The challenges of buying and outfitting our first trailer

...and other surprises on our maiden voyage!

Dear readers—I recently discovered this unpublished essay about our very first trailer camper and maiden voyage camping experience. Though I summarized this stage in this episode, there was lots of interesting material in this essay and I thought you’d enjoy an exposition of the challenges involved in buying your first trailer. 🥴

Our rig set up on our very first campout at Wright’s Beach, CA.

I’ve long had a thirst for the road. I’m not sure if it’s a culmination of my early life living in a van in the 1970s with my parents, or if it’s the result of living on an island with only a couple of hundred mile driving radius for twenty years…but ever since our kids left home, I wanted to road trip.

Like, seriously, really road trip.

And we did; we took two epic drive trips documented in OPEN ROAD. Over the course of these travels, we found the constant transitions in and out of hotels, motels and tents exhausting, and  we speculated that having a camper would decrease the psychological wear-and…