Selling the 27’ Tenement on Wheels; Book Announcement!
[This is an edited re-post from a prior Substack post on August 29, 2025.]
Man, am I gonna miss having that toilet down by the shop. That’s probably my favorite thing about owning a large penis extension travel trailer.
I live in a rocky, hilly area, crafted by both glaciers and the screaming of Sam Kinison thousands of years ago. There’s a 40’ drop in elevation between the south and north edges of my 2.5 acres. For a guy with bad knees, “going down to the shop” about 120-feet away and 28-feet lower than the front door hurts. And the chickens are on the far side and another 8’ downhill from that. It isn’t the subtle pain, so much. “Motion is Lotion” after all.
It’s the coffee poops.
My shop has magic powers. Perhaps you have a garage or shop or other place with the same mystic juice. Walking into it nearly automatically makes me need to ‘go’ within 2 minutes. Not #1. I’ll do that on a nearby bush. I’m talking the Big Deuce. Taking the Browns to the Super Bowl. Fishing for brown trout. It doesn’t help that I have too much coffee and add pure heavy cream to it. It’s like a trifecta of colon cleansing awesomeness!
Lady GI Doc: “Mr. O’Dell, you did a great job prepping for the colonoscopy!”
Me, beaming with pride, a known deadly sin: “Thanks. It’s my shop.”
GI Doc: “Uhhh… what?”
Me: “I know you said water only. But coffee, heavy cream, and entering my shop… That’ the secret formula to being ‘clean as a whistle’ down there…”
GI Doc, to Nurse: “Call for a psych consult.”
We’re trying to sell a travel trailer. We bought it toward the end of the season, new, in 2017. I was a couple of years shy of turning 50, and I was “due.” Despite already having climbed out of major debt once in my life, I committed an act of Sin against God Dave Ramsey and bought something I hadn’t saved money for. And boy, did those guys see me coming.
I had a 2005 Ram 1500, which is a half-ton. They look tall. Beefy. They sound “throaty.” It wasn’t a bad truck. But it was definitely outmatched by my ego and a friendly RV salesman. Now, in fairness to myself, this is my wife’s fault. She should have known better than to let me go shopping for this thing. 🤣 She’s basically allergic to nature. Not kidding. Even if she wanted to spend time outdoors, which isn’t really ‘her jam’, she’s allergic to like 72 types of “things.” And she likes her own toilet. And a shower. You know—girly stuff.
And in fairness to her, “glamping” becomes attractive to men, too, when it hurts to get up and down off the ground. This behemoth weighs a hair over 5,800 pounds empty.
What most people don’t know until they’ve over-bought their truck’s capability is that your payload capacity 🚫 = does NOT equal your tow capacity. And you’re supposed to get about 10-15% of your tow weight onto the truck’s hitch. So load a trailer with a few hundred pounds of stuff, food, and water, and pretty soon you’re bottoming out the 1/2 ton truck’s suspension.
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“No sweat,” the crook says calmly. “You need a hitch, so you can spend hundreds of extra dollars on this adjustable one with the little arm thingies that help with sway protection.”
Here. Take my money.
[Even when we bought a newer truck the next year, it was still gasoline powered. It had a bigger gear-box ratio on the differential, which helps a bit. But in short, I was not going to be able to afford the big diesel this size trailer demands.]
And that’s not all. You find out after you’ve run the ego-gauntlet that there are about 25 other necessities to successfully “Glamp” the first time. Surge protectors, power adapters, things to level the trailer, things for the stability jacks to land on, a clean water hose, a poopy-water drain hose, a little screen to keep wasps out of your furnace—and I’m not talking about White Anglo Saxon Protestants. But there’s not enough BTUs in the furnace to seriously hurt them anyhow, so why would you bother?
Then there’s the other things you learn, sometimes painfully, along the way. I remember one quite clearly.
“Why is one of our trailer tires rolling toward the on-ramp Jersey barrier?” I said as I scanned my mirror.
That was the most stressful day of travel trailer ownership. That’s even counting the day I stepped through one of the skylights trying to put the cover on it. Oh yeah! Covers! You need a cover, apparently, because RV roofs have the approximate UV-light protective value of a brand new, red-headed, Irish infant.
We were doing about 3-5 miles per hour. I can’t understate how fortunate this was. Like, “The guardian angels were holding that wheel on for miles” fortunate. We were trying to enter I-5 from the Highway 18 connector ramp. It was early rush hour. And we’d JUST come across the mountain pass at about 75 MPH coming back from a several day trip to the central part of the state.
It was 2021. About 15-16 months earlier, I mean like right before the scamdemic hit, I had a company in Bremerton upgrade the tires. They advertise working on RVs, though they are primarily a commercial truck repair and maintenance business. I had just used them to replace the cracked electrical plug. Another thing you learn after the fact is that there are five classes of trailer tires, and the dealers sell the cheapest one they can technically get away with. I upgraded from “C” to “D” due to the amount of weight once we added “stuff and things.” But the point is that the parks were shut down for a long time. We hadn’t moved the trailer in over a year.
That company had over-torqued the lug nuts. Not one but two had broken off on the left rear axle. Thank the Lord that trailer was big enough to require two axles. Turns out, you should really check your lug torque several times on long trips. The departing tire ripped off some skirting and damage the poop valve.
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Anyhow, travel trailers are like boats: you’re as happy the day you sell it as you are the day you bought it.
I am going to miss having the emergency 💩 🚽 down the hill though. If you hear someone screaming like Sam Kinison out in Seabeck, that’s just me doing the “running cheek squeeze” back up the hill.
