CamperBug.com

First Time Out

Do you remember your first time with new camping equipment? Whether it was a tent, an RV, or a coach, the first time at anything can leave you with a tale to tell!

For many years, we camped with a tent.  While our tent was a Cadillac of a tent, with the children grown and us looking for more luxurious accommodations, we bought our first RV .  It was a 30 foot bumper pull, a CrossRoads by brand.  It was bought, almost on a whim.  We went to an RV/Outdoor show, thinking we would move up from a tent to a Pop-Up, then saw a really small bumper-pull, then this 30 foot trailer with a queen-size bed for MiMi and PaPa, and bunks for the grandkids.  It happened just that fast. ( Have you been there???)

It was a Friday afternoon in February, with a cold weekend forecast.  We had bought the trailer earlier in the week , and it was ready for us to pick up.  After receiving a brief instructional session from our sales person, we hooked her up and were off!

We showed up at Fountinebleau State Park near Mandeville, Louisiana near sunset, and we had no reservation.  Figuring out that we were totally green at RV camping, the park ranger assigned us to a pull-through site.  Good thing there!  We had come prepared that day with 2 pillows and sheets for the bed.  That was it.

After parking our new trailer in the pull-through site, and spending the rest of the weekend in a trailer that seriously needed leveling, we locked her up and headed into the nearest town for food and a few other supplies.  We got back to the campground well after dark, around 9:30 pm.  The temperature had dropped to around 30 degrees, with a forecast low in the 20’s. To our surprise, our new trailer keys had apparently fallen out of a pocket somewhere in a Home Depot parking lot in the nearby town.

A park ranger would be there until 10 pm, and suggested we call Pop-A-Lock.  He also suggested that, it was his understanding, that many of the keys that accessed the storage compartments for many brands of trailers were generic.  (Did you know that?) If we could find someone in the campground with a trailer similar to ours, their key might open our new palace on wheels.

After knocking on a lot of trailer doors of perfect strangers in the campground, we found someone who had a key he was willing to loan us at the late hour.  The ranger was right!  The key fit a storage compartment on our trailer, that happened to lead into the inside living area, if you lifted up the wood base for a mattress in the bunk area, and crawled up through the small space. I know you can picture it!

Lesson learned:  Keep a spare key to your trailer in your tow vehicle, and a spare key to your tow vehicle in your trailer.  You can’t really function without either.