The World According to Google

For the past month or so, I've seriously been considering purchasing a camper. I should state clearly that I am not a camper. I do not particularly enjoy camping. Too many bugs and raccoons. That being said, the thought of a camper sounds appealing to me on several fronts. For starters, I am tired of carrying around a lifetime worth of stuff. I am currently forming a plan for my great escape and the first part to executing this plan is to get rid of pretty much everything I own. I have come to the realization that antiques are highly over rated. And collectables. In retrospect, I have no idea how I ended up with so many collectables. And what exactly are collectables? As far as I can tell, they are objects of varying size that, at one point in time I thought were cute, pretty, whimsical, unique, or might-be-valuable-one-day. I live alone in a four bedroom house that is FILLED with stuff. I must stop the madness!

Once I am able to rid myself of all of my things, I will get rid of the house. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen, two mud rooms, utility room, 3 season porch and a garage(with two storage rooms) is more space than any one person needs. Even with the dogs and cats taking up their fair share of square footage, I cannot justify having all this space – filled with all this stuff. So I will sell the house. I have come to the conclusion that home ownership is highly overrated. I look back on my years as a renter with fondness. If something broke – call the owner.

The other thing that I find appealing about owning a camper is the fact that it is portable. I like the idea of being able to hitch my house to the back of my suburban and drive off to parts unknown. Winters in Florida, summers in Maine; sounds like a plan to me. So I have been surfing Craig's List in search of a camper. After surfing for a week or so, it dawned on me that I really don't know anything about campers. For instance, how much does a camper weigh? Can I tow it with my suburban? Does size matter (it does)? So the first thing I did was to google the specs of my truck to find out how much camper I could pull. This turned out to be good news. The max tow weight for my truck is 6000 pounds. From what I've seen, most campers up to 32 feet fall well below this limit. So far so good.

Then I started to notice more detail in the ads referencing anti-sway hitches and gas powered refrigerators. The gas powered refrigerator had me baffled. So off to google. It turns out that gas powered means powered by propane. I'm still not completely clear on this, but the idea sounds good. Some of the motorhomes that I looked at didn't have this option. I considered motorhomes only briefly. The suburban can tow a camper, but a motorhome can't tow a suburban, so that idea was scrapped. So anyway, a gas powered refrigerator cools with heat, using ammonia as a coolant. That's all I know. The article went on (and on) about how this this works, but I figured I had all I really needed to know, so I moved on to the anti-sway hitch.

Apparently there is an anti sway hitch and there is an anti sway control system. I have read a little about these and have come to the conclusion that the sway control system is preferred, particularly when used in conjunction with the anti sway hitch. So the upshot is that the hitch is on the truck and the system is on the camper. I know from personal experience that not swaying is important. One winter, when I was 12, I traveled with my family by car to Pensacola. We were towing a 28 foot sailboat behind us. Well, as anyone who has traveled with kids will attest, road trips get very long with kids in the car – particularly kids who fight a lot (like my sister and I did). Long story short; two kids fighting in back seat, father gets frustrated (after telling them to knock it off for the past 800 miles), turns around to (hopefully) smack them both. Sadly (for him) he misses, but he was distracted long enough to swerve a little. Apparently a little swerve can turn into a big swerve when you are towing things behind you. Fortunately, Dad got it under control and we continued on our way. My sister and I, never missing a chance to annoy, immediately started berating poor old dad. “Geeze, are you trying to kill us?” “If you hadn't tried to smack us, that wouldn't have happened.” So I'm pretty well sold on the importance of having the anti sway hitch and sway control system.

So far, my research has gotten me to a point where I know how much I can tow, I can keep my food cold, and I can hopefully keep from rolling the whole works over. This is a start, but far from enough to make any sort of intelligent purchase. So back to google.

In addition to googling for camper info, I am also googling for a source to sell off all of my antiques and collectibles. It occurs to me as I write this, if I didn't have access to google, how long would it take me to find this information? Would I ever find all that I need, or would I have to go out into the world and actually talk to people who know about theses things? Egad! I would never get out of here.