Log of The Travel
Trailer Minerva
Introduction  

In the fall of 2021, I bought a travel trailer.  This was not some quick spur of the moment purchase but rather one that I had been thinking about for many years.  Camping is in my blood or inherited at least from my parents who would take the family camping in a pop-up trailer, the type that the sides pull out and a tent pops on top.  The pop-up had two beds, one on each side which my parents would sleep on one side and my two sisters on the other while my brother and I would sleep in our boy scout tent outside.   On long weekends or for a week during summer the family would go to one of the many state parks in Florida, Anastasia, Alexander Springs, Manatee Springs, O’Leno, Homosassa, Juniper Springs, Fort Clinch and others.  I have many fond memories of these trips, swimming at the beach or in the springs, canoeing down the rivers with my brother and father, campfires at night and the family sitting around the picnic table at meals.  

Me with Mom and Dad and their RV
1994

After my brother, sisters and I grew up and moved out of the house my parents bought their first motor home or RV. Over the following twenty years the upgraded six times to ever increasing size of RVs cumulating in a 11,600-mile journey from their home in Florida to Alaska and back.  Much to my surprise in 1995 they sold their mobile RV and their roaming days were over but not their end of travel trailers.  After traveling in their RV across the US, the place they loved the most was the mountains of North Carolina with seldom a year going by that they didn’t spend at least a week there.  Upon selling the RV they took to Alaska, they bought a small travel trailer on a permanent spot in the mountains in North Carolina.  While their days of traveling around the US were over, they would migrate every summer from their home in Florida and spend it in their trailer in the cooler North Carolina mountains.  

During my parents RV travel years I would sometimes get a post card from mom and dad from some state saying how much fun they were having.  I never had a RV or trailer, but I did go camping in a tent by myself, with my family and for a few years with the boy scouts as a boy scout leader. As I got older my tent camping lessened, busy with family, work and life until in 2015 I decided to do so again camping at the Floyd Yoga Jam two years in row which reacquainted me with the discomforts of tent camping, rain, hard ground (air mattress went flat), cold, camping on a camp stove and so on and the thought of a travel trailer begin to emerge.  It wasn’t a new thought, the seed planted from the camping trips when I was a child, growing over the years fueled by the cards and letters from mom and dad’s travels and now the first branches were rising from the subconscious it sprang forth, “I want a travel trailer.”  Having a ten-year-old Ford Explorer at the time which needed replacing, I bought a new Chevy Colorado truck that was equipped with a towing package thinking ahead to when I would have a trailer.   T

My thoughts were fertilized further when sister and her husband sold their pop-up camper trading it in for a travel trailer in 2017 and I would hear stories about their adventures and then they sold their house living in their travel trailer full time.  In 2018 I retired and moved back to Florida and my sister and her husband were camping in near by state park and my brother and I took our tents and camped with them for a few days.  It was this trip, after seeing my sister living in luxury while my brother and I were in tents, I decided no more tent camping, it was to much work and too uncomfortable.  Busy with getting settled in a new house the death of my father, I finally bought a travel trailer in the fall of 2021.  

I bought a Flagstaff E-Pro 19FD which is on the smaller size as trailers go at twenty feet in length.  It has all the comforts of home with a single couch over which a queen murphy bed folds down, kitchen with sink, gas stove, microwave and refrigerator, a dinning table that can seat two, and a bath with toilet, sink and shower.  The E-Pro is equipped for off grid camping with two tanks of gas for heating and cooking, two batteries charged by solar panels on the roof which run all the lighting, TV and radio and refrigerator.  

In the following months, and hopefully years, I will travel to places new and old with my travel trailer and this is the journal or log of my trips.  With this adventure springing forth from my mind into reality, I have named my trailer after Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom.  

This is the log of the Travel Trailer Minerva.