Our Bungalow

Casa Grande, AZ  High 80   Low 47

Jim and I have been talking about a change in how we travel for a couple of years now. Mickey and Ginny leave their fifth wheel in our park in AJ and have a 22 foot toy hauler that they pull during the summer months. I thought that was a great idea and Jim agreed. We have looked at many many travel trailers over the last couple of years and found a floor plan that we really liked.

This is Jim checking out the roof of an RV we looked at.

Well, last week we found a used trailer that was within our budget. The day we found it we had driven to northwestern Scottsdale to look at a trailer that was such a disaster I can’t believe they were asking more than $100 for it. We got home and I got on line. Found and interesting looking 23 foot trailer only to find out when we called about it that it was at a dealership in Tucson. It was 2:00 and Jim said, do you want to go look at it. I said yes and off we went. That was the day we drove over 350 miles.

We ended up buying the travel trailer while we were there. It had the major requirements we wanted – a walk around queen bed, a slide with a couch and a double axle.

Our new to us Bungalow is a 2008 Salem by Forest River. Dawn, I think our floor plans are very similar. Check out Dawn’s beautiful new rig over on her blog at Taking The Slow Road.

We picked up the rig yesterday. Safety is always a number one priority for us, and we invested in a Hensley Hitch. Travel trailers have a tendency to sway more than fifth wheels and the Hensley provides the most sway free ride of any hitch made. Jim had to install it himself (very few RV dealers are familiar with this type of hitch and Jim wanted to make sure it was done correctly.) He went to Tucson on Saturday and started the job of installing the hitch.

The rig was sitting under a blue canopy so the color is a little strange. I’ll get a better picture with the rig hooked up in the sunlight. When you see these pictures, remember that we have everything piled everywhere. Just like we had to adjust to living in a much smaller space when we moved from a house to the fifth wheel, we once again have to get used to living in a small space in the travel trailer.

Monday was an extremely long day for us. We were awake at 4:30 and headed for Tucson by 6:30. Saturday and Sunday we had been loading up the truck with all the things we bought last week. After getting the hitch installed (nothing ever turns out easy to do), finally having the walk through on the rig and getting the paperwork taken care of we got out of Tucson.

We decided to spend a couple of nights in Casa Grande for a shake down of our Bungalow. But before we could get to the RV park we had to pick up our new mattress. We bought the mattress in AJ and they trucked it down to their Casa Grande store for us. We wrestled the mattress into the rig and finally got to Casa Grande RV Resort about 5:00.

Jan snapped this picture of us. She also asked me if she could blog about us and I told her sure. I knew it was going to be awhile before I found the energy to get this blog put together. So check out her blog at Jan.

I called Jan and she and Bill came over to see our new Bungalow. They helped us haul everything in from the truck and Jan helped me put the bed together. Then they gave us a house warming gift.

Wow – how neat is that. And then to top it all off, they had dinner ready for us. We headed for their house which is only about 1/2 mile down the road and had the best chili and these fantastic biscuits.

Dinner was wonderful but we were both so tired we almost fell asleep with our faces in our food. We said our goodbyes and headed home. Thought we’d watch some TV but we were in bed and out cold before 9:00.

The girls’ are adjusting quite well.

So to sum up – we are not selling the fifth wheel. It will stay in Arizona all year and be our home when we are in AJ. The rest of the time we will be traveling in the Bungalow. Ginny named our rig the Bungalow and I love it. We’re hoping we might be taking more short trips around AZ in the winter time.

More to come but right now it’s definitely time for bed once again.