Chinook Concourse - Bio Part 6

My too-small-to-be-functional bath/shower taking up so much valuable storage space and my virtual lack of an indoor dining facilities (my table was hard to put up and unstable and in the way then it was up) began to annoy early on. MnJ started looking for what they hoped would be the ultimate wandering machine very early in our time together. This bothered me some but we still had a lot of fun and wandered far over the years.

Mark doesn't remember ever seeing any advertisements for the Chinook, nor even see any on the road, until a Chinook dealer in Pennsylvania advertised the introduction of the new side entry model. He thought this might be exactly what they'd been looking for. So he and Joy set out to take a look.

It was a real motor home with a fully functional bathroom (toilet, sink and shower), full galley (stove, sink, refrigerator, microwave and conventional ovens), a furnace, a generator and a permanently deployed bed, all in a body only 2 feet longer and maybe a foot wider than an I was as an extended cargo van. The ultimate wanderer. Well almost. That bed, while always available, took up a lot of space, too much space! The interior seemed crowded, especially compared to the rear entry Concourse which was the same size.

As soon as they got home I knew my days as a class B camper were limited. All they talked about was the Chinook this, the Chinook that. They even talked about how they were going to buy it with the factory pickup option to save shipping costs. Even so it was almost 5 years before they took the plunge and I became a Chinook.

They were on their way to Florida in the Fall of 1999 with no intention of buying a new motor home when they stopped by at the dealer to catch up on the most recent changes. I happened to be sitting there, a dealer demo model, ready to be sold into a caring family. The price made me seem like a bargain if not a down right steal and they couldn't resist, I became theirs. They spent the night in a nearby campground and, in the morning, spent two hours loading me up with everything from the Coachmen. Then we all took off for Florida.

That was on that trip, my maiden voyage, when I got the name Q, after a god-like character on the then popular TV show Star Trek. He was omnipotent, I thought I was omnipotent. He was a trickster, I was a trickster. Among my several pranks was forcing my built-in compress to always read NW, toward Washington state where I was built and turning on my "airbag deployed" indicator light on and off for no reason. I also continually leaked waste water into my dump valve so that when uncapped about a pint spilled onto the ground. Even now I smile when I think about the embarrassment that caused.

All my pranks were good-natured though and we became good friends knowing we'd be traveling together for many years.