Stargazer's Garage

From Bullet Mods and Accessories When we first bought our Pacific Coachworks Tango travel trailer last year, one of the first accessories that I bought were Lynx Levelers . I didn't want to bother with heavy scrap pieces of wood to level the RV and I really liked the bright orange colour of the Lynx. They are very easy to use especially since the Hoppy bubble levels that I mounted tell us how many inches to raise the trailer, and each of the Lynx Levelers are about 1" tall. There was never any guessing to how high to build the stacks. During the off-season I used the Lynx Levelers under the trailer tires to keep them off the frozen pavement. As it turns out, we had one of our warmest winters on record. So in March when we took the RV out on the first trip of the year, I noticed that the levelers bent out of shape from the weight of the tires on the soft asphalt.... ...Even though it was just cosmetic and they worked just as well under the stabilizer jacks, I still thought ab...

From Bullet Mods and Accessories Last year when we were shopping for our first RV, a Pacific Coachworks Tango , we noticed clothes pins clipped on each corner of the travel trailer. We had no idea what it was for until the dealer explained that it helped the water running from the gutters to fall away from the sides of the trailer. This would reduce the black streaks that occur when the trailer sits outside in the rain. We were skeptical at first, but.... ...when it rained, we could see that it really worked. It's cheap, too, so as homage to the little red-neck inside of me, I promptly placed four brand new bamboo clothes pins on our 2010 Keystone Premier 31BHPR .

From The Bullet We signed the papers for our 2010 Keystone Premier 31BHPR today and did the walk through. It was a little sad saying good bye to the Tango because we had such a good time with it last year. But seeing the new shiny Bullet right next to it made it easy to be excited. It's going to take some time to get used the new layout and figuring out exactly where we should put everything but there was one pleasant surprise: the laundry chute. At first, we didn't think it would be good for anything but when I put our laundry hampers in place, we realized that it would work out quite well. In the Tango we had to take up floor space for it. In the Bullet, it is conveniently out of the way. From The Bullet From The Bullet One thing I was disappointed in was the plastic toilet. The one in the Tango was porcelain. I suppose we have to make some sacrifices to reduce weight.

It's been about a month since we first saw the Keystone Premier 31BHPR at the Earlybird RV Show. The dealership said they ordered 4 of them and we were 3rd in line. The picture on the left shows the outside kitchen which features a refrigerator, sink, 2-burner grille, and a swivel-mounted LCD TV. We were told that it would take about 2 weeks for the new travel trailer to arrive, but it's been about a month now and it's looking less likely that we will get it in time for our Spring Break trip at the end of March. I've read comments on the forums and there have been a couple of rumors why there might be a delay. One reason is the incredible popularity of the unit and the large number of recent orders. Another is that Keystone RV made some design changes and they were incorporating them into the new RVs. Whatever is causing the delay, we've taken advantage by removing almost all of our gear from the Tango. It took us three trips of filling our Denali XL up to the roof ...

We were at the Abbotsford Tradex this weekend for the Earlybird RV Show and saw this spiffy looking 35' travel trailer in full body paint. It's a brand new Premier Ultra-Lite made by Keystone RV. We love our 2009 Tango but the seven of us just needed more space. Because the Premier is an ultra-lite, we can have a quad-bunk configuration with dual-slides and a second kitchen (outside) and STILL be within the towing capacity of our 2007 Yukon XL Denali. It was something we could not pass up. I posted some general specifications and floor plan: Premier Ultra-Lite 31BHPR RV Travel Trailer

Concrete/Grandy KOA : 2 nights, Site #91   Coming back from Everett, I had the urge to get out on the road again and thought it would be nice to go for a couple of nights before the weekend. There was nothing available at Sunnyside so we took a chance calling the KOA campground in Concrete, WA . It's only about 2 hours away from our home and we had heard good things about it.... This trip started out a bit differently because the trailer was actually in storage. Since the trailer was already equipped with just about everything we needed, we thought it would be simple to just pack the clothes and food we wanted into the Denali, load up at the storage yard and leave from there. It didn't go quite that smoothly though, because that morning after stopping at the Costco in Port Coquitlam for fuel, I realized that I had forgotten the RV keys at home. Luckily, we were only 15-minutes away. In the end, we wereg only 30-minutes behind our original schedule. There was a 90-minute wait at...

Lakeside RV Park: 3 Nights 12321 Hwy 99, Everett, WA 98204 Talk about contrasts! From our very first camping trip into the lush forests around Cultus Lake, BC we went to our next destination of urban pavement: Lakeside RV Park off of Highway 99 in Everett, Washington. To be fair, after first impressions of the "neighborhood", the place was quite livable and suited our goal of being close to shopping. In fact, we got a water-view "lake" side spot right next to the fishing pond. We did lots of time at Camping World, Walmart, and Target as well as doing a little shopping at an outlet mall, and I was able to install and setup a few more things on our travel trailer. Click the thumbnail below to see more photos. 2009 Everett I got to climb up on top of the roof of the travel trailer for the first time to install the MaxxAir II vent cover. It allows us to keep the vent open without letting water come in through the opening. I'll need to get up there a few more times b...

Sunnyside Campground : 2 Nights The maiden voyage in our Tango RV travel trailer was a great success. There were a lot of "firsts" for us and the kids, but we all had great fun--despite my returning home with a minor concussion and whiplash! More on that later. We left home on July 1st, Canada Day holiday morning. It took me a while to get hitched up again after only doing for the first time over a week earlier. We finally got on the road around 10:30-ish and went over the Port Mann Bridge to the commercial truck scales to weigh ourselves. After a brief stop in the empty parking lot of an Abbotsford church for lunch, we arrived at Sunnyside Campground in Cultus Lake early in the afternoon. Despite waiting an hour so that we could get "Twilight" admission to the Cultus Lake Water Slides (4 hours of playtime from 2:30 to closing) it still cost our whole family over $90 to get in. To me, it wasn't worth it because most of the time is spent waiting in lines, but the...

From RV Mods and Accessories An electric tongue jack seems to be a very popular modification especially with the larger trailers. The idea of cranking the jack up and down didn't appeal to me and after doing it the first day we towed the trailer I could say that I had "been there, done that." The Barker 3000 offers a 3000 lb lifting capacity as well as a built-in LED light (for hooking up at night) and a bubble level. I have to tell you, being able to lift and drop the trailer with the tip of my finger is a true pleasure. A few additional pictures are available here .

From RV Mods and Accessories When I found out that it was possible to install a regular household thermostat into the RV travel trailer, I knew it would be one of the first mods I would attempt. At first I didn't want to get a programmable model, but the selection available at RONA was very slim. The non-programmable ones were actually more expensive than the programmable ones. This particular one was one of the cheaper ones but it has a bonus of having a humidity display as well as separate temperature and programming displays. In fact, it's much fancier than the digital programmable one I installed in my home 9 years ago! Full details of the install in our travel trailer is posted here: Tango Hotel Mod: Digital Programmable Thermostat

I finally had our 2007 GMC Yukon XL Denali setup for towing and got some time on Friday to pull home our new 30-foot travel trailer--which I nicknamed "Tango Hotel." The original plan was to keep it for one night and bring it back the next day, but our schedule was so busy that instead of rushing the next day, we decided to keep the trailer for the rest of the week. It actually worked out well because we were able to sleep in the trailer for two nights. It allowed us to get familiar with how everything worked in the trailer and start to setup everything the way that we wanted. I got a chance to complete some modifications and one of the first things I did was replace the old fashioned RV thermostat with a modern digital programmable thermostat . I've got a few more mods that I want to do before we live for our first trip next week.

I had a weight distributing hitch installed on our travel trailer today. It looks like a fairly simple setup to use. I'm anxious to try it out but our schedule is so busy right now that we'll need to wait a few more days. In the meantime, we've bought a few things to equip the trailer including some wheel chocks and a power tongue jack that I'll need to install. I have a list of other things I want to get, but with prices in Canada about double the price it is in the US, it's hard to make purchases. We've planned our second camping trip for south of the border so that we can pick up things that we need.

Sunnyside Campground Cultus Lake BC The date has been set. Our spot has been reserved. The destination for our very first RV trip, the "Shakedown" trip, will be a campground within walking distance of the Cultus Lake Waterslides. A tip that I've read in every RV book and website is to take a short 2-3 day trip in the RV at the beginning of the season before you head off for a long trip. That way you can make sure that everything is working and deal with any issues close to home before you hit the road. The is commonly called the shakedown trip. Having never been RVing before, I feel that we still have a long journey before we get to that point with our new travel trailer. Wish us luck!

We jumped through another hoop today and the financing has been approved for our new 2009 Tango Travel Trailer. We're another step closer to parking this behemoth on our driveway. Overall, we must have looked at over 25 different RVs over this past month. This particular Tango happened to be the very first one we saw when we started this journey. On that first day, it was shown to us as a high-end trailer with high-quality materials throughout. But the $33000+ CAD list price was a lot of money. The sales person showed us different trailers and configurations (even used ones) until we reached an entry-level double-bunk model with slides that was very reasonably priced. We left the lot that day with a handful of brochures and our heads about to explode. We went to other RV dealers and looked at many more models and realized that there were certain things we liked and didn't like.... Click below to read more. Some things just seemed to be standard issue so we didn't concern o...

  This has been an exciting weekend for us because we just added a new member to our (virtual) garage: a 2009 Tango Travel Trailer. (Being 30-feet long, it doesn't fit in our real garage.) While the idea of getting into RVing has been with me a long time, taking it seriously and acting upon it didn't start happening until about a month ago. Since we had missed the spring RV shows, we stopped at our local RV dealership a few Saturdays ago for a look and we got a very informative and educational tour of different types of travel trailers. Our 2007 GMC Yukon XL Denali is the most tow-capable vehicle we've owned, and I wanted to see what a 7800 lb. trailer looked like. The sales person spent a lot of time showing us the entire spectrum of RVs from modern upscale to affordable entry-level. We learned about GVWR and towing limits, as well as about slides (not the ones we're used to that you find at playgrounds!), outdoor showers, and saw that there were almost infinite varie...