Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Deciding on a Camper

About 6 months ago, we were living in Denver and had recently paid off all of our debt. On our way home from the zoo we were discussing our memories of camping with our frirends and how uncomfortable it was to sleep in the back of the car, but we had an amazing time and wish we could do it more often. On a whim, we decided to stop at an RV dealer we had just driven past. We learned a lot of valuable information that day: what our tow capacity is on our Toyota 4Runner, how far campers have come, How light they could be and how much fun we could have in one. Possibilities were abounding and I set to work researching travel trailers. We also knew we had a PCS move coming up to Twentynine Palms, CA and it didn’t take much to find out that the waiting list for housing was pretty substantial. Knowing these two tidbits, we began our search not only for a fun recreational vehicle that would provide our son and future child years of memorable family trips, but for a camper we could potentially live in.
We looked and looked at travel trailer dealers from Denver to Fort Collins. One of the first campers we saw was at Trailer World on Colfax. It was the Flagstaff Microlight 23LB. The weight was within our limits, but I was rather afraid it would be too big. There was a smaller version available, but it wasn’t that much smaller and we would have to order it. This model had bunk beds, an actual bath tub and a queen sized murphy bed that folded down over a couch. We fell in love. We kept looking, but we compared every camper we saw to this particular model. It was our dream camper if there ever was one! The dealer said we could “test drive” it if we were concerned about the size. After we had a tow hitch installed on our vehicle, we took the camper out for a test run up some pretty good hills in Denver and it handled it pretty well! The deal was sealed, we secured financing for our new home on wheels and the rest is history…which is what you will be reading about here. :)