Red Tail Lodge Two
Introducing our new rig, Red Tail Lodge Two! It is a 2023 Winnebago EKKO. We are so excited about getting our new Class C RV ready for Season Five.
Why did we buy a new rig? Well, we were running out of space in our VanDOit camper van to put our national park stickers. Just kidding! The real reason comes down to us getting old.
Lifting 6 gallon jerry cans was difficult when Ann was having issues with a separated shoulder. Climbing up into bed was painful when she broke her tailbone last spring. We are both finding it harder to make it through the night without making a trip to the restroom… in the dark… in grizzly bear territory. We want to buy e-bikes, but we don’t feel comfortable carrying them on a bike rack outside of our van, both from a security point of view and protection from the weather. Having a comfortable place for both of us to sit with our feet propped up would be nice for times when we are confined inside for extended periods of time, like during all the rain of Alaska and when we were in isolation after coming down with COVID. We still love our camper van, but we were ready to have a little more room and creature comforts.
So why an EKKO? It has many of the features that we love about our VanDOit camper van, but has the added features we were hoping for. Both are built on a high roof Ford Transit chassis that we can stand up in. Both are small and nimble. Both are easy and quick to set up and pack up. Both have beds long enough for two six foot people to comfortably sleep in. Both have all the plumbing inside heated spaces so they can be used year round.
The footprint of the EKKO is just slightly larger than our camper van, but contains more in that compact space. It has a real bathroom, more storage room, a gear garage that can hold two bikes, larger gas tank, larger fresh water tank, and larger gray water tank. The beds are closer to the floor, making it easier to get in and out of along with enough headroom that we can sit up in bed.
We placed an order for an EKKO back in January of 2022 in hopes that it would be ready for us by Season Five in 2023. However, at the end of September, our dealer was telling us that our EKKO may not be ready until March or April of 2023. Since we wanted to start Season Five on March 1, 2023, that was going to mess up our plans. So we started monitoring a couple of Facebook groups for available EKKOs, both used from people who needed to sell and from dealers who had units on hand, perhaps from canceled orders. After a couple of attempts, we found a new EKKO at a dealer in California with options we were willing to accept. We jumped on it.
The same day the EKKO was posted on Facebook, we placed a deposit on it. It was a Thursday, and we were still on the road finishing up our Season Four travels. We scheduled a pick up time a week later on Friday. The week in between was a big blur and frenzy of activity. We started arranging for funds and car insurance while we were finishing the last three days of our Alaska trip. Then we were home for three days, doing laundry, catching up with our kids, arranging for an RV storage space, finalizing funds, buying bedding for the RV, making campground reservations for our drive out to California, skimming the EKKO and Ford Transit user manuals to familiarize ourselves with all their features, and packing the van back up.
We drove our Red Tail Lodge camper van to California to pick up our Red Tail Lodge Two RV and drove both of them back home. We took two days to drive out. After spending two nights in California, we took our time driving back, driving three days instead of two. We treated the trip back as our shake down trip, testing out all the systems of the RV, making sure everything was working properly.
Now comes the time to make the EKKO our own and get it ready for out Season Five travels in 2023. Don’t worry, this post was just an introduction. We’ll have more posts about our EKKO, including a detailed comparison between our EKKO and our VanDOit camper van. So stay tuned!
For details of the options and specifications of our EKKO, check out Our Rig page.
Check out our related video: Red Tail Lodge Two
(Ann)