Breaking Camp

In one of my favorite movies, The Martian, Matt Damon’s character is preparing to make a long journey across Mars from one base to another, but he knows he can’t just send it and has to take a methodical approach to preparing for this journey given his constraints. This was approximately what I was doing between May and July 2026.

Every couple weeks I’d take the camper out on weekend trips. Using the app “HipCamp” (think AirBnB but for RVs) and RVLife I found suitable places where I could navigate the trailer to and get set up at and give different systems a minor stress-test. I was also, unknowingly at the time, stress testing myself.

The Cascade Range in Washington can be a bit harrowing at times when you are 50 feet worth of truck and trailer. Winding country mountain roads, short notice intersections, people hugging the center line to cut a hairpin turn, oh, and wildlife that ranges from “size of a dog to size of a horse” that wants to casually wander into the linear danger area that is a state highway.

By the time I got to a campsite, whether it was one hour away or three hours away, my nerves were fried. My girlfriend was a great passenger princess, but while she got to sit in her comfy world of bliss feeding me snacks, I was constantly vigilant.

Stick that on loop for hours on end, sprinkle in surprises, hope that you got a good night’s rest and that St. Christopher is with you. It’s a recipe that will smoke just about anyone’s nerves, and that’s before you remember I’m driving nearly $140k worth of truck and trailer that are about to become my entire life.

The first test was fairly simple: I found a spot in Ashford, Wash. near to where I went hunting the last couple seasons. The pad was level gravel, good hookups, a firepit with a few adirondack chairs, private, and backed up to a pond. The backing in was challenging in part because I was still rusty as hell, and my girlfriend who was great at so many other things… was completely useless. I was so used to professional hand and arm signals and shouting when one backs up a truck it was hard to transition to dead staring and vague pointing/directions. I knew if this was to continue I was going to have to get really good at backing up on my own again really quick. It was not going to improve when I injected children into the mix after a long day on the highway cross-country.

Overall the trip was uneventful. I figured out the quirks of the HVAC system and how air moves in the trailer in one night flat, then I moved on to the next problem: why was the battery dying? When it was hooked up to the truck or power pedestal all the systems that needed to work, worked. Under battery power nothing worked. This was going to be a future me problem, but I wasn’t able to devote any meaningful time to it on this trip.

It was a great trip for a lot of reasons I’ll hold private, but overall it wasn’t a bad outing for the maiden voyage of the trailer. The successive trips presented their own gremlins, challenges, and stories but each time I was able to troubleshoot, problem solve, and move forward in my understanding of how this was going to work long term. There were system failures that, thank God, failed on a practice trip and not on the big trip. This gave me the mental space and agility to focus on that specific problem and harden the RV for the big trip.

An awning came out of its channel on first use because it was never secured correctly from the factory, the solar controller was never connected to the battery, the battery was a shitty 80-hour lead acid, the oven didn’t light, the landing gear sense frame twist when there was none due to the faulty battery. The list goes on. Like Matt Damon’s character says at the end of The Martian, “You solve the problem, then the next, then the next, and if you solve enough problems… you get to go home.”

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The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of War or the U.S. Army.