Year’s, which meant dry camping or “boondocking.” No water, no electricity, and no paved roads whatsoever. Off we went with both kids, wondering if everything was going to work properly in the RV or if we would discover something new to fix.

Night 1: It’s cold. 35 degrees Fahrenheit cold at night. We can hear the RV heater running, but it’s barely blowing any warm air and we’re shivering. We kick on the generator and the fan starts blowing sweet, warm air that makes the entire coach toasty. Our heater works, but our coach batteries don’t have the juice to run the heater fan all night. So our next RV project will be replacing our coach house batteries, and we may bite the bullet and install a solar panel system and an inverter. More to come on that project.

Night 2: Ran the generator to keep the heater running until the carbon monoxide alarm beeped at 3am, then the kids crawled into our bed for the rest of the night. There’s four of us, so it’s a good thing our kids are little!

Night 3: Happy New Year in wash 13! Our camping group hosted a big potluck dinner, and we made a gluten-free vegan apple crisp in the Dutch oven. It was delicious! Our camp neighbors set off fireworks at midnight for about 45 minutes and our RV batteries still weren’t holding a charge to run the heater all night, so we were all bundled up.

Our first boondocking trip turned out better than we had hoped for—everything worked wonderfully except for our RV house batteries not holding a charge all night. Our grey and black water holding tanks filled up to about 75% each, we only used maybe 1/4 of our propane, and we had 1/3 tank of fresh water remaining. We did not drink the water from our RV, we brought bottled water for drinking, so we only used our RV fresh water supply for washing. That’s about it for our first boondocking trip in our Tiffin Allegro, here’s to many more!