New to camping? Read this!
What if…?
Two years ago, my husband and I decided we were going to build a house. Yes, in the height of lumber prices skyrocketing, $4/gallon gas (in Texas) and roofing shingles quite literally going through the roof, we decided to build a house. Our smartest move? Well, you’ll see. Now I’d like to make a disclaimer here: I was dead set against living in a travel trailer. He has been trying to convince me for years to buy a travel trailer. I’m more of a hotel and VRBO girl. After running the numbers and seeing how much rent would be I reluctantly agreed that buying something to live in would in fact be cheaper than renting, also giving us something to show for that money we would have used for renting.
The search begins!
With excitement in the air, we began the search for the perfect travel trailer for our family. We are a family of 5, at the time we had a 5 year old, 2 year old and a 5 month old. Five people needing their own space. And space for our stuff that wasn’t heading into storage. After a few weeks of the hunt we acquired a 2010 Sandpiper 345QB fifth wheel. We bought it off of facebook marketplace and boy howdy it is a giant. The Behemoth, as we sometimes refer to it, is just shy of 40 feet long and has 3 slides making it a decent living space for a travel trailer! It came with a gooseneck conversion on the fifth wheel hitch, which worked perfectly for us. Not sure how we would have gotten it home if it didn’t have that conversion on it!
To tell you the truth, this happened much faster than we anticipated. We had to call my father-in-law to come pick up the trailer because my husband hadn’t installed his gooseneck hitch yet.
Working out problems Updating!
The Behemoth has undergone quite a transformation over the past 2 years- from minor things like adding and moving TVs/mounts and changing out an old 5 gallon broken water heater to Furrion tankless water heater to removing the cracking and peeling decals along its long and tall sides.
For the first *almost* year we had it The Behemoth didn’t move much, just the occasional back and forth on my in-laws’ land when trees fell or when we needed a 50 amp plug to do work. I actually didn’t even registered the trailer in our names until March 2023. That’s when my husband convinced me we should take a weekend trip and see how it would be to actually live in the trailer.
The maiden voyage was to a local RV park (Lake Hawkins RV Park) to do a test run. I think we were only inside the trailer for 20 sporadic minutes all day Saturday, something I was not expecting. The kids were on-the-go heading to the playground, park store, lake for fishing and checking out a short trail. I didn’t know what to expect honestly, I had never gone camping prior to this trip so I had no clue what to expect.
The more the merrier.
My in-laws decided to tag along with their travel trailer and bring their golf cart since this park allows them. I am so thankful they came along for this trip because my in-laws helped watch the kids while we setup and figured things out. I highly recommend taking your first trip with someone that you know if you have never been camping before, and sticking close to home in case you forget something important!
Let me add this: parks that allow golf carts are amazing. While this RV park isn’t very large, it was nice to have the golf cart to entertain the kids with. We ran down to the lake in it, to the park store for merch and deodorant. That is the 1 thing I forgot.
We don’t travel too far away from home because we are mainly weekend wanderers. Every once in a while we get a wild hair and venture off 4 or 5 hours away.
Oh and that house? Still not built.
Tag along with us as we travel! We have and will be hitting up Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana!
