Originally Posted by vincoTM
Hello folks! I have been lurking on the TM forum for a few days now, so I thought it would be a good time for me to make an introductory post. This spring, I traded a rifle for a not-too-bad 1988 Coleman Sequoia popup. My wife was instantly on board with the idea of camping, but she and I both got very rapidly frustrated with the Coleman because it turned out not to have a title with it. Plus we did get it cranked up, but it's a little sketchy in the lift cable mechanism. And then we started thinking about tent camping in a box, in the rain - or worse yet, what if it hails??? That just sounds like a lot of not as much fun as initially dreamed. I do absolutely have to give it props, though: that old popup has two king-size beds in it rated at a thousand pounds apiece capacity!
So then we thought about selling it and buying a travel trailer. We shopped and looked and poked and prodded, but I just never could warm up to the idea of 12 years of payments at a hundred fifty a month, or the weight of the darn trailers! We even went to look at other popups thinking they might be nicer than our Coleman, but they just weren't.
Trolling around on Craigslist one day I saw an ad for an older (1997) Trailmanor 2619 that was local to me and within the price range of buying for cash. I put my Google-fu into overdrive and quickly learned about the neatest looking popup I'd ever seen: the Trailmanor! I went and saw it one day on the way home from work, and while likely very functional still, it did have some cosmetic and functional issues that I didn't really want to deal with or spend my money on. But it sparked an ember in my mind!
Fast forward a month, and the wife and I had pretty much decided to hang up the idea of buying a camper at all, but I was still working on getting a valid title for the Coleman. The state Revenue Office told me as part of getting a bonded title I had to go to 2 different trailer dealers and get written estimates of value of the Coleman, in order for them to determine the required value of the bond I have to buy. The first one was easy. The second one was not so much. Driving through town one Saturday late afternoon 3 weeks ago I stopped in at a brand new high-end boat and RV dealership to see if I could get somebody there to give me an estimate on the Coleman.
Lo and behold, what did they have sitting at the back of their lot but a folded down Trailmanor! Of course the salesman nearly knocked me down as I was getting out of my car, trying to "see if he could show me anything". I said just for the heck of it, "what year is that Trailmanor and what are you asking for it?" He scampered inside to find out while I looked at it and figured out it was a 2009 model 3023. He didn't know a darn thing about it, but he told me their asking price and then offered me $1500 trade-in for the Coleman sight-unseen! I said thanks and went on home. I mentioned it to the wife, and she liked the idea of trading off the Coleman, but we were still in "not going to buy a camper mode." So we went about our business for a couple more weeks until I mentioned one afternoon that I was still thinking about that Trailmanor. She said she didn't like the idea of a 10-year-old trailer and suggested that instead we go seriously looking at travel trailers again at some dealerships. So we did, and she even went on her own for a couple of days. At the end of the evening I said let's run by and see if that Trailmanor is still there and if it's set up. The dealership was closed, but the Trailmanor was still there, set up, and the door was unlocked! She stepped inside and was quick to say how much room it had compared to most of the small 16 and 17-foot travel trailers we had been looking at all night. We decided to come back and look at it during the daytime, but it took 2 weeks more to get to it with our schedules. Meanwhile, the wife actually took time to watch some Youtube videos and got herself excited about the Trailmanor concept.
Finally today was the day. I was able to get off work early and picked up my wife and our Suburban from home, and we drove to the dealership. We spent about 2 hours poking and prodding around the trailer, testing things, and we even put it down ourselves. We decided to offer them $2000 less than their asking price with no trade-in, and they accepted our offer with no further haggling! We went inside and did the paperwork, and then we went back out, hooked it up to the Suburban, and dragged it home today! So now we've instantly gone from never having camped before to owning the coolest camper ever built! And we still have the little Coleman to sell!
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