Monday, July 26, 2010

The Great Adventure Begins!

Welcome to Passport to Camping! This is the Cook family's blog about what will be our many adventures camping. We began camping in December 2008 at Disney's Ft. Wilderness Resort. We started off in a tent for 3 nights and loved it. We headed back to Ft. Wilderness in March 2009 to celebrate Caleb's 5th Birthday. We borrowed a friend's pop up for that trip. Then we went in September 2009 for 7 nights in the same pop up. The dream began with the first camping trip...one day we would get a camper.

We started off wanting a pop up. Went to an RV show and fell in love with the Avalon by Coleman. We kept putting it off because Mark's job was "ify" -- good thing because he was laid off from work in July 2009. During his 11 month lay off, we went from wanting a pop up to wanting a hybrid to a travel trailer.

Now that Mark is working full time again - we were able to go ahead a purchase our camper. So on....

Friday, July 23, 2010 ---- the day we finalized the purchase of our new camper.

We purchased a 2011 Keystone Passport 290BH.

We arrived at Lazydays around 3pm - just as Tropical Storm Bonnie's rain bands were making their way through Central Florida. We met with the Finance guy and finalized all our paperwork. We got our insurance set up and headed over to the benefits office to learn about all our perks. After that, a walk through tech came and got us and took us to the camper where he went over everything with us. After he left we had dinner and watched the movie RV (with Robin Williams). The kids loved it!

We discovered however that our DVD player wasn't working properly. It would loose the connection for no reason. Item 1 added to the list of things to fix for Saturday!

Saturday morning, we dropped our Suburban off at a service bay to have the brake controller installed and they came and got the Passport to install the weight distribution hitch, etc. This was only supposed to take 3 hours, ended up taking 7! So we stayed for a second night because rain was coming and we didn't want to tow it for the first time in the rain. We hit the pool over at the Lazydays campground and enjoyed the storm later that night.

Here are a few pictures to document the beginning of a new era in our family!


Mark and our Walk Through tech at Lazydays (sorry can't remember his name). But he was very nice! Of course the rain bands from Tropical Storm Bonnie made for a nice outside inspection :)

The "master" bedroom. I love the decor used in the Passports! (aside, the bed isn't comfortable!) I went home before we stayed the second night and got the memory foam off our bed, that helped a lot.

The kids in the bunkhouse! My kids love making tents so they wasted no time make tents out of the quad bunks.


View from the bunkhouse into the main room. I love our entertainment center with the swivel TV. However, Mark's feet hit it in the night so it bugs him.


Caleb on night 1 in the top bunk. He was so excited to finally sleep in a bunk bed.



Taya in her bunk. We made her sleep in the bottom until Mark can make bed rails for the two top bunks.


The kids decided to play McDonalds with the plastic slide on the screen door. The things they come up with!

Night 2 at Lazydays....after we got back from the pool a big storm hit. Mark snapped this picture right before the storm started.


Another picture of the storm coming in. Well we know the Passport doesn't leak!

Outside Camping World right before we left to take it home. OK, so we admit, we were scared to death to tow this home! We had a "no talking" rule so Mark could concentrate! It was only a 15 minute ride to the house. We made it in one piece. Then we had to tow it to where we are keeping it, about 20 minutes away.
So stop back by. This is a work in progress, many more posts and pictures to come! And here is a list of our upcoming trips. And since this is a family blog....you can see posts from any of us - even the kids (in time):)
September 11-18 - Ft. Wilderness
October 22-24 Ft. Wilderness
October 30-Nov 1 - Ft. Wilderness (with the DIS board Fort Fiends)
November 24 - 28 Ft. Wilderness
December 24 - 26 Ft. Wilderness
December 31 - January 2 Ft. DeSoto Campground
 
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