Our Latest Addition

So off a whim I was looking at 'Deuce and half' military trucks on eBay, don't ask me why, bored I guess. Mentioned one of then for sale in my hometown to my father in law who was interested and asked that I look at the DRMO (Defense Re-utilization Management Office), big acronym for the place that auctions off all of the old military stuff.

So after a quick search I found the site and sure enough plenty of 'Deuce and half' trucks. But then I saw something that I thought would be of much more interest, especially if we could get one at a good price, a pop up camper.

There was 4 for sale in Portsmouth, Virginia. Most likely used by the Morale Welfare and Recreation office to rent to Navy families, my best guess.

I did my research and saw that the average price of these models on the Internet averaged $4500+. We decided we would go halves on one and set a price limit.

It was a 24 hour auction so I wanted to wait until the last minute to bid, unfortunately that would be 4:00am here!

Around 11:00am I decided I wasn't going to stay up, I placed my maximum bid and went to sleep.

Chris woke me up early in the morning and told me I had been outbid, there was an hour left until the end of the auction. I said it was time to roll up our sleeves and fight!

The camper I wanted (3 was of one model and 1 was gaining higher bids so as far as I knew it must have been better), the next bid would put us out of our range. Time to pick another camper.

At one minute till the end of the auction I placed my highest bid and clicked 'OK', I was the highest bidder! Yeah! Then it showed that there was 15 minutes left in the auction! WHAT! Some sort of strange rule about last minute bids. So I nervously waited for the 15 minutes to count down and when it did...it showed that the auction would end in ANOTHER 15 minutes! That was that, I closed my netbook and went to sleep.

When I woke up Chris said that we had indeed one the auction!

What did I get? A 2003 Coleman (Fleetwood) Santa Fe. According to the NADA Blue Book the high retail on this is $3030 with no options selected as I don't know what options it has! I have only seen the pictures with it closed.

How much? With 10% 'Buyers Premium' the total cost was $1277 which is exactly the high amount we wanted to pay (Of course it was going to work out that way). Being that we went halves with my father in law it cost that much less for us. He is going to pick it up and get it cleaned up and titled.

Funny thing is Chris and I were never really excited about camping, but when we saw the pictures of this pop up on web sites we realized that this would make a cool alternative to blowing money at hotels when we are home and we can stay at campgrounds near the beach.