How did you begin this hobby?

[c3saving]

I started a blog to write articles about our adventures and decided to start back at the beginning. The beginning is always a good place to start. Attached is my article on how we got started.

The Mobile Flip Flop Inn

[Muddydogs]

Never thought of camping as a hobby? Camping is something I have done since I was a kid and is just part of my life. Reloading, amateur radio, trap shooting is a hobby camping is just camping.

[myredracer]

Growing up as a kid (in the city), my parents had a cabin on the ocean waterfront and we spent every single summer there. No water, no power, no phone, no sewer, no nothing. Did lots of fishing in summer and duck/bird hunting in the fall. Never traveled anywhere (still bothers me tho.). Sure learned to appreciate the outdoors. I guess I developed a bias and hated any kind of RV after that. Have lived on acreage for 25 years and can't imagine ever being apart from the country and the great outdoors.

Fast forward to a few years ago when my FIL had a stroke. He lived a few hundred miles away and my BIL set us up with his friend's TT in a local CG so we could go visit FIL in hospital. We ended up thinking a TT was pretty cool, even though the TT was old, quite small, had a lousy layout and the bathroom was really stinky (am used to an outhouse, no big deal here).

Later in the same year, we went to a car club gathering in southern Oregon at Howard Lake Prairie CG (nice place and lots to see nearby) and stayed in one of their rental TTs. Thoroughly enjoyed the camping experience, which included a bad lightning storm that knocked out the power and someone stealing all of our large firewood pile one day.

After we got home (early Sept. by then), we decided to just go *look* at TTs at a few local RV dealers. Really had no intention other than looking. O carp, - we ended up buying a year-end blowout special at a price we couldn't resist. Thus began our interest in RV-ing and haven't looked back. We took this TT back to the above CG in Oregon the following summer for our first long distance trip with it. Way too much fun...

We really wish we had gotten into RV-ing a long time ago, esp. when our kids were young. We're now on our 3rd TT. When we bought our first TT, we thought all you did was hook it up to our truck and go off into the sunset to camp happily ever after. How naive. We are now well-indoctrinated into the many things that can go wrong with owning an RV, some of which have been very serious indeed.

In summary, totally love the RV-ing experience of travelling and going to campgrounds. Personally, I also totally love being able to do modifications to these things, some simple, some crazy. 'Course, camping today for me is a far cry from roughing back when I was a kid, and that's just fine by me. 🙂

[hawkeye-08]

We moved from tent to truck camper many years ago when kids were babies... something about it has to have heater and potty inside. We have since moved to TT after a number of years not camping..

[Mike_Up]

chracatoa wrote:

Mike Up wrote:
It had a working toilet and shower (which he never let me use)

Wait, no one could use it or only your dad could use it? 🙂

No one, guess he didn't want the hassle of cleaning the shower or messing with black water. We did dump since we used the kitchen sink and water.

[fil564]

In 2007 my stepdaughter went off to college and told my wife that it was time for us to get a life. We ended up joining a membership campground to stay in cabins and park model trailers they had. In 2008, Fourth of July weekend we were out near the road in our park model sitting outside watching one trailer after another pull in and my fiscally conservative wife told me she thinks we should get a trailer. After months of looking we purchased our first in September 2009 mainly staying at the campground and finally we took our first road trip in 2013 to Maine. She now questions why did we not do this sooner, on our second trailer and you can find us just about every weekend at the campground except for our yearly excursion for vacation.

[chracatoa]

TacoPuller wrote:

Serious KUDOS for giving it another try!! It doesn't take any energy to give up- but there are no rewards for that either. You now are earning priceless memories that can't be bought for any cost. Hope you now have many many years of fun!!
Cheers-

Yeah, I thought that after the kids are gone to college in a few years I would stop doing it, but now we're never going back.

Mike Up wrote:
It had a working toilet and shower (which he never let me use)

Wait, no one could use it or only your dad could use it? 🙂

[Mike_Up]

I began camping in a Pop Up years ago with my parents. They split and so did the pop up.

Later my Dad bought a used Shasta and fixed up.

It had a working toilet and shower (which he never let me use), use a water system pressurized with an air pump, and used 120VAC lighting and propane gas lighting inside the camper. Had a really nice stove and oven and a standard 120VAC compressor refrigerator.

We used that camper for years and went everywhere in it. My dad, step mom, step brother, and step sister.

Later years, I went to tent camping and loved it. Camped for a few years with just tents.

Later I found setup and tear down a bit inconvenient so I wanted a trailer and went with a basic 2005 Rockwood 2290.

No water heater, no shower, no toilet. It had porta potty, AC, refrigerator, furnace and 20 gallons of water through an electric pump to a faucet on the galley. Did a lot of camping in it and loved those times. Didn't love the many, many times it was in for warranty work.

Later went to a Starcraft pop up with inside toilet/shower.

Loved the floorplan but not the U-Dinette. Wish it had a traditional dinette for 'more' room. Trailer was great, reliable but Aqualon tent loved to leak through every seam even after being wetted, sealed, and resealed. Replaced tenting and moved up to a TT.

Got my Jay Flight 19BH and loved it.

Had issues but Jayco finally fixed them all after shoddy work from small none local dealer. We went many many places in this and loved it. Unfortunately it got hailed damage but that may have been for the better. The damage was only cosmetic yet insurance check helped put us into the 26BH.

The Jay Flight 26BH is EXACTLY the same floorplan as the Jay Flight 19BH but with an additional front queen bedroom.

We had an addition to the family so the 26BH offered another sleeping area and much more storage cabinet and exterior storage. We just love the 26BH. This is definitely a keeper for our family of 4 and a guest many times. Large, roomy, comfortable, and fully of luxury items. I just don't like it's larger footprint and the inability to get into spots the 19BH and pop ups were able to fit.

I do miss pop ups but they are so over priced today in comparison to full featured travel trailers as my 26BH, I don't think I'll ever buy another. I worry about used pop ups, seeing many older pop up lift systems fail. I don't want to be that person.

So I do the best of both worlds, camp with the family in the 26BH and camp by myself or with buddies in my 2 Eureka Tetragon 9 tents.

[xteacher]

DH and I bought a tiny Coachmen TT as a way of having a place for our two kids and us to stay when we visited our middle child, a handicapped son, who lives 4 hours away from us. It also gave us and our other two kids a way to enjoy beach and mountain trips that we couldn't otherwise afford.

Over the years, we've had several TTs, a 5ver, even a PUP. Now that it's just the two of us, we again have a tiny, very inexpensive TT that we keep in the town where our handicapped son lives to use as a "hotel" room when we visit him. We've recently purchased an Aliner Ranger 15 to use for actual camping trips - again, a great way to enjoy places we otherwise wouldn't be able to afford!

[TacoPuller]

chracatoa wrote:
...

...This is our fourth year and we camp around 30 days a year as well and I really love doing it. We’ll be going to Vancouver Island this year.

Of course, I wish I knew better – we should have bought a 3/4 ton vehicle. We should have learned about payload and everything. Now I know better, next time – in 10 years or so? – I’ll do it right.

Serious KUDOS for giving it another try!! It doesn't take any energy to give up- but there are no rewards for that either. You now are earning priceless memories that can't be bought for any cost. Hope you now have many many years of fun!!

Cheers-

[chracatoa]

As a kid we went tent camping 2 or 3 times. I hated it. No restrooms, cold, rain, lots of work. My father had a utility trailer that he made it himself. We had to assemble and disassemble it every trip. And we had to set up the tents. I just hated it. I swore off camping and any kind of trailers from then on. I hated it so much that as an adult I would always make sure the car I was buying didn’t have a hitch at all just in case.

After we moved to Washington our kids started hanging out with friends that would go camping every weekend – imagine that! All of them had travel trailers. And they wanted to be there as well. We let them go a few times by themselves.

We decided to try tent camping once more – it couldn’t be as bad as I remembered, time has changed, tents are easier to assemble, etc. So we got a tent and tried it twice. Assembling the tent, moving everything inside, etc., was as bad as I remembered. And one time there was a guy skyping at 1:00am in the tent next to ours for an hour. And it was freaking cold. We would wake up at 5:30-6:00am while our friends would sleep in in their trailers until 9:00 or 10:00am.

One time we decided to leave the kids in the campground and we would stay in a hotel during the night (the kids would stay in the campground with their friends). That actually worked great and we had a great time. But we couldn’t keep leaving our kids like that, that wasn’t fair to our friends. Our friends would tell us that you just park your trailer and you’re good to go, there’s almost no work, it’s heaven! So we decided to buy a TT and a TV.

(It turns out my friends were omitting some stuff. I realized that it takes 30-40 minutes to deploy and 30-40 minutes to leave. We have to clean it up, empty the tanks, stow the stuff, hook up, set up the WDH, the works. We also need a place to park the trailer. And you have to plan ahead to drive with a TT otherwise you get stuck.)

Anyway, I had heard all the stories of people starting with a pop-up, moving to a hybrid, then to a 26’ trailer. I wanted none of that. I bought a 26’ (31’ actually) trailer from the get go. People though I was crazy. I also bought the biggest SUV I was told that could tow – a Sequoia.

As I said I had never wanted to pull a trailer in my life and had no experience. My first trips were awful. I didn’t understand the WDH system very well so we would jump all over the place. The rig felt very unstable (and that’s when I decided to change to a ProPride which made them way better). In one trip I forgot to put the hitch pin in and somehow it didn’t fell off the TV (I think the WDH wasn’t set correctly so the weight kept it there). In another trip I had no breaks because the jack foot was pulling the cord when I was driving. This was the same trip we drove through a forest fire, the smoke was so thick that I was driving with tears in my eyes. The campground we stopped was the base camp for the firefighters. Also, I hit both sides of my trailer in my first year.

But everything went well after that. I even assembled my own ProPride hitch, a great feat for me considering that I’m all thumbs. This is our fourth year and we camp around 30 days a year as well and I really love doing it. We’ll be going to Vancouver Island this year.

Of course, I wish I knew better – we should have bought a 3/4 ton vehicle. We should have learned about payload and everything. Now I know better, next time – in 10 years or so? – I’ll do it right.

[Sondy132001]

c3saving wrote:
Sondy - That looks amazing!!

Thanks I am all about glamping 😉

[lgarcia]

One daughter is 2.5 hours east of us, and another is 2.5 hours west of us. One has a spare room up a flight of steps that are hard to negotiate, the other has no extra room. We wanted a mobile bedroom to visit them 🙂

[gmw_photos]

I grew up tent camping, and then as a young adult bought a motorcycle and got hooked on traveling around the country on the bike. It was of course obvious to me I could afford to travel more places if I kept the costs down, so a lot of camping in a small nylon two man tent carried on the bike. Eventually my brother, dad and I went together on the purchase of a used Apache Eagle tent trailer. We used it for years, mostly at a "local" COE lake.
When I retired I decided I wanted a real hard side trailer so that I could comfortably set up in one place for days, weeks or even months at a time. Almost four years ago I bought this 19' Funfinder, and I must say, I have enjoyed every single day and night I've spent in it. Best of all, I can take my dog with me wherever I go. Just this last weekend it was my home for the weekend at a horse show. I love having my own good food, my own bed and making my own coffee in the morning.

[c3saving]

Sondy - That looks amazing!!