I bought my first class A last year from a private party in Florida, I flew down there from Louisiana and drove it back home over the next few days (a bit over 1,000 miles). The lessons I learned from this are to take your time, get to know the vehicle, and take time to rest.
Most of the issues I had were a result of not following the above suggestions, I left my house at 2 amp to drive to the local airport (70 miles away), got on a plane before sunrise (changing planes in Atlanta, then flying into Orlando). The seller picked me up at the airport in Orlando, and drove me to his house where the motorhome was parked about an hours drive away, at this point it was nearly 3 pm local time, I had been up for 12-13 hours, running on little sleep, etc. So as you might imagine, I was not in the mood to do as detailed of an inspection as I probably should have, I just wanted to get the transaction over and get to a place to spend the night. Thankfully this did not come back to bite me. After getting done with the paperwork, and orientation from the seller , I made a quick stop at the local Wal-Mart for essential supplies for the night (sheet, pillow, sandwich fixings) and headed towards my intended first nights stop. Here is where I begin to find issues that will be annoyances on the drive home, there were 3 of them that I discovered that first day: The backup camera lens had moisture in it so was useless, the passenger side window mount was loose so it shook going down the road to the point of being useless, and the headlight hi/low beam switch was stuck on low beam. These 3 things caused repeated annoyances for the rest of the drive home, but I made it ok, I just wish I had been able to take the little bit of time to address them before I started the long drive home.
