Every great adventure has an origin story, and ours begins with a phone call from a friend, a birthday, and a well-intentioned (if slightly optimistic) sales pitch.
Back in 2011, a friend of ours was selling his 1999 Jayco Eagle popup camper for $2,500. The wheels in my head started turning immediately. I sat down with Donna and laid out my case — think of all the money we'd save on hotels! I could use it for hunting trips! And think of all the traveling we could do with Zack while he's young — he was six at the time, the perfect age to start making those kinds of memories. It practically pays for itself! Reluctantly, she gave in. And on my birthday that year, we became the proud owners of our very first RV.
The Jayco Eagle was about as basic as it gets, but it was ours — and it had a name. Our friends had christened it Binker Lee, a name rooted in family history that just seemed to stick, and honestly, it suited her. It slept six — two queen beds that popped out from either end, plus a dinette that converted into another sleeping area. We could tow it with our 2007 Lexus GX470, which made the whole setup feel surprisingly manageable. It did have air conditioning, which was a genuine luxury and not something we took for granted.
A few things were a little more... rustic. The toilet was a Thetford Cassette unit, which meant instead of connecting a sewer hose and dumping the tank from the rig, I had to manually remove a sealed cassette cartridge and carry it to a dump station to empty it. Character building, let's call it. The toilet also happened to live in the shower, so for that first rig, the campground bathhouse became our best friend.
Our first trip was Paris Mountain State Park outside Spartanburg, SC — and just like that, we were campers.
Now, about that "saving money" theory? In hindsight... it didn't exactly pan out. One rig led to another, each a little bigger and a little nicer, and we found ourselves spending far more time on the road than we ever originally planned. Turns out when you love something, you lean into it.
But the memories we've built over the years — those are priceless. We haven't looked back since.
