We sold our camper this week. It was bittersweet. I am so excited to continue working on Big Red, and I just know it’s going to be amazing when we get done. But it’s going to be a long, hard road to see it to completion, and we are only at the beginning of this journey. Also, the camper was cozy and comfortable, and it was the vessel for many great adventures.
Now another family is going to make their own memories in the camper, and I am so excited for them. They are a young family just starting out on their camping adventures. Hearing their story made me reminisce over our years of camping.
We started out tent camping at Jordan Lake when Paige was just a toddler. The days were so much fun, splashing around in the lake and exploring the campground. But the nights were long and sleepless. Have you ever tried to sleep in a tent in the summer with no air conditioning on a cheap air mattress with a toddler? It’s not fun! I’m a little spoiled, and I told Adam if he wanted to keep camping then I would have to have a bed and air conditioning. So my dear husband sold his beloved fishing boat so we could buy a pop-up camper.
The pop-up camper had two huge glorious beds that folded out and an air conditioner that was cold enough to make your teeth chatter. It was heaven! We started venturing out to new places, and I fell in love with camping. I had never really enjoyed traveling much before, but something about being able to take my family and our little home on wheels and set off anywhere our hearts desired just made my soul happy.
We had caught the camping fever, and it wasn’t long before our hearts desired something bigger and better for our traveling pleasure. We bought a brand new Keystone Springdale travel trailer, and we may as well have won the lottery! The pop-up camper was more like a glorified tent, but the Springdale was like a tiny house. It had all the comforts of home, and we loved it. We traveled more in that camper than anything before or since. Any weekend we could possibly get away, we would hook that thing up and off we’d go.
We traveled so much in it, though, that we began to make a wish list of features we’d love to have in a new camper. As that list grew, we decided to list ours for sale, just to see if there would be any interest. We sold it almost immediately, and quickly picked out a newer camper with all the bells and whistles that checked off most of the items on our wish list. The Grand Design Transcend was in many ways nicer than our house. It had all the finest finishes and the perfect layout for our family. I thought that it would be perfect, and that we would never want anything else. But I was wrong.
I think that we just enjoy changing things up, trying something different. It’s just part of the adventure for us. We also began to realize that camping is less about having the finest things and more about enjoying the journey and making memories together. So here we are, with our biggest adventure yet sitting in our backyard, getting the makeover of a lifetime as we make a whole new kind of memories.
If you have ever thought about giving camping a try, I hope this is encouragement for you to start, at whatever point you are in life. You don’t have to have a big, fancy camper or the latest and greatest things to get started. We had just as much fun and made just as many memories in our first tent as we did in our big, beautiful camper. Start wherever you are with whatever you can afford. You can build your own adventure!