{"id":209,"date":"2011-12-14T07:06:44","date_gmt":"2011-12-14T12:06:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/?page_id=209"},"modified":"2011-12-14T08:28:30","modified_gmt":"2011-12-14T13:28:30","slug":"searching-for-a-used-fifth-wheel","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ourwanderyears.com\/blog\/searching-for-a-used-fifth-wheel\/","title":{"rendered":"Searching for a Used Fifth Wheel"},"content":{"rendered":"

With our fifth wheel specs in hand (see “The RV Takes Shape”)<\/a>, it was time to search in earnest for one to call our own. An obvious starting point was Google, but a search for “Used Fifth Wheel” returns over 15 million results. Maybe once I am retired I will have time to look through 15,000,000 web pages, but until then I need to narrow my search. The very first result was for www.usedfifthwheel.com<\/a> which sounded promising. But the site offers only one option for narrowing my search: price. A search for 5th wheels in the $25,000-to-$50,000 range returned only 7 RVs, none in New England. Not very useful.<\/p>\n

The remaining offerings on the first Google results page were similarly unhelpful. Some were for remote dealerships (do I really care if there is an appealing RV for sale in Tyler, TX?), others were for sites that talked about used fifth wheels in general, and a few were for specific RVs for private sale in places I didn’t want to visit, even when I get an RV.\u00a0 Bad floorplan. Too small.\u00a0 Too expensive.\u00a0 Too old.\u00a0 A lot of time spent unproductively.<\/p>\n

I decided that it might be more productive to search for specific models. I found a site that is very helpful for picking out models that meet our specific needs: www.rvguide.com<\/a>. The search screen allowed me to narrow the search down to fifth wheels. Unfortunately, it also forced me to pick a manufacturer, a model and a year. This is where I discovered just how many different models of used fifth wheels exist. The point was driven home because I had to re-enter my choices – fifth wheel, manufacturer, year, model – for each model I wanted to view. The payoff from all this tedium was a floorplan of each. I picked out 2009 as a model year of interest because a 2009 model would be new enough to have flat-screen TVs and old enough to be affordable. I could also look at only those models that were longer than 35 feet because shorter ones were very unlikely to have the bath-and-a-half that we required.<\/p>\n

I should point out that the web site did not allow me to specify a length, but almost every manufacturer has model numbers that reflect either the length or the square footage, which is a good proxy for length.<\/p>\n

A few hours of this yielded a very short list of candidates:<\/p>\n