It’s been a long journey choosing our second home on wheels – a year ago we didn’t even know what the term “Class C” meant! A couple years ago we started thinking it would be fun to travel around the US for longer periods of time. Our first idea (plan is too big of a word for at that point! 😉 ) we thought a truck camper may be practical for us. The ease of not towing anything and being able to unload your house and have your car available to use any time seemed like a perfect idea! Fast forward a few months and these are our takeaways after more research. The floor space on the lighter weight models is really small and with a 90 pound dog it was going to be difficult to live like this for a year. And wow, those truck campers are expensive (new or used!). We did tour some of the larger truck campers with slides and those are really nice… but heavy! So, a truck upgrade would be needed if we went that route. This idea just kept getting more expensive! A little reluctantly we moved on from our first idea.
Plan B – a travel trailer! We already owned a truck, so this seemed like a no brainer to buy a home we could pull. After visiting several dealerships and attending our first RV show last winter, we were set on the new plan. During this phase… we toured many trailers (so fun!) and our favorites went from Forest River, to Winnebago and then we landed on Lance. It was love at first sight! No wonder we see so many of those on the road – great floor plans and materials used. For months we were set on looking for a Lance to buy. Then reality hit… we learned since Lance is a fairly new company (and very popular!) there aren’t many used ones that hit the market (and the ones that do are pricey). Besides the expense of owning a truck and travel trailer I started having second thoughts about wanting to drive and tow something (oh that length!). I want to be confident driving and share that responsibility. Stefan and I had taken a short trip to Sand Dunes National Park (if you haven’t been there – what are you waiting for?!) over the summer and it hit me… we pull over often to take photos! That was not going to work when we’re towing something. Mentioning these thoughts to Stefan… I can’t say he was overly thrilled with the idea of a motorhome (as that meant selling his beloved blue F150).
A few days later Stefan came to me with motorhome plans and prices he’d been researching – so we both embraced another new plan. A couple months ago we traded in the beautiful blue truck for a small car for the next few months (we plan on selling it while we travel full time for a year). After a year of dreaming and researching – we made the first real move to a year on the road! Luckily Stefan’s dream truck will live on as he’s well documented it with tons of photos! 😉
Class C! Now that we had officially decided on buying a motorhome – we researched online and went to a local RV show to walk through floor plans. We looked at Leprechauns, Minnie Winnies, Chateaus and discovered we wanted to stay in the 24-27 length range. After walking through quite a few rigs – we thought we were set on a floor plan that has a slide with the bed. But again – ideas changed. 🙂 When we saw a 2012 Fleetwood Jamboree Sport with 20,000 miles for sale online and in our price range, we reconsidered (this one has a corner bed with a dinette slide). After a spur of the moment road trip to Arizona (that’s another story to read here) from our home in Colorado – we are now the excited new owners of “Dutchie” the Jamboree! We are realistic there will be drawbacks… in the future you may hear me complaining about crawling over Stefan to get in and out of bed and not having a separate vehicle to drive! 😉 It was quite the decision making process, but after the first 1000 mile drive – we love it!
See ya on the road!
Kris & Stefan