Welcome to Camping with the Schoon's

Welcome to my new blog, Camping with the Schoon's. This will be our 3rd year as Travel Trailer owners and prior to that we were tent campers for over 15 years. We've camped with kids, with dogs, with other adults. We've camped at the beach, in the mountains, the desert, parking lots and even in our own backyard. With all of that camping comes lots of experience that I think might be beneficial to others. Hopefully this will be a place that you'll bookmark and come back to often. We will share our stories and adventures and along the way link to some great places to camp and things that we find that are either nice to have or essential to our camping lifestyle.

We both have full-time jobs. I'm in Information Technology and work for a large computer company. My wife works for a real estate firm and sells houses in the area where we live, Charlotte, NC. We've both been in North Carolina for a lot of years. Myself since 1986 and my wife since 2000. We've both lived here longer than anywhere, we actually joke sometimes that this house we live in now has been the one place either of us have lived the longest. Life is funny like that.

The camping bug hit me early when my two oldest kids (now 27 and 25) were around 10 and 12 years old. I needed something to get us out and away from the normal routine. I had a buddy that had just started camping and I went out with him once and had a blast. I literally went to Walmart when we got back and bought everything that he had, tents, sleeping bags, cooking gear,etc. The next weekend I took the kids out and we were hooked!

Me sometime in 2003 with our original equipment, that's Lady the black Labrador retriever in the background, she's no longer with us and we now have Saber the Labradoodle.

Since then we've upgraded the tent on multiple occasions, upgraded to tarping out whole site thanks to a recommendation of a buddy of mine and finally upgraded to a small but very nice travel trailer. We've also been through 3 SUVs in that time frame. We started with a 1996 Chevy Blazer, upgraded that to a fancy new 2003 GMC Envoy and most recently moved up to a 2012 GMC Yukon. The Yukon pulls the travel trailer like a dream.

Our latest Hauler, a 2012 GMC Yukon, new to us.

The trailer itself is a 2016 Forest River Wildwood 201BHXL. The BH stands for Bunk House and XL stands for Extra Lite. LOL, I think that every camper manufacturer finds some way to say their campers are the lightest. The fact is that dry this thing weighs about 4100 pounds, the max on the Envoy was around 6100 pounds and with all of us, the dog and all of our gear it struggled on just about any hill. Once I threw the Yukon at it, with its 8500 pound capacity we were in much better shape! Of course we have the braking system and the weight distribution hitch to make things safer.

The day we picked up the trailer, hauling with the 2003 GMC Envoy.

We've done a lot of miles in the last 2 years and are planning our next trips for this year with our first one being in just a couple of days from this post. I am very glad you're here and I hope that you will continue to come back and check things out. My main focus will be on trip logs which I hope to actually write when we are out in the field or very soon after returning. I will be happy to answer any and all questions that may come up and will try to leave comments open on all the posts unless things get out of hand. I don't want to be some crazy moderator but I also don't think much of what I will write will be very controversial. For the most part this will be my place for keeping track of things and logging our adventures, I hope someday that we'll come back here as a family and this will be our photo book of sorts. Thanks again for being here and I will talk to you soon.