In the beginning,  it was only a comment made coming back from one of our usual weekend camping trips. "I enjoy these weekends so much, I just wish we didn't have to pack and unpack everything  every time we go." As they say, Out of the mouth of babes....

Now understand that for 35 years, except for a three year period when we had a brand new 1977 Jayco Swift popup camper and 3 kids under 10, we had always tented.  At this time, we were thinking about replacing our 15 year old pickup with a new model,  and since  the local fall RV show was being held, we decided to go to the show and see what was available.

Since we were planning on getting a new truck soon and because Bob didn't want to tow a trailer, we spent almost 4 hours going in, out, and around every pickup slide-in camper at the show. The more we looked, the more confused we became. There were simply too many makes and models available, so we looked until we overloaded on information. After we had gathered literature on every make and model we could, we headed to the exit. On the way out we talked about looking at some of the other types of RV's at the show, but we were both tired and besides, we knew what we wanted. Talking on the way home though we decided that actually we didn't have a clue what we wanted.

Over the course of the next few months as we read and reread every brochure we had picked up at the show, it became clear that we really did not want a pickup slide-in camper. It was because of two issues. First and foremost, Linda insisted whatever we would get must have a full bath. No toilet/shower combo, everything must be like at home. Second there must be "space". Like in 'space to not always have you right there'. There were pickup campers that had all these things, but you had to have a giant, jumbo, dually pickup to safely haul them around. That was definitely not the day to day, around the town truck we were thinking about. Back to square one.

Time passes and now it's time for the spring RV Show. Off we go again, this time determined to look at everything  so we'll know what we want, if anything!  Four hours of looking at RV's, attending boring seminars, eating high priced food and we at least knew what we didn't want - a pickup camper. What we were trying to do, or so we thought, was to find out what would be a good first time style of RV. Eventually we looked at a 24 foot Minnie Winnie and liked what we saw. It had the separate, yet complete bathroom Linda insisted on having and second it appeared to be small enough to use in the USFS campgrounds we liked to visit. We looked at more 24 foot Class C's and they seemed to have everything we were looking for in an RV.  This time leaving the show we knew what we wanted, now to find a used one was our next task.

We looked for about a month at many used Class C's and some Class A's  (all 28-30' or less).  Then one Sunday afternoon we went to see two RV's, one was in bad shape, as had been so many others we had looked at, really used and abused, but the second one was different. It was very nice, clean and actually appealing.  We looked at it, and loved it, but...there were issues...the generator would not start, the refrigerator wouldn't cool,and the bathroom smelled.  When we came back the next day, they had dumped the black water tank so the bathroom smelled  much better, they had filled the gas tank as the generator would not start because the fuel tank was under 1/4 full, now the refrigerator... the deal was made for them to fix the frig and we would buy the 1990 Jamboree!  test