When we purchased our first travel trailer 10 years ago I was so excited! I had a list of places that I wanted to visit that was at least a mile long. After all, we had decided to forego the cabin in the mountains in favor of hitting the open road, and I for one was ready to put that camper to use.

We found the camper, and I was ready to go!

We live in Atlanta but had actually purchased our camper from a family owned business in Illinois. (Shout out to House of Camping for a TERRIFIC experience!) I am all about shopping local, but at the end of the day saving money is always going to win out. When our local dealers were unwilling to wiggle on price we  started looking out of state. BAM! The exact camper that we had decided we wanted was sitting there waiting for us in another state and could be delivered to us with a SIGNIFICANT savings over our local dealer. (To be fair, we tried to get our local dealer to match the price but no dice.)

And then the camper was delivered…

Remember how I said I had my travel list ready to go? I was serious, I was ready to head out the minute our camper was delivered. But reality quickly set in. You see, we had our camper delivered to some property we had purchased in the North Georgia mountains. (Pro tip: Look for land if you live in the city and have serious HOA restrictions that won’t allow you to keep a camper at home. We saved a TON in those first years by not putting the camper in storage, and it got a whole lot more use.)

The minute the camper was delivered it was connected to power and water, the slides were put out, and it was ready for use. And that is exactly what we did. We used that camper in that same spot FOR YEARS. My visions of traveling were soon outweighed by the convenience of just running to our own camp and spending the weekend with no work and no fuss.

It was fun and all but the travel bug was there, and I was soon pestering my husband to hook the camper up and go! He finally caved, and we took a couple of smaller weekend trips and then finally we hit the road to Sevierville, TN. We had a glorious time at River Plantation RV Resort and had a blast exploring Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg. I was READY to start planning the next adventure. And then we did it again. We loved the campground we stayed in, ended up paying them to store our camper, and we went back to that same campground every camping trip for the next TWO YEARS. I am serious, we traded camping on our own land for camping in the same RV Resort in Tennessee.  We might as well have bought that first cabin we liked and called it a day. We were going NOWHERE.

And then Bill finally caught the bug!

Finally, a couple of years ago we ended up taking an epic camping trip out west with some friends. We flew to Vegas, rented a motorhome, and spent almost two weeks traveling from Vegas, to Sequoia, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Hoover Dam. (More about that AMAZING trip later!) And on that trip my husband finally confessed the real reason we hadn’t taken our own camper out on the road the way we had planned. As it turned out, he hated towing. He was constantly stressed that something would go wrong, and he just felt like it was so much work. I literally took my mental list of places I wanted to go and ripped it up right then. Why did we buy that camper again?

That trip out west did confirm that we loved camping and that we loved the opportunities that camping opened for visiting new locations. My husband also came home with the motorhome bug. He loved driving that big home on wheels on our trip. He spent the next year or so researching and FINALLY last year we purchased our first motorhome. I was sad to say goodbye to that camper where I had watched our son fall in love with camping and with the great outdoors, but I was BEYOND ecstatic that we were FINALLY going to GO! Last year was full of trips, small and large, and was more than we could have ever imagined. We are finally working our way down my list, and I can’t wait to share our adventures with you here.