We Buy a Camper

Chapter 9 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

On our first trip out with our hybrid camper, July 2013. Photo by Sarah Styf

I started working on a camping memoir five years ago but abandoned it after a year of detailed work because the time just wasn’t right. Now I am ready to get back to the work I started and turn it into a true memoir of the first 21 years of marriage and parenting. If you want to get regular updates on this project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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We sat inside the salesman’s office after suffering through a timeshare pitch that we knew wasn’t going to go anywhere. We had returned to the Smoky Mountains for our tenth anniversary, eager to celebrate time away from our toddler daughter and infant son. Like many who travel with limited budgets, we had caved to the pressures of sitting through a two-hour presentation in exchanged for free tickets to visit the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge. Our salesman tried. He pointed out all of the fun places we could visit with our small children, highlighting the possibility for international travel, beach vacations, and access to an endless number of resorts anywhere we could possibly want to travel. We had stretched every dollar to make this every-five-years couple vacation a possibility. I had no idea how he thought we were going to be able to afford travel to these fun locations on top of the monthly payments to keep the time share in our possession.

We looked at each other, we looked at him, and we finally said, “Actually, we’re more the camper buying type of people.”

Jeff had been hinting at his desires for years, frequently mentioning his childhood memories with their family of six squeezed into the small camper that had sat untouched in his parents’ side yard for the first several years of our relationship. For a whole host of reasons–money, time, space, exhaustion–I had ignored his dreaming, choosing instead to focus on the here and now of a life that was in constant shaky motion. I was still in graduate school and working part time as a graduate teaching assistant and part time as a high school English teacher. We had a toddler and infant. Our house still needed major renovations, including two bathrooms and a kitchen. The last thing I wanted to do on the weekends, weekends I used to get caught up on all of the things that I didn’t get done during the week, was pack up our tent and camping equipment and we didn’t have the time or money to consider a camper.

But in that moment, I knew. I would put it off for as long as possible, but we would eventually purchase a camper. We had finally said it out loud to someone outside of our family, voicing our resolve to give our kids experiences with nature, not luxury. I wanted my kids to love hiking and biking and campfires. I wanted them to be outside and unplugged as much as possible. I wanted to take them to national parks and show them the incredible natural diversity across the United States. I wanted to them to experience and appreciate the world they live in, not just enjoy pool time while flirting with other resort patrons.

We returned from the trip and jumped right back into life as busy working parents of two small children. We kept dreaming about the places we wanted to go and the things we wanted to see as a family. While we didn’t know how, we knew that those dreams included camping and getting back out into nature. We wanted our kids, who had always been city kids and would most likely always be city kids, to see the country, love the outdoors, and appreciate all elements of creation.

I also struggled to get past the idea that we would only really be camping if we did it in a tent. Tent camping helped us grow as a couple. I loved the sound of rain on the nylon rain fly. I loved early morning bird chirps and the rustling of an awakening campground that can't be muffled by thin tent walls. I loved snuggling up under a warm sleeping bag on those cool spring and fall nights. I loved those things as much as I loathed trying to stay dry when it rains all weekend, failing to find warmth when the fire won't light, and hot, humid nights from which there is no escape. The tent cities that couples with small children set up on their campsites have always impressed me. They impress me because I know how much work it was to do it with just the two of us. Memorable? Yes. Cheap? YES! But it was still work and I couldn’t imagine how much harder it would be with our two loveable, yet energetic, little ones.

And so, we once again put camping dreams on the back burner. I was overwhelmed by the mere suggestion that we dust off our camping equipment, and buying any kind of camper was financially out of the question. Jeff stopped making suggestive comments about what we could do and instead started secretly looking for what was available, preparing to present me with options when I finally said I was ready.

With one year of graduate school left, I quit my part-time graduate teaching assistant position so that my part-time high school teaching job could became a full-time teaching job. We began paying off our debts from the housing market crash. We took a Financial Peace class through our church, and I finally learned how to budget our finances to calculate what we were spending and how much we were allowed to spend in a given month, wondering why it took me until my mid-thirties to figure out that important life skill.

It was a long journey. First, we replaced our little Ford Ranger with a leased red F150 shortly after our son was born. After ten years of truck ownership, our family had finally outgrown our little truck. We knew that a camper was a distant possibility, so we needed a truck to pull something small, and we still liked having something bigger with which to transport larger goods. While it wasn’t the best financial decision, we believed our lease was the most practical solution to our most immediate problem: needing another vehicle in which Jeff could transport safely transport both children when I wasn’t able to.

With the truck we had more freedom to dream. We visited the camper show in Fort Wayne two years in a row, getting a glimpse of what could be. Then, shortly after learning how to pay off our debt and being encouraged to only ever pay for purchases with cash, Jeff started seriously looking at used campers. I kept arguing that we really needed to be able to pay with cash because we couldn’t take on more debt. Jeff kept arguing that we didn’t have time to wait for cash. Our kids were moving out of the toddler years and if we wanted to enjoy quality time with them in the outdoors we either needed to get out our tents or buy a camper with payments that we could afford with the goal of paying it off as quickly as we could. I finally relented. Living debt-free was a worthwhile goal and one we didn’t plan to discard, but we also weren’t willing to throw away quality family time while our kids were little. For us, family togetherness and memories trumped being debt-free. It’s a life outlook that we’ve never regretted.

We went from hypothetical camper owners to seriously looking for a camper that would fit our family. We researched the options and looked at everything from hybrids to pop-ups to full trailers and then back to hybrids. Always concerned about finances, I wanted to initially look at pop-ups, convinced that it would still be easier than setting up and taking down a tent while giving us the option of heating and air-conditioning, depending on the model. Jeff became enamored with hybrids, which would give us a smaller footprint in our driveway than a full travel trailer but would give us more space inside than a smaller pop-up, the hard sides providing us the option of a small bathroom. The additional difference between a hybrid and a pop-up is that the living area resides within solid walls while the “bunks” work much like Murphy beds in a guest room; they fold outwards, expanding the length of the camper. We looked at every used option, even considering going from having nothing at all to purchasing a large travel trailer at a solid used price.¹

Finally, we found the hybrid trailer that we felt was right for our family at a price that we could justify. Now that I was an effective budgeter, I determined that we could afford the additional payments and with a little work and moving money around, we could easily pay it off in a couple of years.