From 16 feet to 23.

What's the old saying? Buy your second RV as your first. We did not know this lesson, until we learned it the hard way!! During COVID we decided to get into camping more seriously. We had tent camped for years and loved it, but we were at a point in life where we wanted a bed and a little more security.

The Airstream Basecamp fit our lifestyle: rugged, good-looking, adventure-focused, a little toy hauler with the bougie creature comforts of an Airstream. It appealed to our REI, Gen X, Patagonia-wearing image. And we practice what we preach, out hiking, biking, riding fast electric skateboards, and watching the sunset.

So we ordered the brand-new REI edition the day it was announced, put our deposit down, and got excited. Then months went by without a peep from Airstream.

To dip a toe in and see if we even liked it, Lucy worked Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp for months and found an incredible deal on a used one. She can't be stopped. Don't even try.

When we went to look at it, plenty was wrong. The kid who owned it was young, and it was his first RV. He lived in the Bay Area, and when the lockdown hit he couldn't afford rent near his job, so he bought the Basecamp and parked it in his mom's driveway to live in. Honestly, that is smart: the loan on the Basecamp cost less than rent in Silicon Valley.

But things were broken. He had cut the window treatments physically out of the windows, and the screens and fixtures were damaged. It needed work. We negotiated the price down to simply taking over the loan he still had on it, which was an incredible deal. We canceled our REI order, and to Airstream Temecula's credit they did not give us a hard time at all: they refunded the deposit, no questions asked.

I had never owned an RV either, but I am handy, and it turned out to be easy to order the OEM parts straight from Airstream and make the repairs in a couple of hours. Total spend, under $1,000. I even ran power and water out to the backyard where we stored it and used it as an office before our first camping trip. It was great in that role.

On its first adventure out, the Basecamp towed beautifully. The previous owner had pulled it with a Tesla Model Y, and our Rivian did not even notice it back there. Frankly, we were surprised by how nicely it towed.

But on that first camping trip, converting the couch to a bed and back to a dinette every day got tedious, and the cushions were never comfortable to sleep on. The usual fix, dropping in a real mattress, ruins the Basecamp's whole point as a toy hauler: most owners end up either leaving it as a bed or living with a tiny dinette and a tiny sleeping area. We loved the view out the big front windows, and we loved what the Basecamp stood for, but in practice it just did not work for us.

Still, we learned a lot of lessons with the Basecamp that prepared us for the next one. We learned how to work on it, maintain it, and live out of it, all with very little risk in a camper we got a great deal on. That low-stakes education is exactly what it was good for.

So a year later we started shopping for its upgrade. We were sold on RV camping. Just not in the Airstream Basecamp.

16 ft · single axle · ~3,500 lb dry · wraparound kitchenette glass · the first one