Why live in a little metal box on wheels?
Now, that’s a good question.
Because it’s better than living in
a cardboard box under the bridge!
Not a bad answer. But maybe not what you were looking for, so
let’s try again. The trouble is … I’m not sure where to begin this
story. I could begin with the purchase
of our first fifth wheel trailer. Or I
could start with that tiny broken down travel trailer that we used a couple of
times before the ass-end fell off of it.
Maybe I should begin with all those years of tent camping for extended
periods. However, I have a feeling that
I should begin a long time before that…
I grew up
on an acreage in an unincorporated area known as Johnston Station. The name came from the stop along the railroad tracks
between the cities of Des Moines and Perry Iowa. It is just south of Camp Dodge military base. Camp
Dodge had been a busy
training location during the second world war.
However, by the time I was born, the war was over, the train station was
gone and Camp Dodge had become a training ground for
the Army Reserve/National Guard.
The area
was neither city nor country and yet not a suburb either. Our home was a small five room house on a
dead end street near the end of the residential area. To the north were open fields on the flatland
before climbing a steep but not high hill.
The hill was the gift of the last ice age to cover this area. From that hill southward it is mostly flat to
gently rolling hills until you start approaching the Missouri boarder.
To
give you a better idea of the size of this community, there were around thirty kids
in my kindergarten class and most of us were together for our entire scholastic
experience through high school. By
graduation we had added about ten more kids when Grimes, the town to our west,
lost its school and combined with ours. 
My kindergarten class
Our little
community had a school, kinder- garten through twelfth. There was one ma and pa grocery store, a bait
shop, a barbershop, an ice cream shop, a gas station and a key club (this was
before you could buy liquor by-the-drink in Iowa).
As you can
tell, there was not a lot of things to do except, climb trees, ride bikes and
go swimming at the big pool in Camp
Dodge. (At the time it was built, it was the largest
swimming pool in the world. And later
when they added filters, it was the largest filtered swimming pool in the
world. Alas, like the old school and the
grocery store, the pool is now gone.)
The point
of this rambling is that I grew up living more outside than inside. Most pictures of me taken before high school
show me wearing nothing but cut-off shorts.
Except for the company of apes, my life was exactly like Tarzan’s. I grew up loving the world outside. I loved fishin’ an’ campin’. I’d make teepees out of blankets and sleep in
them as often as Mom would let me. As a
Cub Scout, Webelo and Boy Scout, I loved it every time my pack or troop would
go on a campout.
As an adult
with a family I didn’t do much camping.
My wife’s idea of ‘roughing it’ was the Motel 8 instead of the Marriot. The few times that we did go camping just
never turned out well. Eventually we
just quit trying. It wasn’t her fault that we didn’t camp more. However, now I really regret that I didn’t
just take the kids and go camping without her.
 |
| Looking into the tent from the screenroom |
The second
wife, Ella, loved camping as much as I did.
We started out with a borrowed umbrella tent. Over the years we progressed to larger tents
combined with conversion vans. As a
matter of fact, the reason we bought our first little travel trailer was really
to haul all of our tent camping stuff. I
had been looking for just a regular trailer (not an RV) to load the 12x17 tent,
the 15x20 screen room, the shower tent, the 20x60 ground cloth, the 20x60 tarp
and frame that went over the whole setup.
 |
| Looking into the screenroom from the tent |
When a friend of my stepson needed
to sell his little travel trailer I thought it would be a nice addition to our
setup … not a replacement.
Unfortunately, we only used it a couple of times before the rear wall
rotted off at the floor. We ended up
giving the trailer away to our granddaughter’s boyfriend. (I will not get into that any further than to
say, he was a mistake we both made.)
We came to realize that we had
reached an age and health condition where it was just too difficult for us to
continue to tent camp in the manner to which we had become accustomed. It wasn’t the camping that was so
difficult. Even the setup wasn’t too
much for us to handle. The tear down,
however, had become and onerous chore.
After rolling up all that canvas, it was increasingly difficult to get up
off the ground.
Rather than give up the time we
enjoyed living simply (relatively) and close to nature, we began to look at
recreational vehicles (RVs). I was drawn
to the size and convenience of class A motor homes. Ella on the other hand, was completely turned
off by them. “I don’t want a steering
wheel in my living room!” was her reoccurring chant. And I became convinced that having your home
and transportation in the same package might not be the best idea for us
either. We were already thinking of
living fulltime in an RV once we retired.
If you’ve separated the
transportation from the living area, you’ve eliminated all the motor homes
(class A, B, C etc) and truck campers.
What we were left with was the choice of a travel trailer (TT) or a fifth
wheel (5er) trailer. A 5er requires a pickup truck as a tow
vehicle and we did not own a pickup.
Therefore, we began looking at TTs which could be pulled by our
conversion van.
Here we began to become confused by
the information we were receiving from RV dealers about the towing capacity of
our van. Some dealers would show us only
small travel trailers, stating that our van was
not capable of pulling the larger units.
Other dealers were telling us that the van would pull anything on their
lots. With all the conflicting
information making my brain hurt, I decided to ask an expert.
 |
| Here is the van when we just picnicking. |
|
When I explained that, because we
were both still working, we would be staying local for the immediate
future. We did intend to do a lot of
traveling once we retired, however.
Being a good salesman, he immediately showed me a three quarter ton GMC
pickup that he had just taken on trade.
It had both a frame hitch (for a TT) and a fifth wheel receiver
hitch. We bought the truck.
 |
| Road Ranger and the GMC Sierra pickup |
That same weekend, we expanded our
shopping to include 5ers and ended up purchasing a thirty five foot Road Ranger
fifth wheel.
Our intentions were to take the
Road Ranger (RR) out for a weekend of camping.
Which is what we did. Only, we
came home and loaded more stuff into it and went back out to stay for a week or
two. We came back and loaded more stuff
into it and went our for a month … two months …! We came back six months later and only then
because all the parks closed for the winter.
Over the winter, we bought a
membership to Cutty’s Des Moines Camping Club, a private camping club with a campground/resort
that is open all year around. 
The lure
of the fulltime RV lifestyle combined with the increasing expense of owning and
maintaining a house, finally convinced us to move into the RV fulltime.
We now have all the conveniences of
home without all the expense and upkeep of a house. And as and added bonus, outside is just a few
steps away. We’ve found that we like
keeping the home and changing the yard by moving around.
I almost forgot how foggy it was this morning.
