Our Three Campers

When we first moved here to Oregon over nine years ago, Michael and I wanted to either get a boat or a camper for our family to have something to spend time in together. We decided on a camper...longer season of use.

We bought our first camper in March of 2008...just 1 1/2 years after moving here. The boys were just 11 and 8 (they were small). We loved that camper...well we thought we did. After about a year of use, Michael and I knew that we needed a bedroom for ourselves...and the boys needed a permanent bed, not a table that folds into a bed. Hey, we were newbies to the camper world, so we were just learning. And we really did learn a lot in that first year. Here is our first camper. It was so cute. (and look, there is the first Keesha)

In March of 2009...just one year later...we traded in our first camper for our second camper. We thought for sure we knew exactly what we needed. Michael and I got our own bedroom, and the boys got bunk beds in the back for themselves. This was a cute camper as well. There were really only two things we did not like about this camper...the awning and our bed was not a walk around bed. Michael had to climb over top of me to get out of bed. That actually got annoying very quickly. We took this camper all over Oregon. We had both Zena and Keesha when we had this camper.

What we forgot to put into the equation when we got the above camper was that the boys were not full teenagers yet...they were just 13 and 9 years old. That first year that we got the second camper, Cam grew over a foot in a year. We learned very quickly that we really needed a slide-out because the boys were going to be full-grown adults at the age of 13 because they grew all of their height early like Michael. Michael began our hunt for a large camper with slide-outs that was light-weight. That is not easy to find. Michael found this camper on a Tuesday (4/26/2011)...we made a trip to Bend, OR that night (I was so sick with a cold). We went back on Saturday (4/30/2011) to trade in our camper (remove our 'real' mattress from our old camper and put into our new camper), and then we drove back home, dropped off the new camper, and immediately went to trade in our SUV for a bigger SUV. I was sick this whole time. It was quite the whirlwind over the course of four days. This is the camper that we ended up with...and boy has it been great. The boys both got big by the time they were 14 years old. It would have been really cramped camping without this camper. We have two slide-outs (the couch and table slide out, and the boys room slides out). Michael and I have a bed that we can walk around each side. And, the awning is really nice...no legs that go down to the ground (which you continually run into when you are outside). We have gone to so many wonderful places over the past four years...we have been all over Oregon and also to Canada. I have loved all of our many adventures over the course of the past 7 1/2 years of camping. We certainly have been to so many places that we would not have been able to go to if we had not had our campers.