 I just hit my sixth year anniversary on the road as a full-time nomad and during that time there has been a lot of adventure and fun and hilarity and some foibles and some craziness but there's also been some things that were irritating and a couple that were downright terrifying so today I'm gonna tell you about it. Happy Sunday everybody it's Robin with Creativity RV. I hope you're all doing well out there. I decided to go through some of my old footage recently to celebrate my sixth year on the road and I can't believe how much stuff I've gotten to do since I went out on the road full time and of course I've had all of your basic RV problems. I went down a really bumpy road a few minutes ago and this is what it looks like inside. Got some work to do. Like things that break over and over again. I've had frozen pipes, I've had broken solar systems and broken furnaces and I have a fan that I have replaced five times. I always keep an extra motor in stock just in case but that is not the stuff that I'm going to tell you about today. Today I'm going to tell you about my top seven craziest stories since I've been on the road. These stories started out one way and ended up another because everything went wrong so I pulled out some of the original footage to show you while I tell you some of these crazy stories so forgive the choppiness of the editing and all the different hairstyles that I've gone through in the last six years. Alright here's story number one. I got hit by a semi while I was parked at a Cabela's parking lot. I was at a Cabela's parking lot overnight and I was working in my chair about 7.30 in the morning and I see this semi come like it's going to turn into the space next to me which it did and then the entire rig shook and I almost jumped up out of my chair to go look but then I saw through the other window that it kept going and I thought oh I just shook because semis make you shake when they go by and I walked around the outside of my rig and I saw that the vent was gone on the outside of my refrigerator so I look up and I see that this window is completely shattered and not only that but the other window over here has a chip and the entire top of my rig about 12 feet tall has these huge metal grooves in the paint. Wind down, took out this window, a whole bunch of paint, the vent and kept going. I have a dash cam that records automatically when things go by me in a parking lot just in case but the thing that I was working on that morning was downloading the footage so I didn't get the guy's license plate and I just had to eat the damage myself. Okay story number two is one of my favorites. My friends and I were camping out in a long-term visitor area in California and long-term visitor areas are government land and we were near some military installations so we would hear planes fly by once in a while and we would hear some booms. Well one night my boyfriend came and got me and he said yeah I think you're gonna want to come outside because I think there's a dude out here. So of course I say a dude what do you mean a dude and I went outside and in the distance about the height of a man we saw this flashing beacon. Our neighbors were rushing outside and congregating and motion sensor lights were going off and voices were raised and I was like shut up shut up we don't know what this is right dawn. This is the first image that we got when we looked at the dude through the night vision we were even more alarmed. In night vision it looks like a dude in a big space suit was standing right over there. We can see that he's got a beacon on his helmet that goes from white to green to red and we could hear him and see him pulling up a parachute and then two nondescript pickup trucks fly in to the campground just on that ridge over there and the dude pulls his parachute up the ridge you can see all of them here. They take the dudes pack off they take his parachute and him and they put him in this truck and they hauled ass out of this campground. Well it turns out that our camping area was near a base where they trained paratroopers from all over the world so it turns out this guy just flew off course and they came and picked him up but it was one of the weirdest things I've ever experienced on the road. Okay I tried to pepper in a fun one right there before I told you about my RV that literally fell apart. I had a class C from a well-known manufacturer. I bought it new and within a few months the whole rig started to go like this and I'd be driving down the road and everything would shake. I'm on a perfectly good road I'm in an 80 mile an hour zone and there's not a lot of wind today. This is what my steering wheel does. I'm going 60 in an 80 and you can see from my hand it's just rested on the wheel and I'm holding it. I'm actually stopping it from shaking a lot but this is not a good drive it's an uncomfortable drive it doesn't feel safe. Look at that. You can even hear it and everything in the back shakes and I don't like it. And I thought I was off balance but at the slide there were these weird jagged pieces of metal coming out and then everything started to separate. The bathroom sink separated from the wall. You could stand in the bathroom and put your hand through to the bedroom and wave at whoever was in there and the cabinets went and shut and then they started to come off of the walls and so the manufacturer picked it up and took it back to their factory and when they returned it to me it was in worse shape than when I sent it to them. This is the overhead fan that was supposed to be fixed and first of all I mean you can see it was left totally dirty but I was told that this knob was stripped and look that's supposed to be open. I mean before it may have been stripped but at least it opened so now I can't run the fan. So far it looks like the wall was fixed okay. I mean I guess we'll see when it gets cold again. I'm not loving the workmanship here but there's a bunch of glue that was left back in this corner but nobody will probably see it bit me and it looks like the back splash was repaired. It looks like as they tried to fix everything other things just popped apart and they tried to use a whole bunch of silicone to keep it back together but no dice it didn't work. But I tell you I learned a lot from this experience because even brand new rigs from high-end manufacturers can fall apart and you just have to do what you can and then keep it moving and for me that meant getting a different rig. Okay the next one's kind of embarrassing. I went to camp on a beach with some friends in Texas and we were in a big row of people and then some of our friends left and we slowly saw the bunch of other people left the beach and we thought they were just leaving because the weekend was over. No no turns out they were leaving because it was high tide. Now I've camped on the beach before and I was aware of high tide but in those places everybody parked so far back from the tide that it wasn't even an issue but here before we knew it we were absolutely swamped with water. My RV was buried about halfway at my tires. Thank God it didn't get to my engine but I just sat in my camp chair and watched the water flow in and then when it receded the scariest part was getting back off the beach where we didn't get stuck and have to call a tow truck. I'm beach camping on Mustang Island which is just outside of Corpus Christi, Texas. It's been really great but then my friend and I made a huge rookie mistake and the tide came in and the tide went out at the exact same levels. You can see this shot here from my door that's my son T City Mayor and that was high tide every single day so I had all that room between my door and the ocean and you can see here this big row of RVers that's me and my group with some other people behind us and if you look down the beach you can see that the RVs go in one place and then they always leave room for cars to go down in front of the RVs and then also behind the RVs and every day that we camped for a week high tide just came up to here so I was not expecting at all what came next. Well that's not good. Yeah I went to go check on the boy and I saw that the water was way higher than it had ever been before so I went outside to look at Peggy's rig and you can see the water was almost up to her and here probably not the smartest move I decided to sit outside in my chair and just make sure our stuff was okay and that's when a big surge came up and completely surrounded me and my RV. Now you might be wondering at this point why we just didn't get in our cars and drive away well see what the sand is doing up here that's what it was like when we got inside of our rigs and this water was going back and forth we could feel the sand moving out from underneath us and we were sure that if we tried to drive we were gonna get stuck. I know lots of water out there. We're getting ready to go and my biggest concern is the weight of our rigs in this wet sand. Okay you can see the tide actually came up to here while we were sitting in our RVs. My friend actually already pulled up a little bit and she was able to get out just fine but boy this is some squishy sand and you can see all the swirls that went around us. So I went first with my four-wheel drive and you can see me here looking at my side mirror my rear view mirror with Peggy behind me because I was kicking up mud and swerving and getting stuck and I was talking to her on the phone making sure she was okay and then you can see the relief on my face when I make it and then I see that she made it. I tell you I will camp on the beach again because I love it but I will never ever do it again without consulting a tide table. Okay I've saved the three craziest ones for last. Last year I was camping in Wyoming at a National Forest campground and I went outside at night and turned on my lights and somebody fired a gun and it sounded like they fired it right over my head. Something a little bit crazy happened to me recently while I was camping so I was going down my steps and I turned on my porch light and immediately two gunshots rang out that sounded like they went right over my head. It was the loudest shot that I've ever heard outside of a gun range in my life so I knew that it was very close by to me definitely in the campground so you guys can imagine. I turned off the lights and I jumped back inside and stood there in the dark and I was thinking okay well somebody in here shooting a gun I don't hear a party I don't hear anybody that's drunk and it definitely seemed like it happened because I turned on the light and then I thought well that's nuts why would somebody do that and then another shot rang out and you guys I'm telling you it sounded like it was outside my door so after the Starlink was booted up I tried to call 911 it wouldn't go through so I tried to call the local phone number for the police department in Jackson and they were closed so I called the local sheriff and this lady answered and she was great and she said look it's Lincoln County that I need to call but I'm gonna call them for you so they'll come out and then a few minutes later like the whole Jackson Police Department came into my camp ground I think there were like eight cops that came in total and there were people in the woods next to me with flashlights and I thought oh my god something really happened I don't know what's going on I can't see anything but then more cops come down right next to me and then a sheriff pulls up right next to my camper and looks up like is she in there and so I put on a hat and I came outside and I said hi do you need to talk to me and he goes are you Robin and I said yeah and he said look we don't usually like to alert other people about who called but as soon as we came in the campground other campers were running out at the police cars to wave us down to tell us somebody was shooting a gun in here but we're pretty sure it was the people right next to you my partner is over there now we're familiar with them they work in town and then the cop said well here's the problem if nobody can tell us for sure it was them we can't ask them to leave and then he just looked at me and I said well normally I would leave I would have been out of here the problem is that I am tethered to this Starlink that literally the cord goes out of the back of my car and through the woods and I didn't get a shot of that at this spot but here's a shot of what the Starlink normally looks like away from the car so it's not like I could just jump in the driver's seat and go I was standing with three cops at my campsite at 12 30 in the morning and that's when I explained that when I first went out it kind of felt like I turned on my porch light and that's when the shots were fired and the cop looked at me and went so by this point I had a pretty good idea what the cops were thinking about the people next to me and then they looked at me and said would you like to go and I said yes I would definitely like to go I just need to pack up my stuff everything was good they were great I was going to leave those neighbors and all of us pulled out of my campsite and then when we started to get towards the entrance I was like I have no idea where I'm going I don't know if I should turn left or turn right so I pulled over near the entrance to the campground just to check my map and then you know all the cops went by and as they did I I waved at them and luckily on my own travel map I had a scenic overlook about an hour and a half down the road so I turned that way I went there and then I woke up there the next morning and was glad that I had left that spot and look I don't normally camp really close to a town and this time I broke my rule because it was fall and some of the national forest campgrounds don't charge a fee then and so I just wanted a campground hop and get to know the area better but because it was free there were some other people there that I probably didn't want to camp next to and I won't do that again the next one was pretty scary I wrote out a bomb cyclone in my RV in Colorado in March now I wouldn't normally be in Colorado in March but somebody in my family had a medical emergency and so I drove that way while the weather was just fine but then it changed and there was no outrunning this storm because it went across eight states so I got a spot at a state park campground and hunkered down the wind speed was over 95 miles an hour there were semis that flipped on the road just below us and I did sustain some damage this is gonna be the worst blizzard to hit Colorado in 20 years I mean I could barely get here the wind was so bad and then once I was here there was no leaving this storm was coming in I'm here and I'm happy to be here and I think it's gonna be just fine right now is when it's gonna get really bad it is definitely blowing and I am shaking and it's a blizzard I think right now it's about 40 miles an hour the wind but it's gonna be getting up so fingers crossed everything's gonna be okay and everyone in here is gonna be okay okay guys it's getting bad in here I've been watching the news coverage I still have a TV it's not good it looks like I'm gonna hit some wind in the 90s I bet he's so glad to be parked oh my god crazy holy cow I almost couldn't shut the door to get back in here so they're moving RVs that are facing the wrong direction because there's danger of them blowing over and the highway is closed I can't believe I just saw another RV pulling in here it is no joke out there and I'm gonna crank the heat in here even if I have to put on shorts and a tank top because I think we might lose power oh that's not good you guys it's actually gonna be turning pink which means the speed is getting up over 95 here this afternoon so keep your fingers crossed for me and everybody else that's here wow the TV stations are knocked out and there are a lot of people in town that don't have any power oh oh my god oh my god oh shit you guys I might blow over oh my god so seriously I can my right tires are being lifted up off the ground my like my right back tire and then I get dropped back down and then I rock you guys I can't get the radar up anymore I know this isn't the worst of it it's gonna get worse for two more hours and it's not stopping till tomorrow morning oh shit so fun and games until somebody gets blown over right I'm literally hiding out in the men's bathroom at Cheyenne Mountain State Park so here's what happened I was being lifted off the ground so I called the ranger station and I said hey things are getting pretty nasty out here is this about the wind speed where you see our views flip and they said yeah they said if you feel better just come down to the visitor center and hang out it's open till four it was getting better and I thought you know there's a fire place there just grab your stuff I've got a car it's right up the it's right up the road at least there was a visitor center right up the road so I opened up the door to my RV to get the car and my RV door blew backwards and broke and I almost couldn't get it shut both hands sliding backwards on the ice and I was sliding all over the place and I thought this is the dumbest thing I've ever done so I turned around to come back up to this bathroom and I parked and I opened up the door to the car that I borrowed and it blew off the hinges it's bad I've got about four hours to write out inside of this bathroom before I can go back to my RV I definitely moved about three feet the car that I borrowed the door blew backwards and the actual metal hinges were half-pride off the frame of the car so I have to get that fixed all in all it's okay everybody here was okay and I'm okay I've no idea where I'm going because the weather as you can see changes here like every 20 minutes and I have to find a window to get over a mountain pass in happier news uh Kahlua check coffee check and pretty soon there'll be some whipped cream on this bad boy oh yeah in an RV you can be at the mercy of the elements but I never expected anything like this the last one is seriously embarrassing and it's the most terrifying experience I've ever had in my life I was brand new on the road and I was leaving Colorado to drive to Arizona for the winter and I had to go over my first mountain pass while it was beautiful weather until I got to the pass and then it got suddenly fogged in and I got a little freaked out and I decided to pull over and put on some warmer clothes and then check out the weather and check out the route again so I could calm down for a minute before I kept driving and that's where everything went terribly wrong because I was still pretty new in the RV I think I've been in the RV maybe for months and I didn't know if I was coming up on some windy roads or some ice and I got really nervous and I decided to pull over I was wearing shorts so the first thing I wanted to do was change because it got cold and then I was going to pull up on the internet the weather report and see if I could get some idea of how hairy this pass was so you know I stopped the car and I ran into the back and I was literally changing my pants and the whole RV started to go like this and I thought wow there really is a storm coming in that that's a big gust of wind but then I realized that the whole RV was rocking and I turned to look out the front windshield and my RV was going downhill with me in the back not in the driver's seat and um you know not very fast but remember I'm totally fogged in as far as I know I am literally driving off a cliff right here so quick like a bunny I ran downhill and jumped into the driver's seat and threw my feet on the brake and I realized that the keys were still in ignition and I had not quite put the car in park now I know stupid but believe me I've never made that mistake again my fingers were shaking so bad I could barely hold the steering wheel and I threw the car into reverse and I was able to reverse it back up the hill when I came back and it was sunny I realized that I would have gone down the hill into a parking lot but I couldn't even see that parking lot and so honestly it was terrifying I thought that was the end um believe me I've never made that mistake again now even when I'm just in a car and people make fun of me for this I double checked that it's in park and I put on the emergency brake every single time and this is almost six years later when I look back at these stories some of them are a little bit crazy but it's better than sitting on the couch and I doing nothing so yeah RV life sometimes means that you need to deal with bad roads and bad weather and constant repairs but it also means that you get an adventure I mean in what other life could you be in high tide on a beach one month and battling a bomb cyclone the next or thinking that your campground is being invaded by space aliens only this one and I love it now it's your turn everybody else if you have a crazy story that you want to share please put it in the comments below I would love to hear about it if you haven't subscribed already please consider doing so and I'll see you all again next week until then everybody out there have happy travels and be free