Every Story Has a Beginning...

Every story has a beginning. This one actually began several years ago, when Donna and I decided that we wanted some sort of RV. Over the years, we've looked at a variety of motor homes and travel trailers. We even rented a Minnie Winnie for a wonderful long weekend in Pennsylvania. Early this spring at the RV Show in Timonium, we were even very close to purchasing a lovely little travel trailer, but decided at the last minute that it was not going to be financially feasible (it was quite expensive), nor was it going to be what we really wanted.

While sitting in a modest pop-up trailer later that day, Donna asked me to tell her what I wanted in a camper. I gestured around us and said, "This." -- that I wanted to be able to have a connection with our surroundings. As a child, I loved tent camping, and while I thoroughly enjoyed camping in our family travel trailers and motor homes, my camping trips in tents were always my favorite adventures. Being older, I'm no longer interested in sleeping on the ground -- and neither is Donna -- so the tent trailer offers the openness of a tent combined with the relative comfort of a travel trailer.

After scouring ads for used tent trailers and scores of Pinterest pages to get ideas of how we could make a small tent trailer work well for us, we decided that we'd visit our favorite area RV dealer during their annual open house/mini RV show. We were close to buying a very nice used Coleman, but it turned out to have been sold the day before. In the end, we purchased a brand new Coachmen Clipper 107LS tent trailer. It's small enough to tow behind our aging Dodge Grand Caravan (a.k.a. The Green Hornet), yet large enough to be open and airy.

The little 107LS has most of the amenities we wanted (notably lacking is a toilet) at a reasonable price. And, it comes with a warranty! Our first project will be adding that missing toilet....