Our Motorhome was Destroyed

February 26th through March 2nd, 2023

We left Las Cruces, New Mexico, in our 2019 Newmar Dutch Star 4369. Life was amazing, and we were blissfully happy. There was some wind in the forecast, but nothing we were too worried about. It was a drive from Las Cruces to Carlsbad, and it's almost always windy. It's western Texas, after all.

We drove a couple hours, intending on stopping at Guadalupe Mountains National Park. It was on the way, and they had RV parking. The wind had picked up as we left a wide plain and headed up into a relatively narrow mountain range. We parked in the RV lot near the highway, in view of the pass we just came up. There were no other RVs or cars around us, and we parked the car and boat nearby but not immediately next to us. We left the dog, Lacey, in the motorhome and went into the visitor center for the park.

Margot went back to the RV to retrieve her forgotten phone. It was getting very, very windy at that point. We could see the mountains around us when we first got there, but visibility was decreasing quickly. You could barely see the mountains.

All of the cell phones in the visitor center went off at nearly the same time with weather notifications warning about high winds in the area. The wind whistled through the windows and doors of the visitor center, and we sat down inside to wait it out. We weren't worried about Lacey -- we knew the motorhome would likely rock back and forth a bit, but she's been in windy conditions before and she does well.

About 5 minutes after we sat down, a parks worker came in and said "whoever owns the RV, it went over." We had no idea what "went over" meant, but we both assumed the brakes had failed and it had gone into a ditch. We went outside and fought the winds, hurrying to where our RV was parked. Well, where it was parked when we left it.

It had actually blown over on its side! It weighed 47,000 pounds -- almost 24 tons. And the wind blew it over. We were both in shock (and we still are), and a parks ranger parked his truck next to the motor home (the roof) so he could jump to the top. Luckily, it blew over so the one and only door was at the top. He got inside and retrieved Lacey. She was uninjured and seemed a bit scared, but she calmed down as soon as she was with us. The car and boat were fine, so we put her in the car out of the wind.

You could barely stand up. Margot and the ranger climbed down into the coach, walking on the driver's side walls to retrieve as much of value as they could. They could only get as far as the refrigerator. They were able to grab all of our electronics near the front, and it seemed that only the NAS enclosure was broken. All laptops, tablets, and screens survived. Monica had her work laptop.

From what we could see, the passenger-side slide had collapsed a bit into the coach, like a drawer going too far into a dresser. A lot of the furniture that was "permanently" attached to the walls and floor had come away from the walls and floor, and everything was jumbled. The wind was blowing hard, the temperatures were falling, and the only clothing we had was what we were wearing. Margot stood in shorts and a t-shirt next to park rangers in parkas and hats. We left the site in a few hours with everything of value that we could retrieve. The rangers put everything from our little Swivelwheel trailer into their truck -- it looked like everything survived, though a bin filled with life jackets was nowhere to be found.

The Guadalupe Mountains are two hours from El Paso to the west and one hour from Carlsbad to the east. We decided to stay in Carlsbad so we could get back to the coach quickly. When we got to Carlsbad, we stopped at Walmart to buy clothes, toothbrushes, shampoo, and everything else we needed (it ended up being quite a lot). We ended up at a hotel, exhausted and stressed out.

We couldn't get it towed for a couple days because the winds were still too strong. We spent the next day renting a U-Haul and spending a lot of time on the phone with insurance and towing companies. We set up a tow for the next morning at 9AM, to take it to a shop in El Paso. Unfortunately, the park also set up a tow for the same timeframe and didn't tell anyone (including their coworkers). That would end up making the towing day even more stressful than the first day.

We planned on getting to the RV at 8:30AM to take the cellular antenna off of the roof, and we got a phone call from the park at 8AM telling us the towing company was already there. We missed seeing it tip over, and we missed seeing it righted again. We also had to wait and get on the roof later to get the antenna.

We were able to clear more things out of the RV while the towing company disconnected the drive shaft and put the front tires up on a big wrecker. The other wrecker (it took two of them to pull it back up on its tires) lifted our little trailer up off the ground. They left and said they'd meet us there, and we went to retrieve our bikes and the other things that were on the trailer. We started our two-hour drive to El Paso to the shop.

We were about 30 minutes from El Paso when we got a phone call from our towing company -- the one we arranged through our insurance company -- saying they were there and couldn't find the RV. The first company wasn't the right company, not the one we arranged, and things turned into a huge mess. Our motorhome had been towed to a shop in Van Horn, about two hours south of where it tipped over. We were almost two hours west where our hotel was waiting. The best-laid plans were destroyed.

We tried to get our RV towed to El Paso. The company that originally towed it said they wouldn't tow it again (it sounded like they were a bit over their capacity the day before). No one could tow it. Eventually, our insurance agreed to leave it in Van Horn. We left El Paso and headed to our third hotel in a week.

It took a long time to find everything and pack it all up once we got to our poor motorhome. The worst damage was in the back bathroom. The washer and dryer destroyed a wall and the shower glass when it tumbled into the shower, blocking our way. We had to move the dryer to get back there. The bedroom slide and large, driver's side slide still moved on their own, so we were able to expand things a bit to retrieve everything.

Everything in the basement survived. Nearly everything in the kitchen was destroyed. The bedroom was practically untouched (a pair of computer monitors flew through the air twice and survived!). We bagged everything up and tossed it into the U-Haul.

Bottom line, the three of us are physically fine and mentally improving every day.

Would we get another RV?

Yes, absolutely, this doesn't change anything as far as our plans go. A "sticks and bricks" house can catch fire or be destroyed by extreme weather. Living in a motorhome will allow us to escape a wildfire or tornado if we have enough time after the first warning, and you can't do that with a house. What happened was a freak accident, and we haven't met anyone who has heard of the same thing happening to something so big, so heavy, and parked.

What happened next?

We were lucky to have good friends with a house a short distance south of Tucson, so we took the U-Haul, car, and boat to stay with them for a bit. It was nice to have a friendly and comfortable place to collect our lives and figure out our next steps.

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