[DutchmenSport]

Welcome to the forums!

New or used, either way, purchase the camper and use it for at least 1 year before you plan on selling your house. In the course of that year you'll learn how to camp in all 4 seasons of the year, how to boondock, have full hooks, route plan, and get some experience with different types of campgrounds and set-ups ... State, Federal, Private, full hook-up, no hook-ups, Summer, Winter, in grandma's drive way or as a camp host in a state park. So, use that year to learn how to handle the camper in all these environments so you won't have a shock while you still have your stick-n-brick home to retreat, regroup, replan, and try again! Once on the road, you are stuck ... if you end up getting "stuck."

The year will give you time to acclimate yourself to using the camper, making modifications, a hook here, move the pots and pans "there." How much garden hose do I really need to carry? How much sewer hose do I REALLY need to carry all the time? Where do we store all this stuff when traveling?

The year gives you familiarity to the lifestyle, the short fallings of the camper, and gives you the time, place, and resources to make adjustments and changes to the actual camper.

What happens if you get the drum brakes and then determine they are not really working right? So, at home, you are in a much better position to have disk brakes installed than on the road when you have no other place to stay, except a motel.

So whatever you get, plan on at least a year, camping as much as humanly possible so you can flush out all the bugs, make these adjustments, and really learn the in's and outs of your new camper with the luxury of returning to your stick-n-brick home and not have to "wing it" in frustration once on the road. When you hit the road ... you are prepared and your camper is now outfitted for your personal lifestyle.

It took us 2 years to figure out we REALLY wanted a washer and dryer in ours .... (just for an example)....... Now that we spend about 10 months of the year away from our stick-n-brick home, it was one of the better choices we made. But it took 2 years to make that decision.