RV Hunting

So we did it. We are now the proud owners of a 1988 Itasca Sundancer. It’s 24’ long and has a 5.7 litre V8 engine up front. It goes about 70 miles an hour downhill and really doesn’t like going uphill. Fuel economy is to be seen but I will be surprised if we get 10 miles to the gallon out of it. Thankfully a gallon of petrol only costs just over $2 here (that’s about €0.40 a litre). Pictures paint a thousand words so have a look at it for yourselves.

It was priced at $8,000, they wanted $6,000 and we refused to give them any more than $5,000. Having it in cash made the deal an easier one to close so we put down a deposit subject to it being checked in the garage and a test drive. The test drive went fine and it needed new belts and hoses and a bit of an engine tune up. The mechanic mentioned something about a new exhaust manifold but when he heard we were selling it in 4 months he offered to weld up the air intakes which would do the job and save us $600 so that was fine with us.

Getting insurance was a little trickier. Since we are living in the RV (not a CV Brenda!!!) we are supposed to have another vehicle to run errands. Thankfully the lovely Tracey at Camping World argued to her bosses on our behalf and found a loophole to slip us in under the radar so insurance was sorted too. It came back from the garage on Thursday evening and the dealer spent Friday morning going through the internals to make sure everything was working.

We called up at lunchtime on Friday and were given a walkthrough of the ins and outs of the vehicle and were then sent on our merry way. We dropped back the rental car and headed on our adventure. First stop Wal Mart for some supplies…..