Time is Marching On ~ Its time to tell

Finally, I sit and take time to write about our traveling adventures. Every year we (my wife Helen and I) take some southern or western state to explore. This is usually done in the coldest months, that is February for us who live in New Hampshire. I have cabin fewer in this time of year and I become lathergic I tend to take naps and I'm not a happy camper like in the sommer months.

This year we picked Southern California as our exploration area. We selected San Diego as our start and ending point. To keep my sanity I start planning in December until we leave. This year it was Feb . 14th. In my planning I find airlines, hotel accommodations, car rentals, places to visit and anything else I can find online.
We are geocachers and in the planning a lot time is spent looking at all the locations we plan on visiting to see if there are caches waiting to be found. If your not familiar with geocaching checkout http://geocaching.com in short to me the idea of geocaching is to bring people to places they wouldn't normally go to. I can honestly say that we have been to many places that for sure we would have missed had it not been for geocaching. We also have met many people on our quest for geocaching, many of them have become friends.

You could probably guess that we used Southwest as our airline from the picture above, I have had good luck with them for price and service. Our trip out there was pretty unventfull except for a page call for my wife at the airport after we went through TSA check point. The page asked my wife to check-in with Southwest counter for an important message. One immediately thinks that something is wrong back home with a family member or relative. Helen went to the counter and the girl calls someone on the other end. It turned out that TSA wanted the combination to here checked baggage TSA lock. This combination lock had the TSA key slot on the bottom but I guess they don't want your bags locked anymore. I think the problem with the bag was that I had packed several double A batteries for all of my geocaching gadgets and had put a rubber band around them. Maybe it looked suspicious? We were on our way with no further problems.

Last week we checked out a couple of slide-in truck camper dealers in the southern part of the state. There are  my many choices, most of them are determined by two factors; cost and what weight limits our truck can safely carry. We easily eliminated two classes, the slide-outs (cost) and (weight). My vision was to buy a used unit. At Truck Camper Warehouse there were many new units with not so many used. Bill Penney, owner was very useful and gave us some good info, he said that he had actually helped in the design of a new Northstar camper.   I am an avid reader of "Truck Camper Magazine" (online magazine) [Back home I checked out his story on line. http://www.truckcampermagazine.com/new-camper:-2012-northstar-liberty/
We headed to our second dealer, Polar RV Sales in Salem, NH and were amazed at all of the used campers here, Dan the owner gave so much info that we were nearly overwhelmed. We were saved from making a decision by darkness around four-thirty. We would returned Saturday after a scheduled vehicle maintenance appointment in Manchester.
On our second early morning visit we had clear mind and choices were more defined. We decided on a 2004 Lance camper model 1025, this camper was not his but here on consignment . The owner wanted $13,500 we wanted to spend around $7,000, Dan would relay our offer and get back to us, a couple of days later the call came in with a $10,000 price. I told Dan I would counter offer a $8,000. It is January and not exactly camping weather here in New England, the owner might need the cash in hand soon, who knows? The luck of the draw, he accepted. The deal is nearly complete as of this blog.