You Want To Buy A What???

Way back in 1986, when I was still a fairly young mother of three, my husband came home from work one day and told me that he would like to buy a camper.  My reply was “You want to buy a what?”  I didn’t know a thing about campers.  I’d only had one camping experience (in a tent–on an oyster bar) and it wasn’t a pleasant one!

Then my husband talked me into going and looking at some used campers.  I was pleasantly surprised to see how they managed to tuck all of the comforts of home in such a neat, small place.  Cute little kitchens, indoor plumbing…I was convinced–I agreed to get a camper!

I don’t remember how or where my husband found our first camper, I just remember him coming home and telling me that he’d found us a camper,  if he could work out all of the details.  It was an older camper that had just been sitting for a long time.  It wasn’t even for sale at the time.  The lady who owned it didn’t have a title for it anymore.  My husband talked her into selling it, had a title search done, and bought the camper from her for twenty-eight hundred dollars. The camper was quite dirty when Ed arrived home with it, but with some elbow grease and a  couple of cans of spray paint, it soon looked almost as good as new. 

our first camper...in the early days of camping

The best part about that camper was its layout and design.  It had a separate bedroom in the back that had two sets of bunk beds.  It had a large closet in between the beds.  We designated the whole back of the camper as the children’s space.  At that time we began camping, our children were ages 7, 4,  and eleven months.  One of the bottom bunks we made into a make-shift crib with a piece of wall paneling.  The rest of the area was large enough to hold all three children and plenty of toys to keep them occupied.  There was even a second fold-down table back there, so the children could have a table of their own.

I loved the little kitchen in that camper, and I cooked lots of meals in it!  It had lots of cabinets, a four burner stove with oven,  a large refrigerator, and a table large enough to accommodate all five of us.  There was room to sleep 4 more people when the table was taken down and the overhead cabinets were opened.  The bathroom had a cute little shower in it, which was perfect for bathing dirty little bottoms!  Best of all the air conditioner worked great!

We owned two cars at the time, and neither of them had a trailer hitch.  My car was a mid-sized Mercury Monarch, and had the power to pull a camper–even though it wasn’t really large enough.  We decided to get a friend to add a trailer hitch to my car.  The camper came with a special set of towing bars that were designed to take most of the weight of the camper off the car, and shift it to the camper wheels, so we figured we’d be okay.

We kept our early camping trips close to home.  There is a state park located just seventeen miles from our home–in the same town where my husband, Ed, was working at the time.  When Ed was “on call” at the hospital, we would spend those weekends at the state  park camping beside a large lake.  We combined work and pleasure!  If Ed got called in to do x-rays, he was usually back within thirty or forty minutes, so we barely had time to miss him.

We did venture about eighty miles away to the beach for a few times that first summer.  There is a large campground located on Jekyll Island and we’d stay there.  My car did fine as far as  towing the camper, but if the weather was windy or if an eighteen wheeler passed us on the highway, the car would sway from the weight of the camper behind it.  It soon became obvious that we would need to find something else to tow the camper with if we planned to do much traveling–but that’s a story for another day… so stay tuned!