The Story Begins...

The Story Begins...

 

I had been looking all summer of 2009 for a vintage trailer. We were getting frustrated with trailers in serious disrepair and over priced. I happened upon this trailer on the St. Louis Craigslist. I don't normally check the St. Louis listings because of the distance from us. I ran across a post for a Shasta trailer that had been posted a few hours before. It had no pictures and limited information but given the asking price of $1000 made me curious as to what it was. I heard back almost right away from the seller and they emailed a few pictures. From what I could see it looked like it was in decent shape. A few emails back and forth and a phone call and we were headed to Columbia, IL the next day at 8 am.

Molly and I went down with the full intention of dragging a Shasta back to Wisconsin unless there was some kind of major flaw that would keep us from doing just that. The 6 hour drive down was pretty uneventful except from being snagged by a Illinois State Police speed trap. Luckily, I was let off with a warning and we continued our trip. Driving and reinforcing each other that we were NOT completely out of our friggin' minds for making such quick a decision the whole way.

We met the seller and made our way to the trailer that was parked at his Father's house. His Dad bought the trailer brand new in 1964. We had the pleasure of meeting him as well. After some questions from the sellers about our sanity and some small talk about WHY some one would drive that far for "this old camper" we had the grand tour. We will get into more details about that later. They did tell us that they had 15 emails in the 24 hours since the trailer was posted on Craigslist. I'm pretty sure one of the seller's started to put two and two together and realized they probably should have asked for more dough for it. We paid the man his grand and hooked the trailer up and made our way North. We were sort of in a bit of shock and glee of buying the 45 year old trailer and only 20 miles down the road...

BANG!

I instantly knew what that sound was. I managed to look in the mirror in time to see the hub cab bouncing across 2 lanes of traffic. . I quickly pulled over to see what was damaged. The curb side tire was shredded. Now, I had looked at the tires before we had left. They were a bit dry rotted but didn't look that bad. I was wrong. Having no spare I jacked up the trailer and removed the wheel and threw that in the truck. Molly was franticly trying to locate a place that would have a trailer tire to replace the shredded one. Finally we found that Wal-Mart would have the tires and it wasn't too far away. I unhooked our new found friend and went to Wally World. They quickly mounted the new tire and we raced back to get it back on the trailer. Once that happened we pulled the Shasta back to Wal-Mart so they could replace the other one. We were not about to let that happen to us again. Add another $250 to the cost of the trailer.

That experience really sucked to say the least. We took it real easy going back home. I didn't really want to chance anything and have another catastrophic failure. We made it home VERY tired and grumpy at 1am Sunday morning.

Overall the experience was a good one. We can cross it off as something we have done in our lives. We found out a few interesting things about the trailer from the original owner...

-He bought the trailer new not far away in St. Louis, MO in '64

-The trailer made the trip down to Disney World the year the park opened.

-The trailer survived a tornado that picked up another trailer parked a few houses down and tossed it 1/4 mile or so. The Shasta sat untouched.

-He always wanted to paint the trailer...I think we are going to make that happen.

-His son always wanted a awning...That will happen also.

-He took the wings off 20 years ago...Unfortunately.

Because the trailer originally came from St. Louis, Molly came up with the nickname of "Louise". Get it? St. Louis...Louise...it makes sense to us. She is a good addition to the family and we hope she will not cause us too many more problems for us. I hope to give you all the grand tour so stay tuned...