Mobile life blends mechanical woes with incomparable beauty

Early last summer my wife and I were trying to plan a vacation, a road trip of sorts.

She wondered whether it was possible to rent a lightweight, dog-friendly travel trailer. She did some internet sleuthing and found what seemed like a feasible option. The owners of the camper would give you a tutorial on how to use everything and how to hook and unhook it for towing.

Not having any experience with campers at the time and limited experience towing anything, my analytical brain started calculating the potential for disaster. We punched in some prospective trip details and winced when we saw the estimated cost.

We had long thought of owning a travel trailer when we lived in Pennsylvania, before we ever dreamed of life in another part of the country, but the idea seemed out of reach. You need a reliable vehicle capable of towing something weighing several thousand pounds behind it. You need a sense of financial freedom and stability. If you don't own a house and don't have any foreseeable plans to, you need storage. You need to have at least a little familiarity with how campers work, right?

Now, years later, living in Montana, we've fortunately been able to remove most of those obstacles, except for the familiarity and mechanical aptitude part. That part, as we later determined, we're just going to have to work on.

But the idea of renting a camper got my wheels turning. For that price or a little more, we could put a down payment on our own. Better yet, maybe we could even find something used, local and lightweight we could purchase outright.

I started some internet searching of my own with some models that might fit the bill and, wouldn't you know, I found a gentleman with a 20-year-old fiberglass travel trailer for sale near Bigfork. My wife approved. I sent him a message through the website and we waited. I checked my email. I checked the website. Over and over. Days passed. Hope and excitement had considerably dimmed when one night my phone rang. I missed the call but he left a voicemail. I listened:

"Hey Casey, this is Neal with the Casita trailer …"

My jaw dropped. I stared at my wife.

"IT'S THE GUY WITH THE CASITA!" I screamed.

I called him back and we set up a time to see it. We later learned he had received several offers but was determined to find the right people, the right situation for the trailer he and his wife had enjoyed for so many years.

It was us. It was meant to be. We called him back the next day and it was ours.

We quickly got to work on that familiarity part. We had a road trip to plan and now we had this eggshell on wheels with its collection of pumps, plugs and ports. We scoured forums. We customized. We installed some new flooring. It's solar-powered now.

BEING CAMPER owners certainly hasn't been without its challenges, however. That mechanical aptitude part? Well, we're working on that.

Last summer on that big initial road trip we lost all power to those pumps, plugs and ports on Day 2 as we rolled into a campsite in Island Park, Idaho, on our way to the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone and the Beartooth Highway. We continued on like a tent on wheels with jugs of water, solar lanterns and head lamps, cooking by fire and restocking coolers with ice when we could.

Just recently we were packing up to leave a spectacular site along Upper Thompson Lake when our rarely used awning locked up and refused to roll all the way back inside its casing. With its legs folded up, my wife was standing with her arms raised, supporting the weight of it while I hopelessly tried to let it out again and crank it past the point where it was stuck.

Just then a man on a bike pedaled down the lane to our campsite. He had ridden past twice on the main road and surmised something was wrong. A mechanical and electrical engineer by trade, he rode to his truck to get a much better set of tools than we traveled with at the time.

The screws and bolts were stuck and rusted and tucked up underneath a curve below the awning's casing. Only through his help were we able to get the awning removed and secured through the back window of our SUV. It would have taken us hours, possibly having to take several trips to nearby Happy's Inn or home to Kalispell in search of the right tools. Ah, the fun of well-worn campers!

On our ride home we marveled at the odds of it all. The timing. An engineer? Who happened to be going for a bike ride? If he was driving past he probably wouldn't have even noticed.

We were and are so thankful. For our journey here to Montana years ago, absolutely. But also for the eventual ownership of something that once seemed so unattainable. Something other than our hiking boots that allows us to experience these serene and unimaginably beautiful locations and the countless selfless people who have helped us along the way that live in our hearts and continue to inspire us.

It was meant to be.

Photographer Casey Kreider may be reached at ckreider@dailyinterlake.com.