Hello, everyone. I am a soon to be first time truck camper buyer. We live in North Georgia, which unfortunately for visiting dealers, events and clubs to learn about truck camping and our purchasing options, seems to be about as far from the hub of the truck camper universe as one can get.
After visiting Alaska 5 times so far, my wife really wants to make the trip all the way to Prudhoe Bay and take the whole summer doing it up and back along the ALCAN highway, so that's the primary driver of our interest. That said, we'll likely do a lot more truck camping once we're up and running.
I currently have a 2012 Ram 2500 with a Cummins diesel engine, but it has two issues that limit it for our TC use. One, it has the G56 manual transmission, which my wife can't drive as she suffered a stroke and no longer has much use of her right arm. Secondly, it has just over 2300# of payload per the door sticker, and that just seems too marginal for any kind of reasonable camper and gear for what we're talking about doing.
That being the case, we just special ordered a 2017 Ford F-350 configured for truck camping. The truck will be 4WD, DRW with the 6.2L V8 gas engine. The cab configuration we chose is the "Supercab", which has the smaller back seat with rear-opening doors, as we have some limited rear seat need, especially until our 14 year old daughter leaves for college, but long-term this will be primarily a two-person rig along with our 50 pound dog. We chose this configuration for payload reasons, and won't know until it comes in, but as this configuration has a maximum of 6780 pounds of payload, I'm hoping for around 6500 on the door sticker as the truck will be a fairly basic "XL" model that avoids all the towing-related items that are typically on in-stock units and can get heavy, like fifth-wheel prep, etc.
We ordered this truck, after also considering the Ram 3500 6.4L Hemi, to hopefully have the capability to go in just about any direction we might decide to go truck camper-wise, from weight-carrying and stability standpoints. The search for a camper won't start in earnest until after we take delivery of the truck, but in one dealer visit on an earlier out of town trip my wife REALLY liked the Cirrus 820, so we're hoping to learn something soon about what Cirrus might do for an 8 foot bed, which supposedly they're working on something. We also looked at a Livin' Lite Camp Lite 9.2, which we were not as impressed with. Given our likely usage to stay in out of the way places vs. camping for extended periods with hookups, we're thinking we'd prefer a hard-side camper, although something with a slide would not be out of the question.
Anyhow, that's enough for now, but if anyone has thoughts for us as first-timers, or might be in the north Georgia area with their TC and would be willing to connect and share thoughts, we'd much appreciate the input!
Randy
Cumming, GA
2017 Ford F-350 4WD Super Cab 6.2L Gas DRW
2014 Bigfoot 25C10.4
