Hammer Down

June 5, 2024 — Day 82

Liquid Spring, Lafayette IL — Ottawa Metro Park, Lima, OH

Susan woke up feeling really lousy (susan here: Prime suspect is the taqueria. Foreshadowing here, I had a miserable couple days coming at me. You haven’t lived until you’re bouncing around in your seat in an RV with a painful, nauseous stomach. Yeah, I know, too much info. But such is the “glamorous life” of your favorite RV bloggers.). She’d been looking forward to the test drive and factory tour at Liquid Spring. So, brave thing she is (susan here: stubborn, perhaps?) sucked it up and soldiered on. We were quite happy to find out the test RV was our exact same model, only a year newer! Perfect, we would have a direct comparison.

For those that don’t know—we’re sure that’s all of you—they rip out the leaf spring suspension and replace it with a proper 5-link suspension. It has a silicon fluid controlled by valves, which, working with a micro-computer, open and close 200 times a second to vary the spring rate from soft to hard evening out the ride.

We both got to drive the test loop and it was pretty remarkable difference. You can eliminate body roll & lean in turns. BTW, not a great idea. It’s good to be reminded by the lean that you are driving something that weighs almost 30,000lbs. Fortunately they have multiple settings from “feel nothing marshmallows” to “sport yep we really should slow our roll.” The reduction of jarring impacts from rail road tracks and expansion joints is incredible. You still hear them, well, you hear the tires but not all the RV sounds you normally would. You almost don’t know they’re happening. On Susan’s ride the salesperson encouraged her to hit a railroad crossing hard. So she did. Really did, like, surprised Paul and our sales rep kind of did. (susan here: he said have a hard go at it, so I did!) We felt it but it wasn’t what we would have felt with our current suspension. In fact, it wasn’t that bad! We knew that if we had foolishly hit it that hard in Clifford we would have had wooden trim parts fly from the walls. (susan here: not that it hasn’t happened before…)

That’s another thing. An RV is a house that gets subjected to earthquakes every day it’s on the road. All the equipment on board is shaken around just as much as the people are. This isn’t good for the equipment.

Another benefit of Liquid Spring is that you can adjust the ride height.

This seem silly at first, but you can raise the ride height to get in or out of a gas station that has a steep ramp which might cause you to bottom out, or you might be traveling down a rutted dirt road to go boon docking so you can raise the height. You can also lower the ride height to park for the night, essentially you’re level but in a squat like the diesel folks. This might sound silly, but RVers reading this are nodding their heads thinking “how cool”. For the those that don’t know, when a diesel parks and levels they “squat” by letting the air out of their airbags. We’re waiting on questions from the diesel folks who see this and can’t quite figure out how a gas RV can squat down like a diesel pusher.

Here’s a shot of the test drive gasser in squat position. We didn’t get a shot of Clifford but I know we used 2 sets of 5-6″ ramps in the front. The test RV just leveled itself. Boom. We’re talking a minute, tops. The non-RVers are thinking, “I thought you had that magic button on the dash that just leveled you?” Yes, we do, but the hydraulic jacks only raise the RV so far, plus they don’t lower it. This new system both makes sites easier to level and if you get lucky, puts the front steps closer to the ground. We’ve been at campsites where even Paul needed a step stool to reach the first step. (susan here: sometimes I need an elevator.)

Susan had to bow out of the factory tour since she was starting to feel even worse. Paul enjoyed the tour, they start with bare steel and make, well everything. They laser cut it and weld all right there.

It was time to leave. Really, it was. After the drive the weather warnings were going off on our phones.

Soon there were tornado warnings.

Eric told us we could shelter inside if we needed to. He asked us where we were going. We had two options north east or south west, one was away from the storm and one was into it. He said, “Stay here or run, but don’t run the wrong way!” One more look at the radar and we made a run for it.

The rain was some of the most intense rain we’ve ever encountered. We took the next exit just to wait it out.

We made it safely our next campground. Phew!

We’re only going to make one blog entry for the remaining days. It was just Paul driving and Susan not feeling well. Ok, she got better on the last day. Spoilers darlings…

Daily: 213

Total: 7,043

Driving Miles/Day: 220

Overall Miles/Day: 86

mpg: 6.67

June 6 — Day 83

Ottawa Metro Park, Lima, OH – Rustic Acres RV Resort and Campground, Shippenville PA

Susan still felt like crap so Paul drove the whole way. That’s not that bad, we just planned out the whole trip, gas stops, and a nice 30-45 minute lunch break. We did make it to Pennsylvania, which was a nice milestone, we’re almost home!

And looking at that photo, is the sick person still in the ambulance?

We pulled into a really nice park in Shippenville, we must go back when we can enjoy it. They even had rope lights lighting up all the spaces!

Daily: 272

Total: 7,315

Driving Miles/Day: 222

Overall Miles/Day: 88

mpg: 6.66 (This number is fiction, no data was recorded so Paul extrapolated, which is a $2 word for guessed, but guessed with math.)

June 7 – Day 84

Rustic Acres RV Resort and Campground, Shippenville PA — Tobyhanna State Park, Tobyhanna PA

Same as before, Susan feels like crap, we plan the gas and lunch stops, and drive.

Pennsylvania is a big state. He grew up there, he knows how big it is. He remembers being surprised at how tiny Massachusetts is. Come on, if you chip off Cape Cod and that weird Lake Erie thing, they’re even the same shape. But oh no, One doesn’t simply drive across PA like you do is MA, it is just to big. So today we started in PA and end in PA.

And we drove past some really cool carved our rocks. Take that Utah, PA has cool rocks too!

Tobyhanna Park is huge, we drove for awhile to find our spot, and they used the space wisely, the sites are far apart and you are surrounded by trees. We like trees. The local deer didn’t seem to care, they just wandered through the park doing deer things.

We often meet up with Paul’s brother, John, who lives right outside of Philadelphia, but with Susan feeling like crap we just pressed on. (He’s was coming up this summer anyways, and since it is not almost fall, he already came up and visited us. Isn’t time travel wonderful?)

Daily: 245

Total: 7,560

Driving Miles/Day: 222

Overall Miles/Day: 90

mpg: 6.76

June 8 — Day 85

Tobyhanna State Park, Tobyhanna PA — Keene NH

Wow, home. We made it. Susan is better! So Paul made her drive the whole way. Actually, no, we can’t remember but that didn’t happen. She likes first shift so she probably got it, and that mean’s Paul got to take photos of stone buildings!

Yay, we’re in PA!

And then we were home. Yay, home!

Over the next several days we found the following things had broken:

• washing machine
• bedroom mini-split
• Subaru battery

But, yay, home! I think we locked the doors and didn’t drive for several days.

Daily: 275

Total: 7,835

Driving Miles/Day: 224

Overall Miles/Day: 92