It happened so fast I didn’t have time to blink, which is fine by me. One Sunday night, Barry and I were sitting around, not doing much of anything but enjoying the mild March air, when I said to him, “Hey, how would you feel about selling my car and buying a camper?”
Long story short: By Monday night, we had a deposit on a travel trailer. By Wednesday, Carvana had picked up my Rogue and transferred enough money to pay for the travel trailer into my bank account.
It sounds fast, but really, it’s been a few years in the making. My love affair with a two-burner propane stove and state-funded campground showers started with our Road Trek road trip, and from there I’ve never been quite the same. We sold the Road Trek because it was needing more frequent repairs, and also, it was fine for the two of us, or for the two of us and Calypso, but once we added a second, larger dog, rain days and mosquito days (northerners, think of those as snow days that leave tiny red welts on you) became a problem.
We sold it and I hated not having it, but we couldn’t very well get it back. Putting in a pool, remodeling our bathroom, coupled with me totaling my car and quitting reliable job at Creative Loafing took care of any “extra” money that would finance that.
But after a year living with a global pandemic, missing my road trips (although I did eek out two trips, nervously sanitizing anything I touched outside our car the whole way), and saying – repeatedly – to Barry, “we never should have sold the RoadTrek!”, the inevitable happened: We bought a camper.
I’m writing this from Ross Prairie Campground and Trailhead, in our new (to us) Viking 17FQ, a wonderful little camper. Actually, to me, it’s not so little – my first apartment on St. Pete Beach was roughly this size, and had the same size fridge – but in the world of camping, it’s tiny.
Which is OK.
We’ve already spent the night at Hillsborough River State Park, Ross Prairie Trailhead, Oscar Scherer State Park, and Everglades National Park. I’ve seen caterpillars in a traffic jam, my first muskrat, and my first crocodile.
I can’t wait to see what I see next.
