Nico's toy car rolled the length of the dinette table on its own at Long Pine Key and clattered onto the floor, and he wanted to know if the camper was haunted. It wasn't. It was about two inches low on the driver's side, and I hadn't noticed because I was so pleased with myself for getting the roof up.
When you shop for a used pop-up, everyone tells you to check the canvas, the floor and the lift system. Nobody mentions the pile of small, unexciting things you need before the first night. We bought ours in February, all Camco, and they live in the green bin on the camper floor. Here's what each piece cost and what it actually does.
The $96 starter set
- Leveling blocks, a 10-pack: $36. Interlocking plastic squares, like oversized building bricks. You stack them into a little ramp and drive the low-side wheel up onto it.
- Wheel chocks, a pair: $13. Wedges that go under the tires so the camper can't roll once it's off the hitch.
- Water pressure regulator: $13. A small brass fitting that screws onto the campground spigot.
- 25-foot drinking water hose: $18. White, made for drinking water, and used for nothing else.
- 30-amp to 15-amp "dogbone" adapter: $16. Lets the camper's 30-amp cord plug into a regular household outlet.
That's $96, about what the four of us spend on one dinner out. Every piece has been used by now.
Leveling and chocking, in the right order
A pop-up gets leveled in two directions. Side to side happens with the blocks, before you unhitch, because the only way onto them is to drive. Front to back happens with the tongue jack after you unhitch. I keep a small bubble level in the green bin, and Maya, who is nine and loves a job with a right answer, reads it while I creep forward and Dana watches the wheel.
At Long Pine Key I did it backward. I unhitched, cranked the roof, pulled out the bed ends and only then noticed the slope, when the toy car took off. Fixing it would have meant closing everything up, hitching back up and driving onto blocks at 6 p.m. with hungry kids. So we slept with our heads on the high side, and I learned to level first, every time.
Two more lessons from that weekend. The four stabilizer jacks at the corners are not for leveling. I tried. They're for keeping the camper from bouncing when somebody climbs into bed, and the couple who sold it to us warned that cranking them hard to lift a corner is how they get bent. And the tongue jack and stabilizers sink into soft sand, so we now carry four squares of scrap plywood from Rafael's garage to set them on. Cost: one promise to help him clean that garage.
Chocks go under the wheels before the hitch comes off, even when the site looks flat. At Bahia Honda it looked dead level. When I lifted the tongue off the ball, the camper still eased back an inch into the chocks with a soft thunk, which is exactly the sound I want to hear from a chock and not from a buttonwood tree.
Water and power
Campground spigots can run at a higher pressure than a 17-year-old camper's plumbing appreciates. The retired couple in Homestead told us they never hooked up without a regulator in 12 years, and that was enough for me. At Bahia Honda, our first site with water, it went spigot, regulator, white hose, camper, and nothing dripped under the sink.
The white hose rule is Dana's. On the last morning at Bahia Honda I used it to rinse sand off the kids' feet and set the end down in the sand. Dana watched me do it, then watched me rinse the fitting for a full minute. There's an old green garden hose at home for feet now.
The dogbone adapter was the one I misunderstood. On a hot Saturday in March I plugged the camper into our patio outlet with it and turned on the roof AC, thinking I'd cool the camper down for a nap. It ran for about 40 seconds. Then the breaker tripped and took the patio lights and half the kitchen outlets with it. A household outlet gives 15 amps. The AC wants more. At home the adapter runs the lights and the little fridge and keeps the battery charged, and that's all I ask of it now. At a campsite with 30-amp power, the camper plugs straight in and the AC is happy.
The rest of the green bin
- Work gloves for the greasy hitch and jacks.
- A tire pressure gauge. I check both camper tires before every trip.
- The spare crank handle, spare fuses and a few LED bulbs, which came from a separate pile of small-parts receipts I'll add up at the end of the summer and probably regret.
None of this is the fun part of owning a camper. All of it is the reason the fun part works. Jonathan Dickinson is booked for this weekend, if our playoff run lets us go. The green bin is already in the camper, bubble level on top where I'll trip over it.
