One Year Review of our 2018 Roadtrek Zion Campervan

It's a rare nice weekend in January and we're heading up to the Whistler area to do our one-year review of our 2018 Roadtrek Zion. We'll be staying at the Whistler RV Park and Campground for one night. Probably some snow there. It's very mild here today. It was 12, 13 degrees. It's sunny, so very pleasant. A little cooler here as we head towards Whistler and the RV Park we're staying at is a private site so we'll be hooked up and plugged into electric for that weekend. This fellow's been here for a little while I think. There we are. The first spot when we arrived hadn't been shoveled out at the front so it was going to be a bit problematic with our clearance. I did some shoveling and we were able to instead move. The spot next to us was another one we could have taken. It's a little loud. You can hear the highway but later on that will be fine. And Dandy Velcro. It's cold. He's not wearing gloves or wearing his snow boots. There we go, hooked up. You can tell when it's working when you can see the red light coming through. There's a couple of minutes when you plug in the EMS. It takes about two minutes before it will actually allow power to come through as it checks the system. We're just exploring the campground. There's a lot of people. There's a lot of RVs here, surprisingly, but I guess it's more people are here to ski. Yeah, quite a few. I'd say at least this section, almost every site's full. People skiing, snowmobiling too because there's a snowmobile area not very far. We could hear them a little while ago and a snowmobile came through here a few minutes ago. I guess he was riding on the side here. The washroom and shower building here is closed. There should be another one a little further down. All the washrooms on this end appear to be closed so I think maybe there's only washrooms in the, hopefully, near the gatehouse that's open. I think I have a couple of buckets because we're still winterized, of course. Yeah, well, we can use our RV antifreeze. Luckily, Gordon picked some up in Squamish. For the black camping, we have to, but we'd rather not because then we'll have to dump it at some point and we'd rather not do that. Sinks for the campers. This whole area behind me and on the other side of this building, the washroom building, is actually a campsite for folks in the summer. This is the washroom and shower building. Since nobody's here, I'm going to take advantage and show you around. Nice vanity there. Nice and clean. View. Three washroom stalls. And two showers. This one's the bigger one. We're going to get organized and settle in and have some dinner. We've already started to put some insulation in the windows, but we've actually got the fire going. That'll give us a fair amount of heat for the rest of the evening, I think. Hi, everyone. I'm Mickey. And I'm Gordon. And if you can see just up to the, my right is actually Precious, our 22 and a half year old cat. And this is going to be our one year review of our 2018 Roadtrek Zion. So it's actually been one year since we bought the van. It was in January 2018 that we bought it. Yeah, we actually ordered it in October of the previous year, so October 2017. And it's actually a 2018 Roadtrek Zion, and that's on a 2017 Dodge ProMaster chassis. And as Mickey said, we actually got the vehicle in January of 2018, and then have been on a number of trips since then. We're going to actually split this video up into several sections. First we'll be talking a little bit about the technical side, so the van, any issues that we've had. Then we'll talk a little bit about the experiences we've had owning the van, traveling, and using the van. And then we'll just close with some kind of concluding comments and thoughts about what we're looking to do in the future with the van, and also with some of our videos. So hopefully you'll find this all interesting, and we look forward to your questions and comments that may result after that. And we just want to note also that we have done some review videos in the past. So six weeks after we got the van, we did our first review, and you can find that online. And we went a little bit more detailed in there. It's actually our very first video, so it's going to be a little bit jumpy in some places. I apologize for that. But we went through kind of everything in the van, from standing in the shower, showing how much room there is, to trying to sleep on the bed. So if you're looking for those kind of details, that's there. And then we did a six-month review in the summer. That actually gives us a little bit of that, and also just a little bit of our experiences up to the six-month point. So you might want to look at both of those. We've had the van now for exactly one year. And in that time, we've actually driven it 18,000 kilometers. During that time, it's been fairly reliable. We've had three issues, actually. One was our ABS module. So if you look at our last video, we talk about the fact that as we were leaving for our trip, our ABS module went, and it impacted a number of different systems. And we've taken that into the Dodge dealer, and it took them basically almost a week to get it finally resolved. Hopefully, that will be the last issue we'll have with the ProMaster. Generally, we found the Dodge ProMaster van to be very reliable. The other two issues were actually related to the coach side, so the road-trek side. And one was with regard to our gray tank. And we were finding that our gray tank was filling up quite quickly. We'd have literally a couple of really quick showers and do a little bit of dishwashing, and the gray tank was full. So I measured it, and we were only getting about 15 US gallons in volume in the gray tank. Zion's supposed to have 23. Now, this seems to be a common complaint with the Zion. So we took it into the road-trek dealer, and they did a vent kit fix. We don't know how much of that capacity that we hope to have we'll gain back. I'm not sure we'll get the full difference, but hopefully, we'll get a bit more, and we'll find out once we de-winterize, because currently, we're winterized, and so I wasn't able to measure the volume of the gray tank. The other issue is actually related to one of our lithium batteries. Now, we had the lithium battery fail once. We were actually on a trip, and it failed in the middle of the night. Not a big deal, because we only use one battery at a time. So we turned on the other battery, and we're able to continue on with our trip. We then took it into the road-trek dealer, and they took a look at it and did some tweaking, and it seemed to work fine. That worked well for three or four weeks, and then the battery started to fail intermittently. So we ended up going back to the dealership, and ultimately, they ended up replacing that one lithium battery with a new one that seems to be working well so far. Now, I will say that in our discussions about our issues with road-trek itself has been very responsive. Usually, I just send them an email, and they come back with a response, and then they've worked really well with the dealership to coordinate and try and fix any of the issues we've had. And if I have any sort of caveat, our dealer is actually very helpful. The only challenge is that getting in is usually a four to five week waiting time to get them to take a look at the van. So hopefully, if we had something that was really significant, they could do it sooner, but generally, there's a bit of a month or a month and a week wait before we can take it in. Good morning. This is, we've had one night here at Whistler, and we'll show you some scenes from sunrise this morning outside of our window, actually, and just behind our van, just gorgeous. Carrying on with our review, we thought we'd talk a little bit about our experiences in the van and some of our traveling overall. So one of the great things about having a camper van is it allows us to really get outside a lot. And we do travel so much more than we used to do, and we enjoy the great outdoors. Yeah, it's actually quite easy to just simply pack up and go. You know, Roadtrek on their website has this picture of this couple that are sitting around their house and just kind of reading a book and kind of looking a little maybe bored, and then they look at each other and run out and get in their camper van and scoot off for an overnight trip somewhere. And we actually do a lot of that. We are part-timers, so we do a lot of trips anywhere from one night to sort of six, depending on the time we have. And one night, to be honest, is nice, like that's all we're doing here, and it's great to be here, but one night's a little short for us, but two or three can be a lot of fun in the van. Camper van's just easy. There's no fuss, no muss. You just pull in and park. You can stop in places on the way, and so it works out really well. The one night thing is great. It's because we don't have to take a lot of stuff, and so packing is easy, you know, just throwing a bunch of food, and what we're going to try to do now is keep a few more clothes in the van permanently so that we don't have to carry a lot of things back and forth between the house and the van. Yeah, I think some of our most complicated packing is simply for our cat, Precious, because she requires certain medicines, so we just have to make sure that we don't forget that, and then of course we're always trying to keep the van warm enough for her. But generally, we've been very happy with it, and as far as using the coach itself, making a chat a little bit about the fridge and stove. The kitchen itself is great. Again, it's a very small space, so we really have to use it wisely, put everything away as soon as we use it, and try to have things that serve more than one purpose. But yeah, the stove works really well, the propane stove, two burners, and when we're winterized, we don't use it as much, and when we're plugged in, we can actually use the microwave, which is great. Which kind of surprised me, because I didn't think we would actually... By the way, you might hear a snowmobile going by outside. I was surprised that we used the microwave. I hadn't envisioned... I thought we'd end up using it for storage, but we do use it primarily just to heat up things quickly, and that's what the microwave's for. And we actually really like the fridge at the level that it's in. It's a higher fridge, so we don't have to squat down to reach for our food in the fridge, which we find really useful, actually. And the pantry, the slide-out pantry is really handy. It's great. We really like that. Yeah, we keep a lot of non-perishables in there, actually permanently, so we don't have to carry it back and forth again. Nice cupboards underneath the sink and the stove. Plenty of room for a frying pan, a pot, and glasses, mugs, plates, and things like that. So there's plenty of room. I don't think that we really need any more room for kitchen items. Maybe a wine rack. For Mickey, not for me. Yeah, not for me. For me. The stove has been very effective for us. The fridge, as Mickey said, just having it up high. The size of it's nice, too. We could certainly do... There's only two of us, so we could have a smaller fridge, but the size of the fridge in the Zion is quite large, bigger than most Class Bs. And we really appreciate, at least Class Bs in the price range of the Zion, and we really like it. The rest of the van, actually, has been fairly good. I mean, as Mickey said, the storage has been more than adequate for us. We could probably have, actually, the Zion SRT, and for the two of us, we'd be fine. But we really like the sofa layout that we have, too, because we put a lot of things back here. There's mats stored back there behind the sofa. Our electrical cords are stowed back all there. So it works out really well. If we had the side sofas, which also could work reasonably well, we'd just lose that back sofa storage. So for us, that's actually worked out to be really effective. There's like a trunk, almost. You know, in this format of the Zion, we have a little bit of a separation between sort of the trunk storage space and the living space, which I really like. And all the stuff that we don't really need to use when we're inside the van, back there. And we don't have to look at it. You have to be careful, though, because the sofa's sliding in and out. One of my hiking poles I left back there, and unfortunately, it wasn't quite positioned. And when we put the sofa out, it snapped off the end of the hiking pole. So it's a fairly strong mechanism back there, which is a good thing. Just don't leave anything that you might want to have potentially damaged by it there. Well, Gordon benefited anyway, because he got new hiking poles for Christmas. I got new hiking poles. And these ones were old. I'd probably had them for almost 15 years. So black diamond hiking poles, they're great. They last a long time. Yeah, the adjustable ones. Yeah, so as far as the coach itself, we found it very useful. And the furnace is very effective. The furnace will warm the coach up. It is a little bit loud. We're pretty well off-grid, except in wintertime. And right now, we've got a plug-in, so we've got the electric fan that's running. We were actually almost too warm last night. I had to come down. I had to adjust the temperature down. We keep it warmer than we would if it was just the two of us, because we have our elderly cat with us. So we try and keep the van a little bit warmer. But when we've snow camped, and I've had the temperature in here, we've just kept it at like 8 degrees Celsius, and so the furnace doesn't run that often. But the van itself, the coach is drafty. It warms up, and it cools down really quickly. And you note, for example, when our electric fan turns off, it'll reach a certain temperature, and then it'll turn off. And the temperature that it comes back on again is like 5 degrees Celsius cooler. And that's only in a minute or two minutes. The benefit of having the side door, you get the wonderful experience in the summer. We've actually had a couple of times when we've opened our back door and have just really enjoyed the view. The negative side of that is when it's cold, those are areas where it's drafty, and it's hard to... I mean, you'll see in some of our other videos, we've done things to mitigate it, and it's fine, but it's a bit of a challenge. I think that's probably one of the only things that we dislike about the van, is the temperature. And I know you probably have heard us talk about it endlessly in our other videos, how to keep the van warm. So definitely an improvement would be to add more insulation to the van. As far as sleeping, we typically will put the full bed out. And again, if you look at our, I think it was our initial video that we did of the van, our detailed review back in February of 2018, we showed the... It's bigger than a king size bed, if you want to set it out completely. We tend to do that, and then Precious sleeps off in the corner. But I've also been in the van by myself, where I've just used the single bed on the side, and I've been snow camping with a good friend of mine, and we've used single beds on the side, and it works very well. If I have any kind of a criticism about the sleeping is that because of the cool that comes in from the back door, it can get kind of cold underneath the bed. So some people might benefit from more of a car topper, or if you're sleeping in a warm sleeping bag or something, you'd never notice it, so it wouldn't be an issue. I think it also depends on which way you sleep as well. And because we have Precious here sleeping in the corner, we tend to sleep side to side. I'm 5'10", and it's fine, but I don't think I could be much taller and sleep that way. I could also sleep in line with the van if you wish, and that would give you actually more room. I think I could probably be 6'4", and still have enough room to sleep. So that's, again, as Mickey said, it depends on the sleeping angle and what you choose. One of the less positive aspects of the Roadtrek Zion is it doesn't have a fixed seating area. Now you could have that, but then you'll end up usually with a smaller bathroom or less other living space. So everything in a Class B is a trade-off. In the summertime, in the nice weather, we're eating outside, so it really doesn't matter. We're cooking outside. You could certainly also turn your front seats around and sit in them if you wished. We were joking this morning because we had breakfast in bed, and it was in part because the bed was fully made, and it was just easier to make some breakfast and then sit in bed and eat it. So kind of a luxury thing, if you will. One of the mods that we'll probably look at making is someone produces a swivel table so we can put it on and it'll slide out of the way. And I think the other thing that we're really interested in is the Sumo shocks, and we've seen other YouTubers install that, and it seems to work really well for them. Yeah, the Sumo shocks are an option, and a lot of people with Class Bs have put them on. I'm actually surprised that they're just not a standard item now. From what we've seen, they do really two things. They give you a little bit higher clearance. I think they raise your van up probably about an inch, which is helpful because clearance is sort of a... I wouldn't call it an issue, but it's very limited on the van. And then they just simply give you a smoother ride. Now, to be clear, we haven't had any concerns or issues in driving our van. We've taken it down some pretty bumpy roads, and it's gone well, but it would bump less with these shocks on, and I think it would just handle a little bit better. So that's something that we're looking at adding. And the other thing I think is, again, going back to insulating and warmth, it would be great if we could add a little bit more insulation to some of the cold spots in the van. But I don't even think it's that much necessarily the insulation. I think it's just the design of the van. You've got those back doors, and you've got a frame, and the same on the side door, and they're just not the same as a nice side wall. So there's always going to be a limit. It's just one of the, again, compromises that you'll have in a Class B. But it would be nice if we could make it just a little bit better insulated. In fairness, we've never had any issue in heat. We're always cautious. We generally try and park the van in shade. A couple of times we've turned on the air conditioner just to cool it down a bit, but opening the windows, having the side door open, we've never had an issue. We've actually maintained a pretty decent temperature. It's been warm, but it hasn't been unbearable or dangerous for our cat. We're always very careful that way. And again, we haven't really been anywhere really hot and humid or in the desert yet. So I guess we'll have to wait and see how that goes. I mean, when we talk about our temperatures here in BC, we've been up to maybe 30, 33 degrees, which is still, it's very warm, but it's bearable. And our humidity here typically is very low. So Western Canada is not typically a big issue. Not like if we were down in Arizona or something along that line in the middle of May or June. So really those are the only things that we would consider doing to this van. Generally we're really happy with it. You know, the coach itself is decent enough size for the two of us. Now we're average sized people. When we've looked at some of the other vans, like I think if you look at the Hymer Actif, which is a van that I really like, one of the things that I don't like as much about the Actif is the aisle way. I think the aisle is only about, I think it's 18 inches wide and we're in our narrowest point, I think closer to 28. So it's even us getting past each other. I think some people refer to it as the road trek shuffle. Even getting past each other, you know, we can do it, but we have to definitely just be cautious about it. So the size is fine. I wouldn't want to be in a class B, I think of any type, if you were somewhere in the middle of November and it was raining for a week and it wasn't an area you could get out in. I think their class B's are great for limited time inside and enjoying the outside. But they get a little bit close, at least for me, with two people. With one, quite a bit different. I know when I was on that one trip by myself, one plus cat, it felt a lot roomier and that's just the nature of the class B van. It's been, as Mickey talked about, a great addition because it's just two things. Just lots of times like this. We can come out for a trip and it doesn't have to be a lot of effort. You can just literally bring a few things, get in your van, drive, park, stop at a vineyard on the way, park in the same parking spot as everyone else generally, and get out. It's just nice to be able to do that and when we come back from a trip, and as you know, we like to do a lot of hiking and stuff, and it's just nice to come back and be able to stay in a more comfortable, have a shower possibly, although typically we use the camping facilities if we're at a campground, but it's just been very positive. The other thing, I think, is that it kind of slows us down and you'll see that in some of our other videos where some roads that we've driven on and we've made it in three and a half hours, I've actually probably taken some pride that we made the trip in three and a half hours. Now it takes us five or six, but that's because we stop. We stop in part just to let our cat get out and use our litter box, in part because we stop and we get out and we walk around and look and maybe pull over, or pull over and have lunch somewhere along a river, and we didn't usually do that. We just, see how fast we, it's not that we're timing ourselves, it just allows you to slow down and enjoy things a little bit more. Yes. So a lot of people get an RV and like to travel in an RV because they want to travel with their pets and we have a cat, Precious, and she's an Olfa cat as many of you know, and our experience has generally been really positive traveling with her. I think there's a little bit of limited space. We have a litter box in the bathroom, so if we want to use it, we kind of have to climb around it or take it out. To shower, we have to definitely take out the litter box from the washroom, but other than that, Precious seems to be perfectly happy traveling. Actually, sometimes I think she's happier in the van than at home because she gets to spend more time with us in close quarters. One of the reasons we chose some of the technology that comes with Roadtrek, the underhood generator, the lithium batteries, is so that we'd just feel a little bit more comfortable with traveling with a pet, so we know that when we leave, our air conditioning system can run probably for a few hours if it was really warm, and then we also have the underhood generator which could kick on and recharge the batteries, but we're still, that's comforting, but we don't usually run any risks. We wouldn't leave for a long period of time if the weather was extreme because we'd be concerned that maybe the technology would fail, but that was one of the major, I think one of the major items when we were looking at purchasing a Class B was the type of technology so that we'd feel a little bit more comfortable in traveling with a pet, whether it's Precious or whether we have another pet at some point in the future, we just wanted to be more comfortable. But we're looking at, over the course of the next year, we're looking at some different trips, whether we just move down across Canada into, that may possibly be the prairies, and then of course we've also got Pacific Northwest, the whole Oregon side, and then going down to the American Southwest, Arizona. I mean, for me personally, I'm really tempted for us to, during the summer, to look for an opportunity to move and try driving a little bit farther north, northern British Columbia, maybe heading up into the Yukon, Whitehorse area, I think that would be gorgeous. Yeah, there's so many places to go, so little time. So those are things that we're looking at for the next year, and one of the things that we're considering doing is actually a video, too, of maybe our top five trips in the last year. So let us know in the comments if that would be of interest to people. We could do a 20-minute video just showing people of all the different trips, if you've got some snippets, and talk about maybe the top five, what we liked and what we'd like to do again. Yeah, and I think our trips were mainly B.C. this time, except for that one trip across the provincial border to Banff, but other than that, everything, all our trips have been in B.C., and mostly in the southwest, although we did go a little bit on the southeast side as well, and Vancouver Island. But there's still a lot more to explore. We also have an email address, which is hykenrv at gmail dot com. So hyken, no apostrophe, rv at gmail dot com, so we're happy to answer individual questions if you have something. We just want to finish off and thank everybody, all the people who watch our videos, and also the people who subscribed. Thanks for the comments and questions, we really appreciate them. We actually enjoy doing the videos, and we enjoy sharing all the places that we get to go to. So if you haven't looked at all the previous videos, we encourage you to do so, and we look forward to being able to produce some more that we can share in the future.