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Old 04-13-2008, 06:35 PM   #5
markandanne
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3 girls here rather than boys, so I won't even pretend that we have the same physical energy level that you have, but we spent a bit of time over the past year and a half renting different RV's from a pop-up to a Class A that we drove across the country last Christmas to visit our folks back East. We wound up in Kansas for a couple of days marooned in a blizzard until they re-opened I-70. The kids were 4, 6 and 8 at the time. The Class-A was a 34 ft with a slide, which sounds huge until you look at the actual floorplan space and realize it's really no bigger than the 3124KB that we bought. The main advantage the slide had was to allow easier maneuvering around each other, especially while cooking. Yes, we had to actively engage the kids to keep them from driving us crazy, but overall they enjoyed the trip.

Interestingly we all had as much fun in the canvas-sided pop-up as we did in the other RV's, which is one of the reasons we bought a TM (as a serious upgrade to the pop-up with a real bathroom and a much better sense of privacy; more important with the girls as they get older than the boys most likely).

One thing no one really mentions regarding young ones is that no RV or camping trailer is very safe compared to how you fortify your home with a toddler. The stairs will be hard to negotiate for the youngest for a couple of years. The cook-top is probably the scariest thing to me, even though our kids are now almost 6, 8 and 10 so absolutely no rough housing in the trailer while cooking. A microwave might have an edge here since the heat is contained inside, but they have other disadvantages (weight, shore power requirement, etc) so I'm glad overall I have the oven. If you keep the pilot off inside the oven it's actually pretty safe with the kids; even if they play with the knobs they can't get gas into the TM like they can with the stove because of the thermocouple. The TM toilet is probably far safer than a toilet in your house (for drowning risk) because you don't have a bunch of water floating in it. The chemicals may be problematic however; you don't want the kids wondering what blue water tastes like. None of this is specific to the TM; any RV will have similar issues.

Anyway, good luck with your decision, whatever it eventually turns out to be. I'm sure the kids will have a blast with anything you do with them.
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