Choosing a Camper

So after decades of talking about if we finally decided to get a camper. We had actually thought we may buy a cabin since we live in Alberta and could have found something in the foothills. But then I thought let's check out campers. Why not.

I began looking at pop up trailers thinking to keep it simple and relatively inexpensive. My wife vetoed that quickly on so I ended up looking at a trailer with a small pop out for the master bed. The pop out had canvass sides but it was a nice trailer will all amenities. It was the kind of trailer we could pull with our SUV.

So I bring my wife to the dealer with our kids. The kids are running around like squirrels on speed running up and down steps into trailers and motorhomes well beyond our means. Meanwhile my wife and I are looking at the trailer I had picked out and she wanders off to another unit and says, "this one is nice". So I look and nod in agreement however it's a fifth wheel trailer! So I tell her we'd need a new truck and she smiles and says "well you've always wanted another pickup". While our children are causing a great diversion we look the thing over and it is quite nice. After wrangling the kids into a one controllable group we approach and salesman and before we know it we've bought the darn thing!

OK we knew exactly what we were doing but it was pretty spontaneous. So we go out for a drive and again in a rather spontaneous and rather rapid move we trade our new Ford Explorer for a used F350 King Ranch Crew Cab turbo diesel 1 ton truck. We are off to the races. So now we begin our camping plans. I now own this huge truck and a fifth wheel. The last time and the only time I've ever driven a truck with a trailer was when I was 13 and went on a road trip with our neighbour who was a trucker. I use to go with him during the summer that year and he let me drive his tractor trailer around in large empty lots plus he thought me very briefly how to reverse. You wouldn't think that such a short lesson would last but I did remember numerous things including watching my mirrors on turns and how to reverse. I wasn't that great at it, but so long as it went very slow I handled it just fine.

So now we have this huge truck which I absolutely loved. Big diesel truck sound and black smoke on start up and whenever you pound down on the go pedal. Our trailer was a 2006 Pilgrim fifth wheel, 27 feet long.