The fun begins

Present day circumstances aside, at the time of receiving the camper back in March I was pretty excited.

Right as I was about to drop off the camper with the mechanic, I snagged a hasty walk-through video. As I mentioned in the last post...snowstorm! Plus, I had to get to work :(

What I definitely did not have time for was any sort of quick joy ride.

To my benefit, the mechanic was enthusiastic enough about the camper himself that after I returned from a rather brief work day, he urged me to take it for a test drive. My wife was able to meet me at the mechanic, so together her and I hopped in and went for a quick spin.

I was nervous about not having any sort of license or registration. I did have insurance, however! I think that would have been enough to sway the police officer to let me off with a warning. I heard various stories about getting insurance for Japanese imports. A few weeks before the camper arrived, I was able to set up insurance through SafeCo, which is part of Liberty Mutual. They didn't blink when I explained the situation and didn't seem to care that my vehicle didn't have the typical 16-digit VIN number. And because it was insured as a motorhome, the overall price per year was quite inexpensive.

Once on the road, we quickly noticed that the fuel gauge was reading alarmingly low. Running out of fuel in a diesel vehicle is problematic if they don't have the right fuel pump setup that can push air out of the lines. Even on my Sprinter that I used to have, getting air in the fuel lines meant you had to screw around for a bit in order to get it going again. For our first outing, the last thing we wanted to do was run out of fuel and get stranded. So we made a beeline for a gas station, hoping it would sell diesel.

Approaching the gas station, we saw it was also a truck stop. That meant diesel for sure. But unfortunately it only carried diesel on the pumps meant for semi trucks. That 

it was very obvious that this was not going to be a fast vehicle. Granted, we didn't take the chance of running it on a freeway or anything. We only had a short loop planned. But I wanted to see how quickly it might accelerate. Could it even get out of its own way?

This video my wife took speaks to that a bit...

Yeah...about that acceleration. Not too quick! Okay, so maybe getting up to speed takes a while. But what I wanted to know (and still don't, as of writing!) is how fast it will go and what speed I can hope to maintain. Are we destined to take backroads everywhere we go? Maybe that's the more relaxing way to travel anyway. Doing 80mph on a Wisconsin freeway has never been overly pleasant. But if we want to go cross-country in this, we might have to budget some extra time.