Our Rig
“You don’t have to be rich to travel well” - Eugene Fodor
Believe it or not, the decision to retire and travel wasn’t nearly as difficult as deciding on what to travel in. Anyone familiar with RVs knows that the possibilities are endless. When we were looking to purchase a camper in 2016 (long before we decided to take this trip), I HAD to have a camper with a murphy bed. Couch by day, bed by night. I thought this was the ideal setup so we purchased 2013 Forest River Flagstaff Microlite 25KS. Truth be told, we very rarely used the couch and always kept the bed in the down position. Having a murphy bed wasn’t nearly as useful as I though it would be. We were also not 100 percent keen on the idea of traveling across the country in a camper with a slide. Slide outs add extra space but they make the camper heavier, they’re more of a hassle when setting up and it’s one more thing that can go wrong mechanically. While we liked our camper, we weren’t sure if we wanted to spend six months in it so we began looking at other options.
Initially we thought a truck camper would suit us best. Charley has always wanted a truck camper and they’ve come a long way in the last several years so I was open to the possibility. Several Youtube videos later, we found a few models that we liked and in the fall of 2019 we took a trip to a major truck camper dealer in New Hampshire to check out their inventory. Of course we loved everything we saw and as with any camper, you get what you pay for so we had our eyes on some pricy models. In addition to purchasing the truck camper, we’d have to purchase a new truck since you can’t put a truck camper in the back of a Ford Excursion. Although there’s a lot to be said about traveling small and light, we weren’t sure if a truck camper was our best option especially since this was definitely the costliest way to go.
We also looked at a few new travel trailer models, primarily those without a slide. Many National Park campgrounds have length limits meaning the longer the camper, the less likely you are to find a place to park it in a National and sometimes State park. Keeping the trailer at less than 30 feet was crucial. We did lots of research into purchasing a new unit for a trip like this and what we heard repeatedly was that many times, more often than you’d think, brand new trailers have issues soon after hitting the road. That in itself isn’t a huge problem but getting any kind of warranty work done in a timely manner is a nightmare. We definitely didn’t want to get stuck in a city for longer than we wanted because our brand new camper had a major malfunction. How frustrating would that be?!
Call us crazy but we actually considered buying a shuttle bus and remodeling it into a camper van. Many people have done it and made AMAZING homes for themselves. We even drew up plans and started checking Craig’s List for vans. Ultimately we decided that it would probably be a lot more labor intensive than the Youtubers make it seem and we weren’t sure if we’d have time to pull it off before our departure date (never mind the fact that it might cost us our marriage).
At the end of the day (really several months deciding, then changing our minds, then circling back around again), we’ve decided that the ideal camper for this trip doesn’t exist and we’re taking what we already own. We really think that traveling with a truck and camper that we are very familiar with is definitely the way to go. Since we bought the Excursion in 2009, Charley has done all maintenance and repair work on it. It’s got relatively low mileage for a diesel and he knows it like the back of his hand. In addition to that, Charley is super handy and can likely fix anything that will go wrong in the camper and we won’t have to worry about voiding a warranty if he does. During the Covid shutdown, we removed the couch and murphy bed and built a new bed platform. This remodel enables us to use the bed with the slide in (something we couldn’t do before) and also provides additional storage underneath. We took out the yucky old standard camper brown curtains and replaced them with new blue and white ones that Charley made. We had a bolt of upholstery fabric given to us years ago so it was perfect for this use. Once we got the new curtains up, the white of the curtains made the tan walls look really dirty so we painted the interior white. It’s so much brighter and we can definitely live with it for six months.
