As we prep the RV for our first trip of the season to Gatlinburg, Tennesse, and the Great Smokey Mountains (yay!), I’ve found a newfound appreciation for so many of the little things in our camper – things that I am so happy our RV came with, or that we’ve added along the way.
So – my list of 5 Favorite RV Things today includes one feature of our Grand Design travel trailer and four items we’ve added to our rig.
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- A Built-in Shoe Caddy. Our Grand Design Transcend Xplor travel trailer came with this feature, and we love it so much that when window shopping for our next RV, we look for a shoe-keeping area just inside the door of every model. A place to put shoes just inside the entrance of the RV – it is a deal breaker for us. I’m not being dramatic when I say that I don’t know how we would function on longer trips without it. The spaces contain whatever mess the shoes inevitably bring in and keep our entry floor clean and uncluttered.
- A Wall-Mount Hair Dryer. I was gifted this wall-mount hair dryer in a family Christmas white elephant exchange a couple of years ago. We were building a house, and so I stored the hair dryer, excited to mount it on the wall in the bathroom of our new house. That spring my hair dryer quit, so I “borrowed” my RV hair dryer, and realized that the wall-mount hair dryer would be much better suited to the camper. A couple of Command strips later, and voila – a wall-mounted hair dryer in our RV. It’s convenient, it saves space, and I highly recommend considering mounting one in your own RV!
- A GSI cookware set from REI. I haven’t logged exactly how many meals I’ve cooked with this set, but I will estimate that in three years at an average of 30 camping days per year, and an average of two meals a day cooked, this GSI cookware set has been used to create approximately 180 meals. Despite burning food in the pans, over-boiling noodles until there is no water left, and scrambling eggs with no cooking spray, this set cleans up beautifully regardless of the beating it takes. Three years in, the GSI set is going strong. But when it does need to be replaced, we’ll be replacing it with the same set from REI!
- This Travel Journal. When we bought our camper, a close friend who has long lived the RV life encouraged us to buy a camping travel journal. We’ve filled out every page of the journal for each trip we’ve taken, and I love flipping back through our memories of previous trips. I especially love the section in this book that lets you enter your site number and your ideal site number. Our family enjoys taking evening walks around the campground and picking out our ideal site and entering it in the book for our return trip to that campground.
- Two Coffee Cups: One indoor, one outdoor. One for indoor, one for outdoor, one for the warm, fuzzy camping trip memory, and one for the functionality: morning coffee is my favorite time of the day 365 days a year, and the coffee mugs I use while camping are my favorites. The “indoor” mug is the cup I bought at the Game Lodge campground store in Custer State Park, South Dakota. It reminds me of our first epic family cross-country adventure that marked the start of our RV life journey. The “outdoor” cup is a 14 oz Yeti Rambler mug the boys got me for Mother’s Day 2021. I like to drag out the coffee part of my morning as long as possible, and while camping I love sitting with my coffee under the awning outside or beside an early morning fire, and my Wall Drug mug would leave me with cold coffee too quickly. It may seem silly, but coffee from these mugs is the sign of happy camping trips.
I have a lot of favorite things when it comes to RV life, but these are the 5 I’m feeling the most sentimental and grateful for today. Do you have any RV features, gears, or accessories you couldn’t imagine RVing without? Drop a comment and let us know!
