Part 2 – An Unexpected Adventure
The search begins
If you read my first post, you learn’t that we decided to upgrade our camper. The question was, to what…
At first and for a good amount of time I searched for replacement tent tops. Our tent was made by OzTrail, so that would be a logical place to start. On their website they had them listed, great, but the price was a little on the high side. But we still liked the idea, we knew the tents fitted out trailer as they were the same size, but we could get one with a bigger room.
But then for some reason they disappeared from their website. After some more searching we discovered that Marlin Campers were now the official resellers of the OzTrail tents…ok, not a problem, we can buy them from them. But to our shock, they had gone up almost double in price. Their cheapest tent was over $4k. We call it the COVID tax and you might have seen it on camping gear, cars, 4WDs. The demand for all this stuff went through the roof not that people had to holiday here in Australia and with that came the lack of product and prices went up. In fact, we could sell our Pajero for over $5000 more than we paid for it right now, we are not going to, but we could. When have cars every increased in value (excluding classic cars)?
We were still interested though, this would be still a cheaper way to go. I contacted Marlin to which they told me that they were no longer selling the tents by themselves, they then disappeared from their website (N.B. They are back).
Skip forward a few months.
Until one Saturday morning, as I lay in bed telling my wife about some campers I saw online. For months I would dream and look at campers hoping that one day we could get one, but I kept it to myself until that moment. She unexpectedly then said to me, “Let’s go look at them”. I never expected her to say this, but she recently got a promotion at work and maybe we could now afford to purchase a new camper. Excited we went for a drive to the Southside of Brisbane and visited Mars Campers.
We were there to look at their rear-fold camper as this is what we thought we wanted. Alison’s sister has a rear-fold and it provided a good amount of room we thought would suit us.
But as we walked in the door, the first camper we saw, just to the left of their entry, was their Forward Fold. I have never considered a FF before. My wife was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. “What’s this!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I like this”. She was sucked it to its beauty, the kitchen, the fridge slide, the lounge suite. All of it. The main thing is I was surprised by it’s price. Not much more than the Read Fold and you get a lounge area! Let’s just say that after that, the other campers had no appeal for her and for me.
We left there with a new mission..to find the best Forward Fold.
Stay tuned as the hunt continues…
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