Upgrading the setup and hopping the border

So much to share, so little time. I really need to work on smaller posts more frequently, but for now, let’s go.

Michigan was wonderful.

We continued to have a nice time in Michigan, overall. My son had a birthday that we spent at a beautiful little zoo.

Having traveled so aggressively before getting there, it was interesting to see our desire to move to Michigan develop into something else. At first, we could see ourselves living the rest of our days there and would talk with a sort of riotous obviousness about how much nicer the people are and how clean the environment was.

Weeks went by.

We visited the beach of the lake Michigan, which was super strange since it looked like a coastal beach, but there was no salt in the water.

We did some berry picking a couple times. We visited a whimsical pottery store in the woods near Muskegon.

We found a vegan food spot that rocked and had great beer, we ordered out from there a few times. I learned to drive to the grocery store without maps and eventually knew how the isles were laid out. It slowly became less cute that I didn’t have a store membership card and my ID was from Oregon. I grew a little tired of my 4Runner working setup. Yolanda (the name of our Winnebago camper) was rapidly losing its luster as a free-spirit-mobile and pissing us right off with how little space there was.

We needed to upgrade our setup if this lifestyle was going to be sustainable. We needed to get to Quebec so the wife and kids could visit some family. I went into deal mode.

Getting dealt.

We named our camper Yolonda because we were YOLO’ing-on-to better things (YOLO means “you only live once”, love you Nana). We had YOLO’ed. Now we wanted to…

• Sustainably Travel All We Want.. STAWW.. meh?
• Sustainably Travel And Live Nicely.. STALN, no.
• Sustainably Access Independent Living On Route Moving Over Our Nation – SAILORMOON

We’re working on the next name, but basically, we wanted a little more space without sacrificing too much of the great mobility our small camper offered and not losing all the savings we just created after selling the house.

We knew we wanted a certain brand of a travel trailer, Grand Design, we had just heard way too many rave reviews. Once we visited a dealer who carried them, I can see why. The quality of these units is so impressive, especially now that I had an idea of what to look for. Actual wood components instead of laminated particleboard where the laminate tears off so easy, a solid bathroom door, extremely clever layouts inside and on the systems outside. We wanted one.

The salesman at the RV place we first visited gradually became amazingly pushy. Long story short, he was compelling us to purchase a unit that was a step or two more than we thought we needed and quite a bit more expensive than we’d hoped. It required us to shop for a truck that was much bigger and more extreme than we wanted as well. I was navigating both of these deals at once.

While they were checking my credit on the expensive camper, I was getting my credit ran for a Dodge Ram 2500, one of the few available on a lot. The salesman there was very frank that it costs what it costs, there’s no negotiation in this market. Fortunately, it was a workman’s model and the cheapest they come. They couldn’t get me an interest rate under 6.5%. The numbers were getting stressful.

My wife has this special wisdom where she can somewhat suddenly break the noise and return us to first principles, reminding me we haven’t signed anything yet. So we reassessed.

We’d go for a different truck with Toyota where they could guarantee us a good interest rate. We decided on a Grand Design floor plan that was less expensive, lighter, easier to tow overall, and had a much better layout in the end. I was going to approach the purchase differently as well. I asked the RV salesman his best price on the unit we now knew would work best, here’s a little glimpse into working with an RV salesman.

Becoming the dealer.

I opted for a Toyota Tundra, the newest model has a 3.5L v6 but with a twin-turbo and 10-speed transmission that the reviewers online were talking very highly of when it comes to towing, and the base model CrewCab SR5 with the short bed includes a trailer brake and tow-haul settings while saving carrying capacity. It took so much googling to be capable of writing this paragraph. After calling around there was one being shipped in that would work perfectly. It was a basic black, not a fancy brown or green color, and it was the absolute most affordable base model CrewCab that we needed even though if there was only a Limited model I would have totally wanted it (the universe helping us make a pragmatic decision). The salesman was smart to suggest I sell the 4Runner to Carvana, a swanky new tech company trying to hustle used vehicles, they offered me what I owed for it, which was a great deal for me.

After dealing with the first RV salesman trying to pressure me in all kinds of ways, I decided instead that they should be bidding for my dollars rather than magically putting me in a mindset of bidding for the unit we want. I had heard an older gentleman on youtube sometime ages ago mention how to do this. I’d find all the dealers in a 500-mile radius that sold the unit we wanted, text them, and ask for their best price for it. Who wants my hard-earned dollars?

Eventually, two made serious offers. I then mentioned my trade and asked for their best trade-in offer. Then I took a page from our real estate agent’s book when she sold our house. The two deals were about a thousand bucks apart, I told them both that I had two really similar offers (without any more details than that) and asked them to give me their final, absolute best offers they could. They both fought hard, it went back and forth a couple times until one won out by 700 dollars and an agreement to sell me a hitch at cost. I saved 7 grand off of what Sean (the original salesman) had said was their best offer and about 11 grand off MSRP.

A beautiful drive to Fort Wayne, Indiana, through humbling Amish country, and we were moving into a much-needed upgrade.

Btw, watching Amish folks drive a stubbornly slow and bumpy horse and buggy down a road with a bunch of modern vehicles flying around it was such an honest reminder that we can drive slow and smell the roses a bit. I’m super thankful the Amish are there, doing their thing and honoring some fundamentals about our human existence.

Gaming our lifestyle creep

I’m super glad we had Yolonda as our first camper. Moving out of a house into such a tiny space helped us really shave the unnecessary things out of our lives. It also made moving into a slightly more sensible space irrationally joyful.

If you’re curious, here’s a video walkthrough of the new camper’s layout from a lovely person on Youtube.

Now we’ve got some creature comforts, but still living with so few costs while having total flexibility, it’s definitely cheating.

To Canada

Our campsite in Indiana was just so-so, we organized our things a bit and were ready to reach our long sought-after destination of Trois-Rivières, Quebec. We took the weekend to put in some long-distance driving, this time knowing how to set ourselves up for success. We got up super early, every stop was timeboxed for 15 minutes, and we buffered some time for the border crossing where we’d surely get strip searched (spoiler alert, we got let through quite easily thanks to an experienced Wife who’s familiar with crossing into Canada).

We camped in London, Ontario for the first night. An overly nice fella at the campground helped me back the trailer for the first time, it only took about 6 tries. I found a vegan food spot with the most incredible junk food. The grocery store had amazing food as well, especially compared to the largely cheese and meat-based selections in Michigan and Indiana. Also, Canadians are unquestionably better drivers than Americans on the highway. It was absolutely astonishing to see such sensible order. People use the passing lane for passing, they move right if they’re too slow. It was like a ballet of courtesy at 110 KM/h.

The next day we hauled to our final spot for a good while in the hills outside of Trois-Rivières. We had one struggle with the new, larger camper we were towing, where we entered a rest spot and I went into the “Cars” lane of a fork instead of the “Trucks” lane. My wife was standing outside yelling backup instructions while I avoided a retaining wall and some strangers watched. I politely informed my children not to speak to their father while he focussed on executing this all safely, at least that’s how I choose to remember it.

Settling in for a while.

We’re camped at a very charming campground with very tight corners but with another helpful gentleman speaking french that helped me get all set up in the rain. A beautiful 8-minute hilly drive past a river to get to a healthy selection of grocery stores where I’ve made a slight fool of myself a couple times, not speaking the language (I kept trying to show my ID for a wine purchase, not realizing the age limit is 18 and they definitely weren’t asking for it). We’re about 30 minutes to downtown Trois-Rivières.

So far, Quebec is lovely. They’ve defended their language as a border that seems to have allowed them to retain a wonderful sort of humanity. On the weekend a band came to the campground, we went to watch and everyone was singing and clapping with a genuine sense of community. I felt like I was looking at a vulnerability largely lost in much of the US.

The folks at the RV dealership did a poor job installing our weight distribution hitch, contributing to the tail of the truck sagging more than I’d like. The 3 camera system I bought to make sure my marriage stayed intact when backing up has a big delay that makes its use questionable (maybe I can fix that). Plenty to tinker with but we’re in such a better situation now. We’re meeting my wife’s family where the kiddos get to play with cousins. We plan to stay in Canada for 3 months, maybe all of it will be here, maybe we’ll check out Nova Scotia at some point. Overall, it’s nice to slow down a bit and relax.

Oh, and Oakley got a French style poodle haircut. I had to relearn how to talk to him.