I was going to be cute and Title this post "The Eagle has Landed" but then I did a search on that phrase - and as you can imagine, it's been used a few times before
Got the call on Friday that our Eagle HT 26.5 RLS was into the dealer.
The good news is - our dealer is selling a TON of rigs.
The bad news is - our dealer is selling a TON of rigs and can't get to dealer prep ours till middle of the week.
So Saturday my wife is just bouncing off the walls excited - like a kid on Christmas Eve. So . . . . we drove by the dealership just to gaze at it.
Although I'm already up to a dozen posts here I guess it's time I "introduced" us.
My family bought a 14 ft Rolite Travel Trailer sometime in the 1960's when I was in elementary school. If you haven't seen a Rolite, it was a hard side folding trailer. Electric starter motor pushed stacking chain links through a channel to lift the top of the trailer - then you folded the four walls up, locked the corners, and dropped the roof back down. I swear once it was up you couldn't tell it from a regular aluminum sided TT except for a few extra seams. It had a bathroom, kitchen, dinette, AC, etc. When we would put it up, we would draw a crowd in the campground. You may have seen a similar design years later by Apachee that was fiberglass and not nearly as substantial.
My parents later upgraded to a 18ft model Rolite that we towed many miles including from Atlanta to Alaska and back during the '76 oil crisis that began as we started our return. I can still remember having to stop at every exit coming through Colorado because we could only buy 5 gal. at a time.
Rolite went out of business during that oil crisis, they were small, family owned and that trailer was expensive to build. But I was towing a TT with a learners permit at 15.
My wife grew up in Florida and her family was also big into camping and had a pop up for many years.
When I went out on my own I had a Dodge Van that I custom converted (Shag Carpet was big back then
). Before I got married I traded up to a full size Ford Econoline with an aftermarket "pop top" and self conversion that my wife and I honeymooned in.
As the family grew we mostly camped in tents out of that van. We had a 3 person tent for the wife and I and a two person tent for the 2 girls. We camped all over the east coast and did several long trips to the west coast all using tents.
When the last child went off to college we bought our own TT (my parents by then had moved up to a motor home). It was a 19 ft Sunline and we loved it. I towed it with a Ford Explorer equipped for towing. The kids were all like "We had to camp in tents growing up and NOW you buy a Travel Trailer
. I made a sign for the back - we called it "The Empty Nest." We've been camping in that Sunline for 12 years.
I'm retiring at the end of May after teaching Entrepreneurship for the last 5 years at GSU. We decided it was time to move up a bit - the 19 ft trailer gets a little tight on longer trips - and The Empty Nest was starting to show her age.
So, after considerable research on both: traded the Explorer for a Ford F150 and the Sunline for a Jayco Eagle HT.
The dealer says he'll have it ready to do a Checkout on Thursday, and I don't have class on Thursdays - so we're going to pick it up and head right out of town on Friday for a Church Men's retreat where (luckily) they have RV sites at the Church Campground.
Although I've been Camping and RVing for 40+ Years, this is my first 5er so I'm looking forward to learning new tricks and making new mistakes (not really).
Have enjoyed my conversations on the Forum so far - you'll see me around a good bit I suspect.