June 1st, 2022. . . the day we turned over our keys to our home on 21 acres and stepped into full-time RV living.  But, life is not always rainbows and butterflies and we were hit head-on by a number of snags and inconveniences.  Reality bites!  When we went to hook up the truck ("Toothless") to the trailer we quickly realized that the bed of Toothless is much lower than the bed of our old pickup truck.  We had added extra blocks under the jacks to accommodate the height of the pickup, which now was too much blocking for the height of the Freightliner.  We were in a pickle.  My filter tends to blow a hole in these sorts of situations and that allows my mouth free reign to my inside voice which is usually shouting all sorts of expletives.  We were both thinking "well, maybe we should have hooked up the truck sooner than an hour before showtime" but fortunately that part of our filters was still intact and neither one of us said it outwardly.  With some patience, problem solving and the use of a 12 ton bottle jack we were able to successfully hook Toothless up to the trailer and were ready to hit the road.  However, during our hookup we noticed that all of the hydraulics in the trailer (two slides and all of the levelling system and landing gear) were NOT HAPPY!  They were very sluggish, jumpy and even stopped working altogether periodically.  We attributed it to being extremely heavy and made a mental note that we needed to further purge and remove a lot of excess weight from the trailer.  We needed to change our thinking from Costco runs and stocking up for months at a time to living with just what we need from week to week and not hoarding unnecessarily.

Another snag that we ran into was that when our solar power system was installed the wrong inverter was supplied which meant we had an awesome system. . . when on solar power alone.  When we plugged the trailer in to shore power we had no power, not anywhere in the trailer.  The inverter would not allow any power from the plug into the trailer.  That meant swapping out the inverter for a hybrid one (that is a whole other frustrating story).  However, despite weeks of advance notice, hounding and nagging the electrician and reminding him that we would be homeless as of June 1st, this was not done prior to our departure date.  We had plans to do some boondocking at a friend's cabin about two hours out of town but that meant no cell service or access to our electrician.  So we needed to abandon those plans and find somewhere locally to stay for a few days while the solar system was sorted out.  Now. . . we are not a small unit, about 62 feet long when hooked up, and finding places to park for a few days is not an easy task.  However, as luck would have it a friend of ours kindly offered up her parent's hay field for us to stay in.  Bonus was it was only about 1/2km from our old house!  So that's where we parked for 5 nights while the solar system was fixed.  We also had a fabricator come and design a square spacer box to mount under the hitch on Toothless to raise the front of the trailer up for towing.  I must say, that hay field was a flurry of activity for a couple of days!

Having to stay locally was a blessing in disguise for a couple of reasons.  First, it gave us a chance to purge the trailer and take some of the weight out of it.  We ended up renting one more storage locker for all of the stuff we decided we didn't need (for a total now of three storage lockers in Calgary), and we gave a lot of food, extra bedding, cleaning supplies and even a plant to a friend.  The second blessing was that it allowed me the honour of leading my old team from Eastern Slopes Veterinary Services in the Black Diamond parade with Toothless!  It was a beautiful day and the perfect way to say "so long" to a group of people that I had the privilege of working with.  Reality doesn't always bite!

We finally packed up and left the hay field on June 6th (only a day late), en-route to our Hipcamp reservation near Ardrossen, Alberta, just Northeast of Edmonton (another hayfield and boondocking opportunity).  We realized that, despite all of our purging, the hydraulic system was still not happy and nothing had improved.  So I made another mental note to myself that I would have to look into this when we were settled at camp.  We also realized that we had a leak in our air system to the hitch that needed to be resolved.  On our way out, we stopped at a weigh scale to weigh the trailer and were pleasantly surprised that, given all of our purging efforts, we were slightly underweight!  Also, the truck stop where the scale was offered the perfect place to have the air system looked at and Mike and Lisa Unrau came to our rescue.  Mike quickly identified the leak and in no time had it fixed and we were on the road again, fully inflated!  We arrived safely at our destination and Toothless and the trailer travelled very well without incident.  We took a drive around and even found some buffalo lounging in the sun in Elk Island Park.

We located a mobile RV repair service and he came to the camping site to run some diagnostics on our hydraulic system.  It took all of about 2 minutes to determine that the issue was not weight, the issue was not old or contaminated hydraulic fluid nor was the issue a leak somewhere in the system.  The issue was directly related to the solar system install cutting power to the hydraulic pump motor!  Here's where my filter breaks down a little again and my inside voice becomes my outside voice.  The solar system is a fantastic system, one of a kind, and the electrician did an amazing install which allows us to be completely off grid for as long as we like.  However, because it is a residential system modified for an RV there is bound to be some kinks that need to be worked out. The problem now is that we are in Edmonton and the electrician is in Calgary.  He was difficult enough to pin down when we were in the same city!  The mobile repairman said he could probably solve the issue but that it would take him a while to understand the system and all of its parts before determining the best fix.  Better to have the original installer fix it.  So here we sit, waiting once again for the electrician and wondering if our next destination is back to Calgary, somewhere else in Edmonton or just stay put for an extra few days. . . . reality is just that . . . reality.