We Move into Our Camper

Chapter 14 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

Our campsite for six weeks while we waited to move into our new home in Houston, August 2015.

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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I don’t have fond memories of our family's move to Illinois when I was nine. My parents struggled to sell our house in Detroit and then struggled to find the right house at a price they could afford. They dragged the three of us girls from house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, looking for the perfect, affordable home. They checked off one house after another in the large real estate book that refused to yield a new home for our family. In those months of uncertainty, with my dad starting a new job and us girls starting school, we lived in two different rental houses, finally moving into the house my parents would buy that would become our home. We had a lot to be thankful for as we moved in shortly before Thanksgiving. It had unsettling to move our stuff and then move it again before I was finally able to unpack and make a house a home.

Less than two years later we were doing it all over again, only this time moving across the country to Wyoming. While our limbo was short lived this time (we were moving into a house owned by the church that had hired my dad) we still spent the first week we were in town living in the already crowded home of our pastor's family. The situation wasn’t ideal for anyone, but for a dramatic, introverted eleven-year-old still reeling from the unwelcome disruption to my life, it was horrible. 

Then, when we moved to Michigan five years later, we were once again in limbo while we waited for our house to become available. The house was purchased but not yet empty, and so our family of six moved into a double-wide trailer on a church member's property. Again, space was at a premium and I remember the front screened-in porch being my one retreat.

Let's just say that I'm not new to moving causing temporary disruptions in my life.

I had never loved living in Fort Wayne, struggling for five years to feel at home, and I was desperate for a change. Jeff had hoped that getting us back into camping would help with the waves of depression and loneliness that had plagued me since we left Indianapolis, and it had, a little. But I needed something dramatically different. Jeff agreed to start looking at options out of the Midwest.

Finally, after two difficult winters in a row, we were both ready for a change, ready to leave the state that had been our home for thirteen years. While it was difficult for me to leave a job and students that I loved, I accepted a teaching position just northeast of Houston, TX. After a childhood of moving and disruptions, it appeared that history was repeating itself in my adult life, but we chose to see this as a scary adventure that would make our lives richer.

“Besides,” Jeff said, “this means that we can camp all year round now.”

But before we started planning our first Texas camping adventure, we had to find a place to live. We had much more success selling our now fixed-up Fort Wayne than we did putting our Indianapolis house on the market in the middle of the housing crash. That house was still occupied by a renter who would finally agree to buy the house three years after we moved all the way to Texas. Within a month, we had accepted an offer and we had the confidence that we could start looking for our new home in north Harris County.

The June before we moved to Texas we took a family trip on a plane to visit and look for a house. We were optimistic that we were going to find our dream home and be able to move in as soon as we arrived from Indiana over a month later.

That didn't happen.

We found a house. My husband loved it (at the time) and I really liked it, but it needed some work. Our realtor suggested we offer a lot less than what they were asking for the property. When the sellers rejected our offer, we decided to hold off, a decision that we ended up being thankful for when the following spring, that neighborhood was hit with heavy flooding during what Houstonians call the “Tax Day Floods.” Then, in late summer of 2017, that same neighborhood was hit with Hurricane Harvey flooding that most certainly would have sent us out of that house for months to come. With that offer refusal we dodged a huge bullet, but it still left us without a house to move into.

Jeff took charge of the situation. “What if we just move into our camper?” he asked me one night as we weighed our options. It wasn’t the first time we had considered it. The year before we had started dreaming about building a house, Jeff suggesting that we could just live in our camper while it was being built. So while this wasn’t a new conversation, it had always been a hypothetical, not a reality. 

But we needed a place to live and we had to tow our camper down to Texas anyway. With no better options, we made reservations at an RV resort and then fulfilled plans to move into our camper. For six weeks we would live in our 30-foot-long camper, a maximum of 300 square feet replacing the nearly 4000 square feet that left behind. And our upgraded camper purchase allowed us the freedom to take a little longer in making an important housing decision without the pressure of finding an immediate residence for our family.

We took three days to get to our new home, stopping at an Indiana State Park to sleep once our house was finally empty and then making stops in St. Louis and western Arkansas before finally arriving in north Houston.

The RV park we had selected wasn’t what we would select for normal travel, but it had all of the amenities that we could possibly want while waiting to find a new home. We did our best to cook, the kids fished in the lake behind our parking spot, we spent time in the resort pool, and we appreciated the fact that we still had air-conditioning. But it didn't take us long to discover that RV living and RV camping are two completely different beasts.