Convening and such

Today was the day! The day when we were going to finally find the camper of our dreams. It was the day that we would visit the RV convention in downtown St. Louis. And visit it we did. It was incredible. Acres and acres of shining chrome accented license plate holders and majestically lofted motorized awnings, entire streets and communities of carefully ushered machines to pamper, comfort, and envelope their fragile, pasty white occupants, a mountain of the finest American made aluminum and plastic all engineered so that rich mid-western retirees can sit in air-conditioned luxury and look out of a bloody window. There was not a single truck camper in sight.

However it was a fine day tromping around and looking at the shinies. It was fun to play in the money. And we did find out some interesting things by talking to the staff of some of the dealerships. First off, truck campers are not popular in the midwest! One of the reasons given was that there are more trees here than out west... I know, I didn't really understand that one either, but we have it on good authority that if we want to find a truck camper then we have to go to either Utah, Colorado, or Montana. Hey, it's probably true. Most people were nice enough and seemed to agree that a truck camper was a good option, but also that we are naive to be looking in an RV convention for them (despite them being advertised for the show...). 

This trailer was marked down because there was a strange Canadian in it...

We found one local company that stocked a truck camper, a Camplite model, and would offer us a convention discount. It was in their lot rather than the show room so after 2 hours of wandering around we decided to rescue our car from the looming shadow of a meter maid and make the drive back across town to where they were based. This thing was crap! It was supposedly brand new but bits of trim were coming off it, other bits were splitting. There was needless space taken up with bad design, very little storage, and it was generally awful. The camper we went to see which was made in 1992 was a far better bit of kit. 

This one was marked up because there was a charismatic Welshman on it...

So here we are, back to the old plan I guess. We are going to see a camper on Sunday morning (hopefully before the Superbowl) in Illinois, potentially seeing another in the same area at the same time, but no confirmation yet. Both are super cheap. If we can get something light with a semi-watertight roof then we are going to go to work fixing it up. If not, then perhaps we will be trekking over to Colorado to find something half decent. Goodness this is a challenge.

Other things today; Zora and Michael completed the NYT crossword first thing in the morning, which is extremely impressive and a testament to the benefits of not going to work, we visited Aldi's on the way back home, which is a testament to the value of German based supermarket chains (Hawaii, you don't know what you are missing), and I cooked a lovely bit of Salmon and some damn fine roasties for dinner. A good, frustrating, day!

-T