I’m giving away a freebie at the end of this issue that I'm hoping will help a lot of people with RV Overwhelm. Would love to hear what you think.
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​The install is almost done when I open the manual and realize we've just wasted $3,500.

It's the fall of 2015, and we're leaving the next morning. Reservations at Fort Wilderness, then a resort down in the Keys. Our first big trip in the 38 foot motorhome we've finally landed on, towing a 2008 Jeep Wrangler behind it. I'm sitting in the waiting room at the shop while they set the Jeep up to flat tow, all four wheels on the ground. $3,500 for the install, to get ready for the trip of a lifetime.

Three hours in, I figure I'll get ahead of myself and read up on how to put the Jeep in tow mode. And I can't find it anywhere in the manual. Turns out the Jeep I bought, to save a little money, is two wheel drive. And for flat towing behind a motorhome, a two wheel drive Wrangler is about as useful as a ballerina tutu on a football player. You need the four wheel drive.

I'd bought the wrong Jeep to save a few bucks, and now it was the one thing standing between us and the trip.

Marissa takes one look at me. She already knows that look. "What's wrong?"

"This Jeep can't be towed," I tell her.

She doesn't miss a beat. "This Jeep is going to Florida with us."

And it does. Instead of admitting defeat the day before our dream trip, I find out that if I pull six bolts off the transfer case, I can drop the driveshaft, tie it up out of the way, and tow the thing without frying the transmission.

So that's what I did. On my back, with blazing hot concrete, six bolts, more than a dozen times, all the way from Tennessee to Florida and back.

By the time we got home I could drop a driveshaft in my sleep. And we were out $3,500 on a Jeep that was never going to work, that we sold not long after.

For years, that's the only word I had for the whole thing. Mistake. A dumb, expensive, avoidable mistake.

The fear that keeps people in the driveway

I hear from people every week who are standing right where we were before all this. They've got the itch. They've done the homework. And they will not move.

When I ask what's stopping them, money comes out first. But dig a little and it's almost always the same thing underneath. They're terrified of getting it wrong.

Buying the wrong rig.
Sinking money into the wrong setup.
Making some expensive, avoidable mistake and having to live with it.

Which I understand completely. I've been on my back in the dirt under that exact fear.

So they try to research their way out of it

I know the strategy, because it's the one I ran. More videos. More spreadsheets. More forum threads at midnight. The plan is always the same: gather enough information up front that the risk of a wrong move drops to zero, and then, finally, you go.

That's exactly what I thought I'd done with the Jeep. I'd researched it, I "knew from experience" that Wranglers were perfect for flat towing. And I still ended up under that Jeep with a wrench the night before the biggest trip of our lives. All that research, and I still missed the one thing that mattered.

Because here's what nobody wants to hear.

No walkthrough was going to teach me what I learned under that Jeep. No spreadsheet was going to hand me the $3,500 lesson I had to pay for in person. Some things you only learn by going, and no amount of waiting will hand them to you early.

So you can wait until you're certain, or you can go. You don't get both. And every month you spend waiting is a month closer to the only real mistake, which is never going at all.

The word that changed the math

Years after all this, I came across a book called Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, and it put a name to something we'd already stumbled into out of necessity.

An experiment can't fail. It either confirms the thing or rules it out, and ruling something out is progress, not defeat. The only way to actually lose is to refuse to run it, or to run it and learn nothing.

That one word, experiment, changes everything. Because the Jeep is the reason we found the Subaru. After we sold it, we picked up a lighter Subaru that towed better behind that motorhome than the Jeep ever could have, and carried us for the next two years without me ever touching a driveshaft again. The only reason we found that Subaru is that the Jeep showed us exactly what we didn't want.

The money never changes. It's $3,500 either way. Call it a mistake and it's money down the drain. Call it an experiment and it's the price we paid to find the thing that finally worked.

Nothing about what happened changes. Only the word I put on it.

The RVers who make it out here for years aren't the ones who avoided mistakes. They're the ones who stopped calling them that.

What I wish I'd told myself

• Name the fear out loud. Say it, write it down, spell out the actual worst that could happen. It's strange how much smaller it gets once it's on paper instead of rattling around in your head. Half the time the worst case turns out to be survivable, and the other half it turns out to be something you can plan for.
• Take the shakedown trip. Go somewhere close to home before you go somewhere that matters, so the thing that breaks, breaks 15 minutes out instead of 400 miles from help. Cheap, low stakes, and it'll teach you more in one weekend than a month of research ever could. A single shakedown would've caught my Jeep.
• Let experience do the teaching. You will learn more in your first month on the road than in two years of reading about it. Some lessons just don't exist on a screen. Stop waiting until you feel ready and go start living them.

Eleven years in, I've made a lot of expensive mistakes like that Jeep. Dozens of them. And looking back, none of them were failures. A failure is a lesson you paid for and walked away from. I walked away from every one of these with the lesson in hand.

So I wrote about the 22 biggest mistakes we wish we'd known about and how to avoid them, so you can learn from them and skip the ones you don't need to pay for yourself.

That Jeep you just read about, $3,500 and more than a dozen times pulling the driveshaft on and off in the dirt, didn't even make the list.

That's what the guide is for. The dumb, avoidable mistakes like my Jeep, cleared off your plate, so you've got room for the experiments that actually matter.

I'm hoping to share it on a much bigger scale on YouTube before long, so I'd love your eyes on it first. If a mistake's missing or something's off, there's a button on the bottom right of the page to give feedback. The more helpful we make this, the more it helps the next person facing the same fears you are.

➡️ 22 Things We Wish We'd Known Before Going Full-Time​

Until next time, see you down the road!
— Nathan