Post-Camping Thoughts!

We survived our first camping trip in our new trailer. We went to Two Rivers State Park with a couple of other families and I will say it was a success! (Now I am so tired and have plenty of laundry to do!)

But as we were camping, we got to look and really evaluate our camper.

Here are the things I super-like about it:
1.  The bathroom has a door to the outside. 
A. When we are playing on the beach, we won't have to drag sand through the entire camper just to go to the bathroom.
B. When we are travelling, we will not need to put the slide out "out" just to go to the bathroom. This was always a problem in our other trailer, somebody could always come along and hit the slide out if you weren't careful where you parked.
The downside is that our bathroom does not have a lock on it- who doesn't put a lock on the bathroom door?? But I guess people were locking themselves out, I really think Matt should change the knob and put a lock on!
2. I LOVE the bunkhouse!!! Can I say this enough?? We have a camper with two separate bunkbeds and the room has a door of its own! I don't think I saw our kids half the weekend...along with the kids of the other family we were with. At times, there were 7 kids in that room!! The best part is that the kids' mess stayed IN that room. Toys were not all over the camper floor, the table was not full of art projects, it all was in that room!!
Matt's favorite part of the bunkhouse was that there were curtains on the windows and not shades, the kids were always messing up the shades by their beds in the old camper.
3.  I love the wrap-around table. We can fit up to 6 people around our table!
4.  My massive bedroom!  Our bedroom is huge, there is actually room to walk around and get dressed! It is so big because our bed is a slide-out.  There is also storage against one whole wall. We have 9 drawers and a huge closet with sliding mirror doors plus storage above and under our bed. There is so much storage, we don't know what to do with it!
5.  We have a TV that mounts on the wall (and swivels) and an entertainment system that includes speakers (inside and out), a built in DVD player, plus much more.  I loved listening to music outside!

There are also many things outside the trailer that Matt really likes- the electric stabilizers, the electric jacks, the electric hitch, he said it was almost too easy. :)

Things I do not like:
1.  I wish there was more counter space, but I guess I can deal with that.
2. Matt couldn't figure out how to open the stove vent this weekend.  There was actually a family with another Rockwood camper two spots away and they came over and asked Matt if he knew how to open their vent because they couldn't get theirs open either!
3. We also have a place where you can put a grill on the camper, but Matt couldn't figure that out either.
4.  In the bunkhouse, there is a door to the outside. You can open this door, push up a bed, and store your bikes in there. Unfortunately, kids can very easily open this door and fall out if you do not lock it from the outside.
5.  It rained and rained on Friday and Saturday night and since we sleep in a slide out, I felt the rain was coming down right on my head and it was very LOUD! I guess it's something I will have to deal with!
6.. I like about everything else. :)

The only thing we need to do yet is get bed railings.  On Friday night, Christian fell out of bed (from the bottom bunk) and Saturday night, Megan fell out of bed (from the top bunk.)  Luckily, we had a couple extra pillows come with the camper, so I had put those on the floor incase this would happen, so no children got hurt.  We need to figure out something!

Since our camper is so nice, I feel like I don't want to get it dirty. I wanted to keep everything clean and wiped down this weekend. It didn't always happen, but I would have liked it to happen.

Now we have the trouble of storage.  Since we have been broken into once, we know that it will probably happen again. We are going to empty EVERYTHING out of our camper and store all of it in our garage. We are going to keep the camper at our outdoor storage site until we come up with a better plan. I think Matt is going to rig up a security system and leave the door unlocked.  He was even thinking about putting a sign on the door that said, "All electrical devices have been removed, please feel free to look around, but there is nothing worth anything left in the camper." It will be such a pain to unload and reload everything when we want to go camping, but we cannot think of a better option at this point.