Hello, my name is John. I’m 40 years young and have enjoyed camping my entire life. I should have joined a forum years ago but here I am…late to the party. I live in SE Wisconsin and am originally from Northern Wisconsin.
I grew up camping in tents mostly and occasionally in a homemade truck camper. My parents mostly took me camping at locations that were free without any hook-ups and only sported a fire pit. These locations were always right on the water and quite secluded.
I continued to tent camp until I was about 22 when I purchased my first camper. It was a 1976 Apache pop-up. I began to frequent slightly more civilized camping areas. Mostly county parks that offered a fire pit, picnic table, and pit toilets all for $10 a night. Most of these sites were water front property. To me, it was only a very slight step up from tent camping. My young family was growing and I found that the packing, setting up, breaking camp, and the unpacking process wasn’t much of an improvement over a tent. What I mean to say is, that with the growing family, the family vacations were almost as much work as our actual jobs if not more. Another words, we were no longer enjoying our vacations as much as we should have been.
We had the Apache pop-up for about 4 years before ending up selling it and going back to tent camping for a period. About 8 years ago we re-entered the RV scene when we picked up another old camper. This one was a huge improvement of the pop-up. It was a 1975 18 foot Aristocrat. As much as I love roughing it and boon docking, this made camping so much more enjoyable with 2-4 children. Although the camper was old, everything worked great and it became our home away from home. We began visiting more civilized camp sites because we could now take advantage of having AC, electric fridge, water hook-up, and so on. The price of camping went up also. Previously we were paying $0-$70 a week. Now we were paying $200-$300 a week. Don’t get me wrong, we still boon docked from time to time but were getting tired of converting our dining area to a bed each night and lack of storage space. We wanted a camper with plenty of storage and dedicated sleeping space for the two children remaining at home with us.
This brings me to present. We have outgrown our 18’ Aristocrat. My budget isn’t huge so it took me awhile to score something larger, more modern, and everything working. I ended up finding a 27’, 1994 Starcraft that had minor outside damage from a storm. It has a few minor scratches and dents on the exterior but everything works perfectly and the interior is in great condition. Asking price was $3000 and I paid $1000. Tires were in great shape and it pulled fine. It has a separate bedroom in front and bunk beds in the rear for the kids.
I am excited about getting all of our equipment moved in to our new camper and making it our own. I will be learning about some more modern features with this camper such as electronic tank level indicators and cable TV hook-up (antenna and such). This will also be the first camper that I will utilize a distribution hitch on. I was amazed that the tongue weight was lighter than my old camper and total weight was nearly the same.
So here I am. I’m happy to have found a place to ask questions and hopefully answer a few too.
(I tried to insert some photos but it's asking for a url? My photos are on my computer.)
