Camping in a trailer? Too decadent for my tastes—but I have a persistent spouse.
My spouse Helen and I love to camp. In fact, one of my earliest memories of our relationship is camping in Door County, Wisconsin, shortly after we met in grad school. We used a tiny two-person tent, which was appropriate both for our incomes and the fact that we were in the early stages of our relationship. Ahem.
We upgraded to a four-person model to accommodate ourselves and our son, and that’s served us well for many years. The thing is, Helen grew up in a family with a pop-up tent trailer—one of those that fold into a low box for pulling behind a car, and are cranked up into a big triangle at the campsite. Her father was a schoolteacher, with summers off, so they’d take that time to camp with the trailer from West to East Coast (and back again), visiting extended family. She’s always wanted a camper for us as well.
For me, in contrast, camping with much more than a tent, a sleeping bag, and a pocketknife feels like cheating (though I’ve been known to make exceptions for marshmallows). The idea of getting a camper, even a small one, had an air of needless luxury.
Still, we can’t deny each other our pasts, and I knew that travels in a camper were a big part of Helen’s childhood. She began to talk about all of the places we could visit, using a vehicle where the journey could be as entertaining as the destination (not something necessarily true of air travel). Once I started to think of a camper as a mobile hotel room, rather than a tent substitute, I could finally get my head around the idea. I gave in, after agreeing with our son that we’d still go on a real roughing it backpacking trip sometime.
We looked at pop-up trailers like she’d used as a child, but found that for just a little more, we could get a small, hard-sided trailer that had better bathroom features (a space with a door, not just a shower curtain) and didn’t have as many moving parts to go wrong. We settled on an R-pod, which felt compact but functional. The model we wanted wasn’t in stock, however, so we ordered one, which should be ready in April.
The other part of the equation, however, is that said camper requires a vehicle strong enough to pull it. Neither Helen’s VW Jetta nor my VW Golf were going to cut it (unless we bought seven more Golfs and hooked them together like Santa’s reindeer). What did we get? That’s a story for another post—part of an ongoing account of our travels, serialized irregularly. Stay tuned for Part II.