Trailer Shopping 101

There are two rules I've discovered that should be always followed when shopping for trailers. 
1: Don't go in 100 degree weather
2: Don't bring the kids!
If you are like us and do bring the kids, then a third rule applies:
3: Assign a DD (because a day shopping with our children invokes heavy drinking)
We broke all these rules.

"Lonnie" had already done his homework and had a 10-point list of required features prioritzed with sub-bullets and presented to me in triplicate when I returned from Alabama.  Well, not triplicate, but there were a lot of emails--same thing.  My eyes were slightly bloody from all the web browsing for trailers and I just really needed to get inside some because pictures don't do them justice, and since we were going to live for a year in one of these things, I needed to try it on.  Just like shoes, I needed to make sure the trailer fit.  "Lonnie" and I did a bit of browsing alone, and when we saw some things we liked, we decided to bring the kids.  Not because we are gluttons for punishment or were attempting to expose them to the elusive RV culture, but because we wanted our wild, ferrel children to find ALL of the things to break that we would never consider!  We wanted to know all the poorly placed buttons and controls, and all the ways in which body parts could be severed by a camper.  Only young children can find these types of dangers.  It was over 100 degrees and none of the trailers were hooked up to AC, which I think is a terrible flaw in the marketing. I'm more likely to buy when I'm confortable and cool, not when I'm sweating my happiness off.  Our kids didn't fail us.  The very first trailer we looked at had all the master control switches at floor level!  Who does that??!  I certainly don't want to get on my hands and knees to prime the water pump, and I really don't want my kids doing it either.  Other designs offered similiar failures to consider that a family might actually want to live and survive in a camper.  I briefly considered a career switch to 5th wheel interior design because it is soooo apparent that current designers are single, with no children, and have never actually set foot in their designs.

For about 2-3 weeks we were met with constant let-downs by promising designs with major danger flaws or just purely bad layouts, that we considered just living on a sailboat.  But we weren't sure if it would be too tall to fit in the campground because of the trees.  In the end, we found an almost perfect camper.  It has a big kitchen (I mean bigger than most NY City apartments!), a loft for Kai, a toy hauler garage that converts to a bedroom for the twins, a bedroom for us, and enough closet space for my shoes.  And no readily apparent dangers, at least none that the kids have found yet (other than the sub woofer power button).  So we bought a used camper from a guy whose wife only wanted to stay in hotels.  He was very sad to part with his trailer and I think was envious that "Lonnie" had a wife who wanted to live in it!  I'll take the adoration :)