T&C's Adventures in the T42

We finally got the chance to take the T42 on her first "real" trip: a long weekend in Yosemite National Park.  Yosemite was a good choice for our first time out in this large-to-us vehicle, since we've been tent camping there near-annually for three decades, and know the road between the Bay Area and the Park like the back of our hands.  The one route deviation we chose for the trip was to take New Priest Grade instead of the usual Old Priest Grade since we'll probably never try taking the T42 up Old Priest Grade; if you've been up it before, you probably understand why 😉.

Before taking the T42 too far from home, we wanted to test out as many of her systems as possible.  Some systems were easy to test from the comfort of our own driveway, while others . . . not so much.  Anthony Chabot Family Campground seemed to fit the bill nicely:  less than an hour from home (in case we forgot something vital, or things went tragically wrong and we needed to abort) with sites that have "full hookups" (30 amp power and sewer - things we can't test at home - in addition to water). We originally booked a campsite for a weekend in April, but Mother Nature had other plans - storm damage kept the campground closed past our reservation date, and we had to reschedule for after our return from Japan.  The next date that was free was the weekend of the June 17th - which was a bit closer to our planned annual Yosemite trip than we would've liked (in case we found something wrong/missing that had to be resolved before that trip), but what can you do? Tom was a...

Perhaps you've heard the old saying that goes "the two best days in a boat owner’s life are the day they buy the boat and the day they sell it" .  We're hoping that doesn't extend to camper vans, because in March (after about two years of meticulous research and hand wringing) we "pulled the trigger" on the purchase of a 2023 Winnebago Travato 59GL! You can view all the official specs on  the Winnebago site , but our particular Travato is built on a 2022 RAM Promaster chassis (it's not uncommon for the chassis year of a camper van / Class-B RV to run a year behind the coach year, because of the time required to do the conversion), and being one of the last COVID-era build units she's something of a unicorn among her Travato siblings (i.e. due to supply chain issues, the chassis doesn't have the usual ParkSense front/rear sensors that beep to let you know how close you are to things when parking - but does  have Adaptive Cruise Control instead...