It has been awhile since I’ve had a reason to update everyone on our latest activities in our transition to full-time RV life. My first post about this centered around our proposed truck and the towing hitch I had picked out. That has changed.
I had decided I needed a RAM (I had chose to go with the RAM brand of trucks because of the reliable Alison engine) 3500 to have the payload capability needed to handle the pin weight of the trailer and everything else we needed to put into the truck. I was unable to get the salespeople at our local dealership interested in working with me (hey – I’m about to plunk down nearly $70k for a truck; you think I can get some help here??) so I kept looking online for a truck nearby that would be close to fitting my needs and wants.
I finally found one that looked like it might work but it had some options I was not interested in. For one, it was a long bed. I didn’t want a long bed; much harder to maneuver in towns and getting into and out of parking spaces. It didn’t have fixed running boards but retractable ones; retractable running boards do not go all the way back to near the back tire allowing you to step up and look into the bed like the fixed ones do. It has a sun roof, an option I wasn’t necessarily interested in. It has the newer and larger 400HP, 1,000 ft-lb torque diesel engine; it’s nice but not what I was looking for as I didn’t need the extra towing power. Plus that’s about a $12k option. But it did seem to have everything else.
It’s a Laramie Longhorn with nearly all other bells and whistles which is what I was looking for since we’ll be essentially living in and out of this truck for the foreseeable future. Leather interior, all fancy electronics with 12″ touch screen; auto-adjusting brights; 10 cameras for viewing all around the truck; front and back radar sensors for added safety and security; adaptive cruise control (wasn’t on my list of must haves but really, REALLY nice and I’d miss it if I don’t have it now!), and a few other niceties. Oh yes – it’s the Delmonico Red color scheme with the tan leather interior.
So where did I find this truck? At a dealer in Memphis. We were planning on driving up to Iowa to visit my wife’s father who’s in a nursing home there and Memphis is basically on our way so we stopped by and looked at it. It was a very nice truck and the sticker on the door told me the payload was 3907 lbs which was going to cover what we needed for the trailer we were looking at. However, I was almost ready to walk away because of all of those pricy options including the long bed which I really didn’t want. In full disclosure though, the dealer told me this truck was slightly damaged in a hail storm in Texas on its way to them and was repaired; so they have to sell it as a certified used car and not new. The damage was not visible and wouldn’t affect anything about the truck. And the used price they were offering me was nearly $15k UNDER list for this truck which was nearly $85k. So I would be paying nearly what I was planning to anyway for a lesser truck and this one only had 49 miles on it! (And I put half of those on doing a test drive with it!)
As you can see in the photos, we drove the truck off the lot and finished our trip to Iowa and back home here to Florida. Now all we need is our 5th wheel. More later about the upgrades we’re planning for and our thoughts on a different 5th wheel hitch.