Flip This Camper #005: Jacked Up in Carolina
- Trail South
- May 23
- 2 min read
Location: North Carolina
Vibe: Muddy. Dangerous. DIY or DIE.
They don’t tell you this when you buy a fifth wheel from an auction site:
You are completely on your own when it comes to:
Hooking it up
Lifting it up
Figuring out how not to die
There’s no staff. No instruction manual. No friendly “you got this, bro” from the shadows.
It’s just you. A 15,000-pound fifth wheel. And a scrapyard that looks like Mad Max meets a tetanus convention.
I drove all the way from Alabama to North Carolina for this rig. Photos looked decent. It was listed as “good condition.”
So when I roll up and see the front of the camper sitting on the actual ground, I’m thinking:
“Huh. That’s… not in the pictures.”
Turns out, one of the jacks broke during a storm the day before. Which meant the entire nose was buried in mud like a depressed wooly mammoth.
Here’s what happened next:
I pull out 3 car jacks.
I grab 4 sketchy plywood scraps.
I spend two hours sweating, swearing, and trying not to get crushed by a rolling death box.
Every crank of the jack felt like the trailer wanted to lunge at me. Every moment was one plywood slip away from a final destination sequel.
And did I mention…?
I was alone.
Like, fully alone. Just me. Kala. And the unmistakable feeling that no one was gonna find my body if this went wrong.
But somehow, some way… I got it up.
The camper lifted. The truck slid under. And I hitched that sucker like I’d done it 1,000 times.
Kala hopped in like, “Yeah, that was a lot, bro.”
We pulled out of that yard — dirty, victorious, and only mostly traumatized.
Moral of the Story: RV auctions don’t give you instructions. They just give you gravity and pray you figure it out. But if you’re patient, cautious, and mildly unhinged — you might just drive away with a steal.
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💬 Got a rig that tried to kill you?
Tell us. If you lived to type it, you’re part of the club.
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