In today's video, I'm going to talk about my Travato,
the things i love, the things i hate, and i'll answer the question
would I still buy it knowing what i know
now.
what is going on youtube greetings from las vegas nevada actually
a few miles outside of las vegas nevada if you've been watching my videos you
know i'm staying on a military campground
right now at nellis air force base but it
is crazy crazy crazy hot here it's been getting up to 102 103 degrees
every day and stayed at that temperature for like four or five hours
so it's just too hot to do anything so it's time for me to move somewhere
a little bit cooler and so i'm headed to california i'm going
to my first thousand trails campsite i'm actually going there on business i
met a really cool ballerina and her boyfriend
online and they have this really interesting
remodeled all pink rv so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to meet them there
and do a little tour but i figured i'd share with you my transition day
and also how i feel about purchasing this winnebago travado am i still happy
with it or do i wish i had gotten something else all right so
let me get the van ready for departure then we'll hit the
road talk about the travado and maybe stop
at a cool little place on the way to california
all right so i moved into my winnebago about four months ago
and i've been on the road living out of it full time for about
three months i left missouri june 17th of 2020 and today is september
21st of 2020 so three months on the road
full time and there are some good things and some bad things
about this winnebago trovato so i figured i'd share those with you today
the main good thing is it's a great little apartment to live in i love it
it's very comfortable i love the open floor plan
of the k it's exactly why i got this rv it's been a great boondocking rig
like i mentioned i've been on the road full time for 90 days now
about 60 to 70 of that has been on blm or national forest land
boondocking and it's lived up to its expectations
the volta system is amazing i always have power
even though the water tanks are small and the black
and the gray tanks are small i've been able to work around that
and it hasn't really been an issue for me to be honest with you
i can stay out about two to three weeks i think
without needing to go into town i usually go into town about every week or
so when i'm boondocking the only problem is
usually trash or i run out of food another thing i love about this
winnebago is how comfortable the drive is it's
like i'm driving a car i've never driven an rv before and i still
feel like i haven't driven an rv because really it's just a van and
it's just really easy to drive i mentioned the volta system
earlier that's another thing about this vehicle that i love
and probably the biggest reason i bought this winnebago
if there were more dealers that had the volta system
maybe i would have had more choices and more options and maybe i would have
chose a different rig but the volta system is simply amazing
if you haven't watched my video where i run the ac for almost nine hours
in a hundred degree desert weather out here in nevada you
should check that video out it really is a power monster and
probably my favorite thing about this rig all right we're getting ready to
stop here real quick when i do transition trips that are long
like today's transition trip is about five hours i usually like to find a cool
spot to stop so we're about an hour into my
drive and there's a really really
cool spot to stop so we're gonna stop there real quick and i'll
share the experience with you so i'm in a really cool spot about 40 minutes
outside of las vegas called nelson ghost town so nelson has
kind of a really interesting history it was
a mining town and it kind of had a sketchy reputation
it was pretty lawless actually a lot of deserters during the civil war
came here um to escape the fighting and not to be drafted into the civil war
so it had this reputation for being just a lawless town
at some point a really bad flood came through the area
and basically the town was abandoned and all these buildings were
left here a family bought the property and have kind of maintained it
they charge ten dollars to get in and you can just walk around here
looking at all the old buildings and all the old cars
it's actually a great place to come and take like
instagram shots um if you're near vegas it's just a cool place to stop
so i highly recommend it i'm gonna walk around a little bit and show you some of
the uh the cool little things i got going on here if you're
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of my weekly videos all right so i know this plane
did not crash here but it's still kind of cool
as someone who spent 20 years in the navy
to see a navy i think this is a training aircraft
if any of my navy buddies can tell me what it is
comment down below but i'm pretty sure because it says
t288 this was a training plane for pilots not an actual in-service
uh jet look at this old travel trailer here i have a feeling a lot of people
in my audience would like to get their hands on this thing
can you imagine how cool it would be to refurbish
this thing look at that that's so cool it looks kind of like an
airstream but it's much much fatter
than an airstream so if you know what kind of
trailer this is uh comment down below i'm thinking it's some sort of airstream
or airstream wannabe company that's out of business now but kind of cool
so how cool is this thing so one of the big complaints about these old
vws is that you can't stand up in them well somebody
basically welded the top of a bug onto this
so you could stand up in this thing so that's pretty cool right there
the inside needs some work though all right so nelson ghost town that was a
lot of fun but let's hop back in the van and head
to california and some cooler weather i think it's like 101 degrees right now
i mean i'm dying the sun is just beating down on me
so let's do this all right let's talk about some of the
things about my travato that really annoy me or
really really ticked me off so one of the things that really ticks me off
is the sound system in the living area is terrible it's a jensen head unit it
doesn't integrate very well with anything in the
van that it's supposed to integrate with doesn't integrate well with the tv
if you do the tv volume do the jensen it's usually behind a little bit
so it's just it's almost unwatchable also
the speakers in this van i've blown probably half of them so i've blown two
in the back and one here in the front and in my
opinion the speaker system should match the max volume of the unit that
you have i've never been a fan of jensen's this
experience has made me like them even less
so i'll probably get my own units for this van
all right the tv you can barely hear the tv and if you turn the ac on high
you're not going to be able to hear the tv at all so that's kind of an
issue when you live in your van and you want to watch some tv
the next thing i didn't like about this winnebago were the screens that came
with it i wish i still had them so i could show you
but they're terrible they're kind of hard to use there's these little
latches that they go on and mine were just falling off all the time and they
were just a pain to fold up so i bought some van made gear ones
winnebago you should reach out to van mate gear
and use their product for your side windows
they're a little pricey but i would have paid for them from the beginning just to
not have to deal with the ones that came with the van all right so i'm getting
ready to turn onto a main road so i want to concentrate on driving but when i get
to california when i get to the thousand trails campsite
i'll talk about some of the things that really
really annoy me about this travato and make me question some of the quality
choices that winnebago made all right i should have filmed myself
getting into this spot but i got a spot as you see here it's
very steep and it's really loose dirt and with my
front wheel drive it was kind of hard to get in here so i
wish i would have filmed it because you would have laughed your butt off at
it but i'm gonna go ahead and set up my rig
and i think i'm gonna wait till tomorrow to talk about
the things that kind of upset me about the rig
it's late in the evening and i want to get finished getting set up here so
although you won't notice it because it's going to happen in an instant so
here's tomorrow good morning from idy wild california
it's kind of crazy it's only 55 degrees here
this morning after spending the last two weeks in 100 degree weather
it's really nice to be in some cool weather
here in the mountains in california that's kind of what i love
about this van life when you get tired of a location
or you get tired of hot or cold weather you can just hop in your van drive a few
hours and be in a completely different climate
a different area a different culture all of that stuff
it's really great and it's why i love van life but i
mentioned there are some things about this van and
winnebago's quality assurance that kind of bother me
and i'll i'll show you that right now so back here is my bathroom
and when i bought this van i envisioned myself
using this shower but i really don't use it very often it's kind of a pain
to set up there's a kind of a closet back here
as you'll see so it's a place to store clothes but it also
is something that can get wet so you have to cover it so
you put a shower curtain up so there's all these
little things right here that you can snap the shower curtain in
but it's kind of a pain you can't access your closet so you can't really leave it
up and it's just not convenient i wish this
whole area back here was a shower room and
then i could just shower back here without any kind of worry
i wish the design was thought out a little bit better now i do know a lot of
k owners that use this shower all the time
and they're happy with it it just doesn't work for me so that's
not really a quality issue but it's kind of a design issue
for me so let's talk about the quality issue so
initial appearance my bathroom looks fine
but you'll notice here this little button right here
once i push it in it's over it's like this thing is just broke and
doesn't work and it's just a real pain in the rear
end especially like right now it's just it gets stuck
in there and it's not working like this
how it's supposed to work and that was the drawer i used the most
so it broke so it makes me think that all these other ones
at some point are going to have issues and for that drawer when i first did it
it was really stuck and i had to use a knife to
kind of pry it open now it's kind of damaged and i know it's
something that'll be covered by the warranty but it's still kind of annoying
that only three to four months into rv life that that drawer is
all right let's talk about some other things that are broke in my bathroom
so here's the mirror i like having this mirror in this cabinet
i keep a lot of stuff in there i don't now because it's broke and i'll show you
what i mean so this came loose and this one's
probably going to come loose at some point
again i know it's a warranty issue and i can get it taken care of
via warranty let me try to get this back in here
but it kind of sucks that i paid as much as i paid for this and after two
to three months i'm having that kind of issue with it so
that's a quality issue to me i would have liked
higher-end finishes so that kind of stuff wouldn't happen i
know i take this thing off-road a lot more
than people do but this is a national park edition travato
it's got all-terrain tires put on and i hope that's not for looks
it's supposed to be able to go to off-road places and not have those kind
of issues so that really annoys me i'll show you
another similar issue so this sink i love this sink i use it
all the time but i haven't been able to use it
for the last month because
this it's coming apart and i tried to fix it
but it's so cheaply done that the little grommets broke off in there
that i can't even fix it you know and so that's annoying so now i
can't use what i consider my main sync again a
quality issue i'll show you another one so so
the national park edition comes with these screens
this screen is pulling down the ceiling so this is something i'll need to get
fixed it's really noticeable from the outside
and again it's another finishing touch on this
travato that's kind of annoying and it's really aggravating that i'm having
to deal with this after just you know my fourth month of
owning this right
all right so all of those flaws and quality issues aside to be honest with
you i really really love this van
i love the freedom it's provided me i love the places that it's taken me
i love that i can explore the united states
canada and mexico kind of on my own terms
i love the systems in this vehicle the volta system
is top-notch and probably the number one reason why i bought this van but the
other systems too the truma combi system that heats the
water and the van the water pump system it's all worked
great i love the open floor plan my van really feels like home it feels
like my studio apartment on wheels
and i absolutely adore this van despite all those flaws that i talked
about would i like there to be some better finishes in here
and some better quality on some of the things that are included
with the van absolutely but would i purchase this van again
absolutely i love this travado and i'm just really
happy with my purchase you enjoyed this video please hit the
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interested in that kind of content thanks for watching
you