Don & Sue, Seward NE

Today marks one month since we picked up our new #357 (550 Ultra SUV) in Necedah.

We spent our first night at the nearby Castle Rock County Park where we expect many of you may have spent your first night and then went on to the fabulous ridge campground at Wyalusing State Park, based on Craig's recommendation. We then headed across Iowa and on to home in Nebraska.

We are completely pleased with our 550 and with our association with Cary and Craig and Marty and the rest of the Camp-Inn family. To honor the design and craftsmanship of the trailer we asked all of them to sign one of the galley doors so they will always be traveling with us.

We have a log book for our 357 and we started it out with the story of how we came to know about teardrops and about Camp-Inn in particular. Here is a link if you are interested in our story.

The story refers to an image or two so I'll add them to the image gallery later just to complete the tale.

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Here is the story with pictures...

The Story of Three-Five-Seven
An Odd Story of Coincidences
Better cycling and fine food and fewer motels and less money started our search for some sort of mobile living quarters to carry us into and through retirement. We were tired of taking several trips to move in and out of motel rooms. We were tired of sleeping in a bed that someone else slept in the night before. We were tired of piling our stuff everywhere in someone else’s room. We were tired of eating at convenient restaurants rather than restaurants that attracted us. We were tired of spending money on rooms and dining tables that did not make us happy. Fine food and good cycling are our two biggest recreational interests. We seek out good food and good ingredients relentlessly, from interesting small town diners to the country’s best restaurants to the best sources of ingredients and tools for our own kitchen. We ride our stable of bicycles several thousand miles a year, often traveling to nearby states to ride trails and roads. We wanted a way to support our cycling as well as allow us to eat well while we were traveling.

Our thinking and searching started sometime early in 2008, starting with mostly it cannot be. It cannot be a tent, it cannot be a pop-up, it cannot be another powered vehicle, it cannot be a pickup camper and it cannot be spelled with two letters. We could not find anything that even came close to something we wanted. We stopped thinking and looking in the spring of 2009. But that was before July 19, 2009, at the southwest corner of East Coolbaugh Street and North 2nd Street in Red Oak, IA, around 6:05pm CDT. Sue and I had ridden the first day of RAGBRAI 37, from Council Bluffs to Red Oak, IA, about 60 miles with an elevation gain of 4,000 feet. Sue had just left with a friend to go back to Omaha to pick up our car. Their car would only hold two people and two bikes so I stayed behind in Red Oak to soak up the atmosphere of the first overnight town for this RAGBRAI.

At that moment, 6:05pm, I happened to be heading east on Coolbaugh St, about a block west of the town square, pulling up to a stop sign. As I rested for a moment a white Subaru towing a small, squat, aluminum trailer stopped beside me. The trailer had a small door on my side with a window in it, which suggested that it was intended to be inhabited somehow. I expected that the top would pop-up somehow but could not see the mechanism in the few seconds before the Subaru took off. I chased after the trailer on a hunch and caught up with it (and the two bikes in a bike rack hanging off the back) at the next stoplight, 3rd street. I had already decided that this was an interesting encounter and also that this was an unusually well-built trailer, whatever its purpose. As the Subaru again took off at the light change I managed to take my first of three images. I again took off chasing the trailer but the Subaru made the light at 4th street and I lost contact with it for a moment in the congestion. I thought that would be my last view of this new toy but at that moment it pulled up on the side of the street a block away and two females got out and headed into a building on the north side of Coolbaugh St. with a Team Angry bus parked in front. I road up on the sidewalk and took a longer look at the trailer, still puzzled by what it might be. I took two more images, including a close up of the logo on the right-rear, and headed north to find something to eat. When Sue returned with our car we packed up my bike and drove over to where I had last seen the trailer, but it had disappeared so we headed home and forgot about it.

The first teardrop we ever saw.


Sometime that next weekend, July 25th, I was reviewing the images from our ride and came across the three trailer images. I figured out the “Camp-Inn” logo and did a Google search which took me to www.tinycampers.com. A few minutes later I understood that this was what we had been looking for but did not know about, a solution to our search for mobile living quarters, a teardrop trailer, and I shared it with Sue. The coincidental meeting with a Camp-Inn teardrop on Coolbaugh Street was only the first of many coincidences. When Sue asked where this company was located, we checked a map and saw that Necedah was only about an hour north of Madison. By coincidence I had a previously-scheduled meeting in Chicago from July 29-31 and Sue and I had long ago decided to drive, which was quite unusual. I have had more than 60 meetings in Chicago over the past ten years on this project and this was just the second time I had decided to drive rather than fly. Further, we had decided to spend the night in Madison on the way back and perhaps get in a bike ride in that bikehappy city. We would be staying over Friday night in Madison. Sue called Camp-Inn on Monday, July 27, and talked to Craig (we think) to see if someone could visit with us on Saturday. Craig said, “Sure, but call on Friday and confirm your plans”. As we left Chicago on Friday afternoon we called again, this time getting Cary, and he agreed to meet us at 10am on Saturday.

In the meantime I explored this new world of teardrop and tiny trailers on the Internet. Somehow we had missed this niche in recreational vehicles. It was clear that a teardrop met our needs well, a simple place to sleep in and a place to eat well, with minimal setup and easy mobility. It was also clear that the reputation of Camp-Inn was unsurpassed. We had found the “Serotta” of teardrops. (Our best bikes are Serotta’s, a custom built bicycle made in small quantities in Saratoga, NY, with outstanding build quality and a beautiful ride.) Needless to say our visit with Cary and the Camp-Inn “factory” went very well. These two guys, Cary and Craig, are both engineers and the application of that engineering mentality to the design and construction of these teardrop trailers meshed perfectly with our own view of how the world should work. We told Cary how well the Camp-Inn fit our needs and vision, even though we had not known that teardrops existed, and we described how we thought we would use it. Cary indicated that we fit their demographic almost perfectly. We also described how we came to find out about Camp-Inn, our encounter in Red Oak. Cary seems to know every owner of the 350+ Camp-Inns built to date and wondered whose it might be.

On our way out of town, along a pleasant rural route suggested by Cary, we passed by numerous parks and other potential camping places and we took a pass through many of them, convincing ourselves that we could find places to camp that we would enjoy (and avoiding those packed commercial sites that we feared). We also happened through Elroy, the hub of three major bicycle trails, enforcing our vision of using this teardrop to support our bicycling adventures. We were hooked. We eventually sent an email to Cary that we were very interested and were starting to work through all the questions, including financing, that would need to be resolved before we could commit to a purchase. We also passed along the three images from Red Oak and Cary identified the owner as Renee because the trailer had some distinctive features, notably missing the propane cylinder and the front storage box. Coincidently, Renee lives in Lincoln, NE, about 25 miles from where we live in Seward. Renee’s trailer was one of only three trailers in Nebraska.

As this process went on we started reading through T&TTT, a forum for folks interested in teardrops and similar trailers. There are more than 165,000 posts in the General Discussion area of this forum alone, on more that 12,000 topics. There was much to learn but there was no way I could read even a small fraction of those posts. But one evening in September I happened to start reading a post titled, “Wrecked TD Sighting in Nebraska”. There was a picture in the first post, dated September 14, of a damaged teardrop on a flatbed. It was Renee’s teardrop! It was clearly a Camp-Inn, with the same distinctive features. Reading through the topic I came across a reply from Cary: “Oh no! It is one of our customers. It is a somewhat unique configuration so easy to identify as our customer in Lincoln. Interestingly enough, another customer had just sent me a picture of this very same trailer (pre-accident) after having seen the customer on a trip. This customer is Renee from Lincoln Ne. I have not heard from her or her insurance company yet. Cary”

And of course we were the “another customer” although technically not an actual customer at that point. Cary probably knew we were hooked. I immediately sent off an email to Cary noting this additional coincidence. Later it turned out that the images we sent him were useful in dealing with Renee’s insurance company since the manufacturer could verify that the trailer was in fine shape only a couple of weeks before based on photographic evidence. Our email conversations continued and we finally scheduled a trip to Necedah at the end of December to take care of our final questions and to schedule the build. A fortuitous recollection of some old savings bonds, purchased long ago which had by now more than tripled in face value, more than covered the down payment and we were off and running.

And here are the two trailers, side by side in the "nest" in Necedah.


The build started in January, heading for a completion by early March to be ready for us to pick it up on April 1. We followed the weekly build photographs posted by Craig every Sunday evening with great interest. At one point Cary emailed about yet another coincidence. Renee’s trailer had been trucked up to Necedah for its repair, finally approved by the insurance company. It was sitting in the “nest”, the large area where Camp-Inn teardrops are built, quite near our own teardrop. So these two teardrops, oddly united, spent some time together, finally. It is now Wednesday, March 31, 2010. We are leaving this afternoon for eastern Iowa to spend the night on our way to picking up #357 at Camp-Inn in Necedah tomorrow afternoon, April 1, 2010.

A little over 8 months later here is our brand new trailer (left), in the same location as the first image. (right)


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Don&Sue Sylwester
Seward NE
2010 550 Ultra SUV #357

 

Don, that's a great story. I took the liberty of inserting it with photos into your original post.

 

Don, Great story! Those were some pretty amazing coincidences that you had! Our story is somewhat similar when it comes to reasons why we bought a Camp-Inn. We didn't like the hotel thing, sleeping in a bed that someone else had slept in, moving luggage in and out of hotels,flying, etc,etc,etc. We wanted to see the country, not fly over it. Bernice saw a Camp-Inn go through our little town in Maine and the rest is a love story with what is now our own little camper.

Charlie

 

Don&Sue great story i think we all found Camp Inn for the same reasons, way to many to list. Thank GOD for people like Cary,Craig and the people that work with them for turning out the great product that they do,also thanks to Evan&Lena # 343 for bringing us all together on this great forum!

Anna&Steve
550 classic # 269

 

Don and Sue,
Thanks for the story.
Steve and Ellen
550 Classic SUV #338

 

Don and Sue,

it is a great story. Welcome aboard. By the way, did you ever find out why Renee didn't get a propane tank?

Dave S

 

(Dave) We have not yet met Renee (Cary agrees we owe her some flowers or something) so we haven't had a chance to explore the setup of her trailer. We all have budgets and interests and Craig and Cary seem quite willing to accommodate what each of us want.

(All) We appreciate the kind comments about our story.

 

Dave,

No propane on that unit because Renee deleted out all her kitchen stuff. She really didn't want to be cooking on vacation.

Cary

 

Don and Sue...

great story...nice to see you keep a journal. We keep a log of all the places we have been with our campinn also. Also a photo journal. Helps recall some great memories.