NoodleDog

No, I didn’t mean “so long” as in “goodbye”, but as in “it has been SO LONG” since I updated. I suck. I know. I have just been busy!

So as it turns out, I have this life thing, and it keeps popping up in various ways. Like Rob and I bought a trailer together. Heh. Not a trailer park trailer, but a travel trailer. It’s neat. It does not mean I’ll be growing dope in my car and selling hash in the local community college. This kind of trailer means we’ll be traveling and towing our little home all around with us.

Rob started out with a camper he bought many years ago. It’s a great camper, don’t get me wrong. It’s pretty fantastic, really. For a girl who thought “camping” meant you get out your tent, you cram your car full of stuff and food, and then you tote it all out to a site far, far away, and then set things up, hang your food up a tree, shiver through the night, and then go home (if you’re lucky and the trip is a short one…), going to a camper was a huge difference. A camper means going camping… sort of. It means you cramp the camper full of stuff, you fill the camper up with water and possibly a generator, and you drive out into the forest in your truck, and you… just…. Camp there. You get out of the truck, arrange all your stuff, and hang out with the other people who have done the same.

The camper, though, is small. And I only say this in comparative terms, because it’s way bigger than a tent, and it has a dinette, and a bed. And a stove and an oven, and a fridge. You totally don’t have to hang your food in a tree at all when you camp in a camper. But it’s small compared to our friends’ vehicles, because our friends have trailers, and trailers are like campers, only way, way better. Trailers have all the stuff campers have, only you can move around in them without having to squeeze by the person standing at the sink to get to the bed. You don’t have to L-shape extend your arm when you’re at the dinette to get into the fridge. You don’t (if you’re a dog) have to shuffle up onto the bench and then launch your furry body up into the bed above the truck roof.

Having a trailer means you pack you house into a smaller version of your house and go camping. You can still (theoretically) just drive into the forest and camp (provided you have a high trailer, which involves flipping an axle or something to get some extra height to clear bumps and small shrubs and slow-moving forest creatures). The trailer has a nice big fridge and a freezer (yay, ice cream and smoothies!). The trailer has a dinette that you can probably seat four people in (if you smoosh) AND a sofa! And the sofa flips down into a bed! And so does the dinette! And we got one with bunks! Because we might have kids someday, and heaven knows you don’t want to have to trade in your trailer for a bigger one later…

And our trailer has a pretty decent kitchen, with good storage space for dishes and cutlery and pots and pans (yes, it has a real pots-and-pans drawer beneath the oven!), and a pantry. A serious pantry, that means you can bring cereal (which we don’t really eat, but we could if we wanted to now), and big boxes of stuff, and many cans of tuna and beans, and a lot of other stuff. If the apocalypse comes, we’ll be well-set with our trailer, I tell you.

Our trailer also has what is close to a full-size bathroom. It has a toilet and a sink and a medicine cabinet, and a bathtub and shower. Sure, the tub is a little small, but if I crouched down, I could sort of sit in it. It would be handy for washing off small children, that’s for sure.

And our trailer also has those bunks – for extra storage now, but for children later on. And our trailer has a bunch of storage in all sorts of handy places. Like the queen-sized bed (in its own separate bedroom, mind you) flips up on hydraulics and lets you store all sorts of crap beneath it. And there are two closets in the bedroom so his stuff doesn’t get all mixed-up with mine (heh). And it has space for not one, but TWO TVs. Because when you’re camping, you need TVs. As many as possible.

The actual purchase of the trailer was quite exciting. We knew that the RV show would be coming to town in February, so we started shopping before that. We went around to the dealerships and looked at stuff. And until you start looking, you seriously don’t know what you want. I mean, all trailers are trailers, but some trailers have stuff other trailers don’t have. Like space for dishes. And storage. And accessible bunks that don’t make you feel claustrophobic. And “slides”. Not the fun kind of slide you slide down, but these sections that pop out, to give you more room inside. So our trailer has a pop-out (which is what I prefer to call them), and that means our sofa pops out to give us more floor space for living area.

So while looking, I concerned myself with the aesthetic details, while Rob made a list of all the technical stuff the trailer had to have. Like a big enough furnace, power conversion stuff, thermal pane windows… And I looked at things like “will we fit into the dinette, or is it made for small people?” and “man, this couch fabric will make me want to vomit whenever we go camping…” and “Hmm, I like these cupboards, but they’re awfully small…” and “Man, my kitchen needs more counter-space”.

And we looked a lot. It wasn’t until we actually got to the show that we were able to really decide on what we wanted. We looked at lots of trailers. And man, some are really, really fancy. There were a bunch we could have gotten, if our yard was bigger. See, we have to also store it in the yard, so exterior length was of paramount importance. We cut ourselves out of 80% of the market right there, by needing something shorter than 30 feet, with bunks and a slide, and a separate bedroom, and good storage. We finally narrowed down the list to three or four contenders, and then the fun began.

The dealers are like little two-legged sharks. And man, they can wheel and deal. And some, I didn’t like, so we didn’t talk much with them. I was mostly interested in what we could get for the price we were going to pay. And the ceiling was a monthly payment amount, because you can now finance trailers like houses – over 20 years on a mortgage. Yes, you pay a lot more for it in the end, in interest, but you don’t have to cough up $20K all at once for a trailer, which really helps people like us buy things.

Basically, we got the trailer at the right time, when they were motivated to sell, knowing that if they didn’t sell us something, we’d go right next door at the show and get something else – we had money to spend, and we were going to get something, by god, and it was going to be THAT DAY, so make us a deal, pal. We actually ended up getting the trailer from a dealer who wasn’t at the show (because of “politics” or something), and they threw in pretty much all the options for just a shade over the sale price, so I feel good about our purchase.

Of course, the trailer has to come from the factory, which means waiting. Waiting for, like, 8 weeks. Two months. That’s a long time, when you’re me. And Rob is even more eager to get it. We cleaned up the camper, and it’s for sale now (so if you want to buy a very cool camper…) and when it sells, we can buy a Suburban.

And the story behind the Suburban goes as follows: We need something bigger in order to be able to keep three dogs, because Rob doesn’t think it’s fair to take only two with us at a time, and the back of the Jeep gets crowded, and Cooter doesn’t like it when the other dogs are near his feet. So we need something big to transport the dogs. And we need something that has towing capacity for the trailer. And parents of friends of mine just happen to be selling a Suburban that fits the bill, so we made an offer, contingent upon our camper selling, that will get us exactly what we need. Yay!

It seems we’re in a bit of a spend-cycle at the moment. We bought the trailer. We bought the Suburban. We also bought a Giant TV on Boxing Day. We are now totally, totally broke, which is just great, which means we can’t afford to have kids to fill up the bunks, but we have a lot of cool stuff.