24-hour whirlwind new camper purchase

At the Dealership

While daily blogging is not something I will commit myself to be doing right now, at least an update every few weeks or so I owe to my still loyal readers who haven’t given up on me yet. Thanks for being patient.

Yes, the pups have grown quite a bit since we got them and they have changed our lifestyle, but they, too, are adjusting nicely to our routines.   Benno and I keep smiling and chuckling a lot nowadays just watching Reggy and Elsa’s antics. They are a joy to have around.

Our Doxies playing in the snow

Mommy, I'm cold, let me in!

We loved our 19-foot Jayco travel trailer, but it became apparent that the space inside appears a bit restricted and now with the addition of two dachshunds romping throughout even more so.  There are so many different types of travel trailers on the market and it boils down to how big a rig can your towing vehicle handle and what fits your needs and lastly your wallet. 

During the past several weeks we’ve visited a few RV dealers in our area, went to the Windsor RV Show and while we were down in Florida, we had driven as well to St. Augustine to look at a 2016 Jayco White Hawk, 24RKS travel trailer with an overall length of 28’ 9” and 5210 lbs. dry weight, where we really started to fall in love with this travel trailer and it’s layout. It had one slide-out and the Queen size bed was a real 80” x 60” Queen and not the downsized 74” x 60” Queen you find in most RV’s. That trailer had a dark leatherette sofa but a lighter colored fabric covered sofa we would have liked better.

Our new 2016 Jayco White Hawk 24RKS

The more we thought of this Jayco model, the more we decided that this is the one we would like to get. However, once we started to look for this trailer here in Canada, all 2016 models were sold out in a range of 500 km (315miles) and the new 2017 models would not come into the lots until mid summer or later.

So guess our surprise, when Benno stumbled onto a website with an ad for the precise Jayco model we were looking for, hidden at a dealer up north close to the Canadian Algonquin Park.  There was a brand new 2016 model, with the cloth sofa, at a very attractive price to boot.  What’s the catch?  Well, during this time of the year the area is plainly dead and no buyers get lost there. Now, if we wanted to see the trailer we’d have to travel all the way to Lovesick Lake RV Sales in Burleigh Falls, Ontario on the Trent Severn Waterway. For all you guys wondering where that is, it is north of the city of Peterborough in the Kawartha Lakes area on Highway 28. We made an appointment for the morning of last Thursday to view the travel trailer.

At the ungodly hour of 4 A.M., my alarm clock ripped me out of my dreams. I am not an early riser so this is especially hard for me to get out of bed. Thank goodness Benno has an easier time with that and he doesn’t mind getting behind the wheel in the dark. In the truck, while leaving our driveway, I noticed the truck clock showed only 02.15 AM. HaHa!! Benno smiled and said, “Sorry, I messed with your alarm clock, lets beat the Toronto rush hour”. This is bad, really bad isn’t it! The drive was rained out, it rained, and it rained some more, even harder at times and with blinding headlights from traffic traveling in the opposite direction, this was a strenuous drive to say the least.

At 05.45 A.M. we were passing close by my sister Christina and her husband Paul’s house in Mississauga, there Benno was joking, “Lets drive by and ring the bell and invite us in for breakfast.” We had a few laughs, this would be a surprise we pictured, and of course we kept on driving. A few minutes close to 06.00 A.M. we were breezing past the notoriously worst clogged up traffic area on highway 401 to the Toronto Airport, but made it through this big city ahead of rush hour traffic and had enough time to stop past Toronto for a well deserved breakfast, feed the dogs their morning snack and then kept on going.

When we arrived at the RV dealer, the salesman we had the appointment with had called in to say he would be delayed.  In the meantime, while we were waiting, the owner of the Lovesick Lake RV Sales gave us a tour of the souvenir store and the restaurant.  The store was filled with unique and beautiful things, very tastefully selected items. The restaurant was closed but would be open for the season soon.  There is a story about the name of the Lovesick Lake (about an Indian Princess who fell in love etc.), which you can find on the last page of the Menu.  In addition to the RV Sales, there is an associated large seasonal campground.  All in all, this is a very nice place to camp during warmer temps.  So, once our guy showed up we drove to the Jayco trailer, which was stored among the other 160, various types of rigs for sale at the snow covered storage area next to the road.  Of course Benno and I were familiar about everything already about the trailer, having seen it before and educating ourselves on the Internet, but we went through the whole process of looking and listening to the sales pitch again.  We knew we wanted it!  Now we had to play it cool and see if we could haggle and get an even better price.  This took some time, including us going for lunch in-between, to give the RV dealer some time to mull about the price, but we did it. 

The rest of the formalities took the better half of the day including getting our cheque certified at a bank in the city of Peterborough, having the trailer’s ownership registered at the license plate office in Lakefield in our name, and the most important part of setting up our trailer weight distribution hitch to mate it to the new travel trailer.  Finally, past 4 P.M. we rolled out of the parking lot, towing our new trailer, heading for home at the beginning of rush hour traffic. Underway we made stops for gas, dinner at a restaurant, letting the dogs go for walks and feeding them supper.  We were very tired driving back and it started to snow, covering the highway with a sheet of ice and the going was slow.  Finally, after 1150 km driving within a 24-hour period, close to 2 A.M., we crawled into our driveway and parked the new camper right next to our other Jayco.  All we wanted now was to sleep for the next three days.

As a side note:  Right on the highway, close to the Lovesick Lake RV place, we drove past the very famous Lakefield College on the way to the license plate office in Lakefield. This is the place where Prince Andrew, a younger brother of Prince Charles, and a son of Queen Elizabeth II, had been educated.  We heard it is a very good College and very pricy!