This camper……ohhhhh this camper. Before we went to pick it up in August 2019, after seeing the photos, Todd and I prayed (I mean we seriously prayed several times about it before picking it up). We prayed that it would not be in as bad of shape as it looked. We kept saying to each other, maybe we’ll be pleasantly surprised when we see it in person. Guess what! It was worse than we expected….I saw the disappointment in Todd’s face when we were actually standing there in front of it and he opened the doors to the basement. I was so so sad because I wanted it to be the perfect truck camper for us.
At $7k the price was better than most used older ones that we’d seen for sale even in rough shape like it was, and now after seeing it in person, we knew why. When Todd spoke to the owner on the phone, originally that is what we agreed to pay but when we saw it in person, there was no way on God’s green earth that Todd would have paid $7k for this camper.
After the initial shock wore off and after re-assessing the overall condition, Todd came to me with a very small glimmer of hope in his eye and said, I would pay $3k for it. At that point that is what he offered the seller. (As an aside, Todd isn’t afraid to negotiate and I dislike negotiating almost worse than anything). The gentleman that was selling it had some emotional ties to it so we totally appreciated that he wanted more for it because of those ties. His deceased grandfather who was an avid fisherman and photographer had left it to him. He had taken it on many adventures across the country and Alaska, when we were looking at it, he shared some of those stories about his grandfather with us.
Before we arrived to look at the camper, we went ahead and made reservations at a local campground with the assumption that we’d pick it up and camp in it before leaving the next morning to head home. We knew it’d be too late otherwise. After seeing the camper, we realized that the campsite was the least of our worries. Regardless, it was $35 down the drain. Thankfully with my job, I rack up hotel points so we found a room for the night that night.
We came to an agreement with the owner that we would pay $3k, I think we were both comfortable with this price because of all of the issues. At this point we were tired of negotiation and ready to rest for the evening.
When we were in the process of loading it onto our truck, in addition to having to manually and individually adjust the Happijacs (since there was no remote) we realized that we could not get the tail lights to work . That is when we had it for the day and decided that we’d return in the morning to pick it up. That evening we had to quickly find a Harbor Freight, it was about to close but they let us quickly go in to get some of the magnetic tail lights (thank God for Harbor Freight).
We went back to pick it up the next morning and the rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. It was Todd’s first time hauling a truck camper and he was pleasantly surprised at how well it rode on our 2009 GMC 3500 Dually.
Check out our video below to announce when we first got it.