Inaugural Camping Excursion Part 1: Preparation

The beauty of tent camping is you get a tent, a sleeping bag, and whatever provision you think you may need, and then just GO! Growing up in the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, I learned to expect a certain level of stoicism with camping. "Roughing It" was a great read when I was a kid and I imagined being like one of Twain's characters as a boy on the banks of the Snake River in Eastern Oregon / Western Idaho. The idea of roughing it seems to have lost its leverage among many whose notion of camping is more or less a miniature house on wheels with as many of the full-sized amenities as possible. And what better one-stop-shop for all-things camping than Camping World? Amazon.com, that's what! More on that in a moment.

We planned to do an overnight in a campground close by in Milton, Wisconsin in order to accomplish a couple of things. First, we were excited to take out the camper for the first time and experience setting it up -- hooking-in the electrical, water, sewer, leveling the camper, and just take it for a leisurely one-night test drive, so to speak. Besides, we hadn't been camping in almost four years and were both excited to get out. Secondly, we binged on several YouTube videos that provided great tips and advice about how to operate and maintain RVs. We thoroughly enjoyed watching Marc and Tricia Leach's "Keep Your Daydream" channel and highly recommend it for its quality and entertainment value -- almost all others of similar intent come off extremely amateurish by comparison.

Of course, you'd think that once you go through every isle at Camping World when you buy your RV would set you up for everything you need, right? Nope.

The Camping World Isle Tour can be completely overwhelming to newbies like Amy and I, so it is fair to say we didn't know what we didn't know. So, it really isn't until you begin to draw from your background knowledge and experience from primitive camping that certain nuances of RVing begin to make a modicum of sense. Amy went to Target and then later on the Dollar General store in order to purchase odds and ends that she thought we might need. Of course, we really wouldn't know what we needed or missed until we got out there and experienced first-hand what RVing is all about.