Our RV Adventure Begins

My family has always enjoyed camping, dating back to the ‘70’s when my brother and I were in the Boy Scouts with very primitive equipment all the way to 2005 when we stopped camping. My wife and I had gone to RV shows and looked at everything from TT’s and Pop-Up’s to Class A’s. This too ended in 2005 after our mother became too sick and after battling COPD and other ailments she came down with Pancreatic Cancer and lost that battle on 11/29/09.

In May of this year (2010) my brother sent me an email with a picture of a Pop-Up camper which got me thinking, I asked my wife what she thought about going to look at RV’s, her response was a very emphatic yes! I started researching Class C’s because that’s what I initially thought was what we wanted. We found one used that we could pay cash for and went to look at it, it ran very well, everything was in good shape except for the side walls were beginning to delaminate. I quickly found out we needed to stay clear of anything that might even look like it might be starting to have this issue soon which cleared nearly all older Class C’s that we had found for sale, amazing. Very long story short after driving some Class C’s we found they just weren’t for us.

While researching newer or new RV’s I checked out a Class A and fell in love. The search for the right one was on, we couldn’t afford a new one, they cost more than our house did when we bought it so we were right back to looking at older models. We looked at quite a few and decided to go after a 1999 37s Pace Arrow which for our first motorhome to us seemed HUGE but had the layout we liked. My wife loved the floral prints on the couch and recliner, I didn’t but in this area it’s what the wife likes that counts most. I am not a fan of Chevy so we kept this one in our minds and kept searching.

I found a dealer on the Internet that had a lot full of repo and used Class A’s so we drove there and checked a few out. After checking all of the ones in our price range out my wife said she liked the 1999 Holiday Rambler Endeavor LE 36GWS. I didn’t like it as much because the ceramic tile in the kitchen had some bad cracks and the hung sidewalls don’t look as nice as newly laminated walls. After doing some research I found that for these older models hung walls are preferred and the dealer said they would replace the ceramic with  a wood floor so I agreed with my wife and we test drove the RV and it drove sooo much nicer than even brand new Class C’s we had driven. So we bought it and picked it up initially on 7/1/10.

The actual process of buying and getting the RV to a fully usable rig has been long and tedious and I’ll post more on that later. We learned a lot in this process, RV dealers are worse than used car dealers, if the salesmen moves his lips, you can bet he’s lying and his bosses, lie more.