Enter the Buffalo

You gotta start somewhere.

    In 2019, Anne and I began seriously thinking about this pipe-dream of a trip we'd been talking about for the past few years. She'd apply for a sabbatical, we'd choose a bunch of National Parks, hook a pop-up camper to our car, and go. However, this starry-eyed plan had a few glaring problems.

    1. We didn't own the aforementioned camper.

    2. Our seriously under-powered 2005 Pontiac Vibe hatchback wheezed going up hills on a good day, with nothing in tow. 

    Serendipity hit in May of that year, in the form of a state inspection that the Vibe failed on too many fronts to count. We scrambled to find a new car in a month's time, and as luck would have it, Toyota had recently released a hybrid version of its popular Rav4 . We quickly decided it was the car for us, tracked one down, and after some typical dealership shenanigans, drove it home. Not only did it give us more room, increased safety, modern features and superior gas mileage--it had a towing capacity of 1750 pounds. 

    With that number in mind, I started scouring online forums and quickly realized most modern pop-up campers weighed waaayyy too much, unless we wanted to spend half the value of the car on a trendy modern one that came with its own slow-drip coffee maker and personalized Instagram account. Nope. As usual, we'd have to do things a little bit differently. More research kept bringing me back to a vintage brand of aluminum trailers with a small but enthusiastic following--Apache Trailers, built by the Vesely Company in Lapeer, MI.

    While admittedly their folding hard-sided ones looked way cool, they were almost all too heavy and seemed to all have a boatload of leaking and structural issues. Props to the people who have the time and skills and patience to rebuild cranking mechanisms and repair ABS plastic, but that's not me. So I set my sights on the soft-sided ones, which are still pretty damn cool, but have a lot less that can go wrong.

    After some searching and false starts, in the summer of 2020 I finally found one: a 1967 Apache Buffalo about three hours away in upper NY, selling for $900. From the pictures it looked structurally sound, and the canvas had been replaced just four years prior, which was a huge selling point. I drove there, gave it a good once over, decided the tires were very tired, but figured I'd be OK if I stuck to the backroads. After some misadventures with my phone losing all sense of direction and unplanned road closures due to construction, I made it back home.

    Then the real work began.

It gets better, I promise.