Home Away from Home

On January 7th, Paige's birthday, we purchased our first trailer. We have been talking about a trailer for about 6 years now. John grew up with trailers and Paige's family would rent them from time to time while she was growing up. We both enjoyed camping but can't stand sleeping on the ground in a tent. The Last time we camped was in 2006 in Island Park - 1 year before we had Eliza. Rich Williams lent us a crappy tent that leaked. We didn't know it leaked until we were camping and we had a bad rain storm on the second night there. The second night became our last night!

John doesn't handle sleeping on the ground for more than 2 nights and Paige doesn't like hiking to public restrooms or finding a bush. So the discussion for several years was that we would get a trailer some day. In september of 2010 we had a Gardner family reunion in Idaho. After the reunion we stopped by the Johnson's home in Rigby (20 minutes away) to see their new trailer. We quickly became a little jealous and started talking more about a trailer. We decided that we really wanted one, but first needed to get a tow vehicle. John's parents had a really nice 2004 Yukon XL SLT which they had agreed to sell to us in the future. So that was the plan for a future tow vehicle.

Last July we purchased John's parent's Yukon from them shortly after Leas birth. Fitting all three kids in John's Ford Edge and the Subaru Tribca was a bit challenging. So we told Michael and Mary Margaret that we were ready to purchase their car if they were still interested in selling it. They were ready and purchased a Buick Enclave so the Yukon was ours!

At that point we began researching trailers. We knew that we weren't quite ready yet with a newborn baby, but next year we would be. In the meantime, we visited several trailer dealerships and John did a tremendous amount of research to find the best trailer for us. We fell in love with the same floor plan as Heath and Tara Johnson, but we found the Jayco to be much nicer quality than the Keystone Springdale. We settled on the Jayco Jay Flight 26BH. It is a 26 foot trailer (29 overall) with a front bedroom, family room/kitchen with a table that converts to a bed and a couch that converts to a bed, and a rear bunk bed with a double bed and single bunk above. The kids really wanted a bunk bed. They turned their nose up to every trailer that didn't have a bunk bed. John was wanting to consider other models which were shorter and lighter - easier to tow - but we didn't find anything that fit our needs.

Through the process of looking for trailers we found that January was the best month to purchase a trailer. January is the slowest month for RV dealerships. They were ready to wheel and deal. When Blaine Jensen RV in Kaysville offered us a $22,100 trailer for $14,999 we knew it was time to buy. We got the model we wanted and they even threw in the electric tongue jack and power owning for that price. We recently purchased a 26" LED TV and a Blu-Ray player for the trailer for some fun entertainment.

So we purchased the bigger model that has everything we wanted. We are very excited to take it out camping.