My response to Larry’s comment yesterday
It seems to me, Larry, that it's more normal for a large RV conglomerate to buy out a smallish RV company, and when that happens, there are two things you can bet on: the prices will go up, and the quality will go down.
It seems that old RV companies were started by a person who enjoyed camping and wanted to build a better RV. And did. And he was proud of his RVs and built the best ones he could, while still making a profit. But he gets old, has a couple of cataract operations, has to pee every 30 minutes, spends most of his waking hours trying to remember if he took his heart medicine, blood pressure medicine, blood thinner, and cholesterol pill, or not, and gets a powerful hankering to retire.
Then along comes a multibillion-dollar RV company and offers him enough money to comfortably retire with a mansion on the beach in Naples, Florida. He says, "SHOW ME THE MONEY !!! " and he's out the door.
The aforementioned billion-dollar RV company, which owns 15 other RV companies, eliminates half of its seasoned, experienced staff and replaces them with undocumented workers who will work for half the price. Then, along with other cost-cutting measures, quality goes out the window.
That's the normal progression of things, so it's unusual to hear about small companies acquiring pieces of a larger one. However, due to the bat flu and RVs becoming a popular way to live and travel, stranger things have happened.
But I'm happy with the Lance, I believe I've gone through the normal progression of RVs. I started with small ones and slowly worked my way up to the Arctic Fox, which was way bigger than I needed. I didn't know it at the time, and when I came to my senses, I went back to a small, easy-to-deal-with, not fussy, lightweight, and easy-to-keep-on-the-road Lance truck camper. And as an added bonus, it's small enough that they can bury me in it.
Tom
This pile of rocks that you see here will be recognizable to any camper as a campfire ring. Now, this isn’t just any campfire ring; it’s a campfire ring that was made by the Denver folks that I bought the 40 acres from, that I later named Pete’s.
Now I’m not a campfire maker myself, and I don’t ever recall having made one at Pete’s. But I left this one sitting here, near where I later put my shooting bench, just to remind me of the folks that came before me.
The lady I bought the property from has probably passed on by now, since she was in her 70s when I bought this place 30-something years ago. She was only selling the property because her husband had passed away. She no longer felt like going out there, since it reminded her too much of the campfires she and her husband had shared over the many years of camping there, so I felt like that was as good a reason as any why I should leave the old campfire ring alone.
After all, this is such a beautiful place, maybe they never left, perhaps they’re still here, making campfires when no one else is around, watching the sunsets, listening to the voices in the pines when the wind blows, and sharing their land with the wild donkeys that came long before them..... Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not, but I left the campfire ring just as it was when I made my first footprint on this land, just in case.