This lives in our driveway now.

It’s huge, isn’t it?! We didn’t exactly mean to get something so big. But, well, there are a lot of us, and some of us are quite tall, and that really limited our options. I’ll talk more about how we decided on something so freakin’ big in a different post.

In this one, I’ll give you a tour of the inside and talk about the rather hectic weekend that ended with this thing being in our driveway.

For some reason, we decided that maybe the best time to go pick up our trailer was the same day we were having a yard sale. The dealership is an hour and a half from our house, and picking up the trailer involved spending a lot of time there going over how everything works, so we figured it made sense for Dave to drive up and get the trailer while I stayed home to handle the yard sale (and the kids).

He drove all the way up there and then called me to tell me that I had to be there to sign all the papers, too. Oops. I would like to point out here that I had mentioned this possibility to Dave a couple of days earlier and suggested he call to make sure it wasn’t the case….but he didn’t. He still did the long, toddler-unfriendlly walk through so that we know how to actually use this thing, but we needed to go up again the next day to sign the papers and bring the trailer home.

Meanwhile, the yard sale was hot and tiring, but fairly successful. A couple of friends brought things over to sell, too, so I had company and the kids had friends to keep them busy. We got rid of some non joy sparking stuff and made a little money.

So then Sunday we finally went to pick up the trailer!

It’s a 2010 Keystone Passport 2910bh. You walk in to the kitchen/dining/living room area. The couch and dinette are on a slide that goes out, so it’s fairly spacious when that’s opened up (which was pretty important to us, largely because we didn’t want to be constantly tripping over dogs who had nowhere to go):

So that upholstery is hideous, right? It’s called “mountaineer.” All RV upholstery is hideous, as far as I can tell. You can choose between totally and completely hideous and only moderately offensive. I will talk more about how I hope to eventually make things less hideous in a future post.

That table there isn’t supposed to be down low like that. I mean, it goes down like that for when you convert the dinette to a bed. I just couldn’t figure out how to get it back up for the picture. The couch also folds into a bed, but one for a small person only. Or even two small people.

Abe really likes to pretend to cook here. There’s a three burner stove, a small oven, a microwave, and a sink and refrigerator. You can see the relatively inoffensive linoleum here, too. And the flowery wallpaper border.

Here’s the view looking back from the bunkroom toward the door and the bedroom. That empty space where a TV will eventually go swings around so that you can watch the TV either from the bedroom or the living room. That’s Abe’s other favorite thing to play with in here.

Here’s our bedroom. This is a “camper queen” which means it’s 74 inches long instead of 80 like a normal queen bed. This is fine for me because I’m short. It’s very close to exactly the same length as Dave, but he’ll manage somehow.

If you go back through the living room area, you get to the bathroom:

And then the bunkhouse for the kids:

So there you have it! I’ve got the beginnings of big plans for making it prettier, but for the moment we’re just excited to have a great excuse to take lots of trips.

A bit about our first day/s with the camper. First, you should know that we’ve never towed so much as a tiny Uhaul before in our lives (we’ve driven giant Uhaul trucks, but never towed a trailer). So suddenly owning a 32 foot trailers is….a little intimidating. But the drive home from the dealership went very smoothly.

Then I came fairly close to a panic attack when it was time for Dave to back it into the driveway. It really just didn’t look possible. Dave had taken an informal “class” on towing a trailer at a different RV dealership awhile back, so he was a little more confident than I was. He pointed out that my only job was to stand there and tell him if he was about to hit anything. And it went okay.

We had been really nervous that the bottom of the trailer would scrape the driveway (which isn’t particularly steep, but it does have a dip near the end that causes some particularly low cars to scrape). But it didn’t! Inches to spare! Dave came fairly close to getting it in on the very first try. Which was exciting. But then it didn’t quite work, and he had to try again. And again. etc. But eventually, he managed to get it into the driveway without even knocking over the mailbox.

Our plan was to park it in our yard, and to have a gravel parking pad put in there. To that end, Dave ripped out the old gate a couple of weeks ago so that he could put in a new, wider gate. Only the new gate building process is kind of slow going (which is a pain since we have to take the dogs out on a leash every time until it’s finished)….so right now we just have an 11 1/2 foot opening. Dave got the trailer backed in no problem.

Then we realized that our yard is a lot more sloped than it looks when you’re not trying to park a 32 foot trailer in it. We couldn’t get the trailer level at all. And we didn’t want it to, like, roll backwards through our fence and into the church behind us. That would be bad. So we decided to put it back in the driveway (where there is plenty of room for it). Only it kind of got…stuck when we tried to get it back out. Trailers are so big! Eventually, Dave had to unhitch the van, line it up better with the trailer, and then rehitch and try again.

And it worked! Now the trailer is back in the driveway. Where it will stay forever (when we’re not using it), because backing it through that gate every time was a terrible idea, I think. Anyway. /travel trailer drama! We are equal parts excited and overwhelmed at the moment, and we’re planning to take it out on its first trip this weekend!