The Vintage Camper Makes Its’ Maiden Voyage

Labor Day Weekend, 2019…a weekend that will be remembered for many things, including the official debut of our 1964 (we think) Aristocrat Lo-Liner Camper at Peninsula Campground, on Rollins Lake near Colfax, CA. After a year of professional repairs, husband/wife weekend restoration experiments, arguments over curtain positions and daydreaming, we finally hooked the camper up to a friends’ Chevy pickup and lugged the little bugger up into the hills and parked it in the woods. Why we needed to borrow a friends’ tow vehicle is another story, but after some creative re-wiring we were able to tow the camper with (mostly) legal trailer lighting. In other words, it was a small miracle that we arrived at our (expensive) campsite at all. So happy were we to actually be camping in our vintage camper, Meg and I decided to take our Corgi dog Daisy down to the lake for a celebratory swim, where I promptly lost the only door key to the locked camper (Pro Tip: don’t put keys in your bathing trunks). My friends’ Chevy pickup had a socket-set in it, so we disassembled part of the outside heater duct and broke back in. Later on that evening, I was reminded how ingenuitive Meg is when she created a frying pan out of used tinfoil to cook dinner, since we forgot half of our camping gear…I refuse to believe the camper is cursed, but we do need to do a few things before we go out again, including make a camping checklist, and buy our own camper-pulling truck.

John Young