Chapter Three — Camping, not Glamping

We had started looking at campgrounds and made a few calls, but now that we had a camper, the search became more intense. Sweetie and I searched for a campground not too far from Bourbonnais. He did most of the searching and contacting people.

It amazes us how people stay in business. You make a phone call, get a voice mail message so they can “get back to you” and they never do!!

Our former campground had park models that they rented out, so we thought other campgrounds did the same. One answered, “oh yes we have them, but we only rent by the week.” Another, “we’re not sure if we have any sites available. Call us back next week.” A third, “what size is your RV?” Well, at the time of that call, we didn’t have one yet, so couldn’t answer that question.

Then Sweetie found this one. (We’re leaving the name out for reasons that will become clear later.)

We explained our housing situation, and she (I’ll call her Cissy) was most kind and said she’d work with us. It’s 20 minutes from where our house is being built. So that was great! It was also close to our storage unit, and close to Sweetie’s daughter. Cissy said her campground was quiet, and they enforced the quiet hour rules. That was comforting.

Yay! We’ll have something in which to live while the house is being built. And we’ll have a place to put the camper. Inhale. One hurdle done.

We met with the Cissy on a rainy day, and she showed us several campsites that would work for our camper. She took us on a tour of the property, the two shower houses, where laundry was, and drove us to the river to show where there was a beach (which we still have not gone to), the boat launch (which we don’t need), but there were benches for fishing. So we chose a lot with a pond view (formerly called the lake), which, for us, helped the transition to a no-water view in the future. Across the road in front of our camper is another pond, which Cissy told us used to be a swimming hole, complete with lifeguards. But now both are just ponds, with no fish (so she says, so people don’t go fishing). I get it.

We filled out the form, gave her the first month’s rent and got a key for the lock. (The campground has gates that lock at 8 p.m. during the week and 10 p.m. on weekends. We laugh and call it “curfew.”) We were officially campers.

Then we set up delivery with Ty. He personally deliver ed the trailer the Thursday before we closed on the lake house. Ty had to deliver it because it weighs more than our car can tow. Not to mention that Hyundai had a recall on tow hitches last year (2022) OCTOBER, and they didn’t have a fix for it, which really screwed up our move. We planned to get a small cargo trailer for our stuff, but we couldn’t do that.

We planned to bring some things down on Friday, but it rained all day and we decided not to move in the rain and muck it all up from the get-go, so we decided to stay in a hotel for one more night and move in on Saturday.

“This will be nice.” Or so we thought.