The Teardrop In The Wild!

 Well - - - maybe not all that wild.

I just got back from the family reunion campout up in Michigan and with trailers  ranging from 19' up to 40' long (not counting my little teardrop), and some attendees (as usual, there were about 40 of us there) that require flush toilets and hot showers, you can't get too wild.

At the place we go, the group-loops are electric only with a couple of potable water hydrants in the communal center of the loops and a five minute walk to the bathhouse, and that's about all the wild some of us can handle.

But I "struggled" through anyway.

I got a lot of sympathetic looks (one person, as in all on thier lonesome nowadays, since it was his wife's memorial service I was at in March, was there in his 40' bumper-pull with two slideouts and chandeliers over the stone-topped kitchen island!),

a few, semi-tolerant eye-rolls (as in "he always was the weird one"),

and a couple of head-shakes, but I dare say I was just as comfortable as those with larger rigs and my 'shower room' was bigger (the bike is stored in there too, to the right just out of the shot.) and arguably cleaner, than what the bathouses had to offer.

I got a couple of incredulous 'do you really sleep in there!"s.

Well - yeah, and more - quite comfortably.

The low-slung beach-chair leaves me about a foot of head-clearance for decadent lounging, I've put wooden tops on both my Boxio's, one the toilet and the other a self-contained wash-sink, so they make great little tables as well as good seats for dealing with socks and shoes like a civilized person.

In this photo the bedroll - a sleeping bag and deflated 7" thick single-sized air-mattress, are rolled up out of the way to the left.

In this shot I'm using my other option. A 6" foam tri-fold mattress with the sleeping bag tucked in behind it.

Both boxio's stow under the cabinet to the left, and the chair folds up and stands out of the way against the front wall

 when either mattress is deployed for sleeping.

There's a little more floor space available when using the air-mattress option, but I have found I don't really use that extra space. The tri-fold is quicker to deploy when I'm worn out at the end of the day, but with a 12v airpump for the air-mattress, not by much. Both are equally comfortable to sleep on.

Here's where being a curmudgeon that camps by himself comes in handy! Usually the entire floor space of a teardrop this size is covered by mattress and the occupants are pretty much limited to kneeling long enough to change clothes and sleeping, but I've got plenty of room in there for - well, living. I've even brought my stove inside a couple of times to make evening tea in out of the weather.

The cargo trailer is roomier, maybe decadently so, but short of full-time living, which I could easily do in the cargo trailer, the teardrop is quite comfortable for me and tows easier. (Not that the cargo trailer is all that hard to tow either.)

In the county park we go to, you rent the group sites from Wednesday to the next Tuesday.

It might have been something I said, but come Sunday night this is what our loop looked like. (Those trailers in the distance are on a different loop.)

The drunken old fool from an ajacent loop took my solitude as an invitation to come on over. After a week of dealing with wall-to-wall relatives I shut that down in a hurry!

I had to stick around to give my sisters time to unload thier trailer and get it over to storage so I would have a spot in thier suburban driveway because they had a project they wanted my woodworking help with, but that's a theme for a different post.