Welcome to Wagoners West! I created this site to document my journey in full time RV’ing. This started off as my quest to locate a home in the far western United States. I did a lot of searching on CraigsList, and City-Data to try to find the ideal place to live. There were lots of really great places but I couldn’t decide on a single location.

My plan was to stay in a few different places for a few weeks or months to determine if I really wanted to be there or not. In doing this research it seemed like I would be spending a good bit of money and time going from apartment to apartment, dealing with utility hookup fee’s and lease agreements, or breaking lease agreements.

The more I thought about the more it seemed like a good idea to get a travel trailer or an RV and just live in that until I figured out which place would suit me the best. After endless searching for ‘the right unit’ and debating with myself on which would be better, a travel trailer or a motorhome, I finally decided on a motorhome.

The reason was that my pickup is an older model (1998 GMC Z71) and has a lot of miles on it. I thought that if I pulled a trailer around, up and down mountains and that sort of thing it would tear it up pretty fast. I didn’t want to upgrade my truck or tear it up so I decided on a motorhome. The next step was to find something with enough power to pull my motorcycle and my truck and still have juice left to get up and over the mountains. In addition, I wanted something with enough living space to be comfortable. I searched pretty extensively and decided on a diesel pusher.

It is a 2003 Phaeton(pronounced Fay-ton) by Tiffin. It is 40 feet long and has 3 slide-outs giving me just under 400 square feet of living space when they are all fully extended. It has a 10,000 pound towing capability, 30,000 miles on a 330 horsepower CAT diesel and an Allison transmission on a Freightliner chassis. From what I’m told and what I’ve read “She’s not even broke in until you hit 100,000 miles!”, I guess we’ll see.

I bought it from LazyDays in Tampa, FL. They claim to be the largest single site RV dealership in the world and have really good reviews. I was able to get the RV for about 20k under book value which was important to me because if this adventure ends in a flaming disaster for me, I’d like to be able to at least get my money back when/if I sell the RV! 🙂

I’ll try to update this on a regular basis with little tidbits regarding lessons learned or interesting things I witness or experience during my journey.