As we were preparing to set off on this new adventure, some of you were probably wondering how life would be with our new GO camper on the road. We were too! In retrospect we realize it’s a bit daunting to take on a 25 day journey without having tried our new rig out for at least one night at a campground closer to home first. If we had we would have quickly learned we didn’t need to bring so much stuff. So we’ve been identifying with the pioneers who headed west in the 1800’s and have been slowly dropping things off along the way to lighten our load. That said, we still have things we hope to give away to our families on the West coast. We will definitely lose weight on this trip!

But as for the GO, it is performing exactly as promised, (although we do have a few design suggestions for SylvanSport.) IMHO, the rig is the most civilized way possible to do tent camping, in that you’re sleeping off the floor on a reasonably sized “bed”, and the fact that you have a table suspended in the middle of the camper enables you to dine, work, play games, and do a lot of things we do comfortably at home. With a carpeted floor you can go barefoot and the bed creates a very luxurious sofa if you want to lean back with your feet up. We’ve rigged it with a power cord in the side wall, so we can easily plug in all our devices, lamps, and even an electric kettle for tea and coffee. The windows are designed to allow as much cross-ventilation or privacy as you may want, but the tent structure has enough give to it so that when the wind blows or the rain falls you get that great cozy feeling of being protected inside.

The biggest challenge for us has been learning new rules of teamwork for this rig. In our previous RV, our job descriptions were fairly well defined over the 15 years we owned it. This one has a number of separate tasks, some of which are best handled by one person, but plenty that require coordination between 2 people. It has enough elements of tent camping like inserting collapsible rods to create the infrastructure or setting up the beds where two can do it more easily than one, so we’ve had a bit of a learning curve. But every set-up and take-down have gotten more streamlined with each day on the road.

The GO on the road is fantastic; you barely know it’s behind you when you’re driving, and when I do see it there, it reminds me of a very loyal puppy who follows you everywhere and just wants to please. (The perfect pet — it doesn’t eat or poop!) It’s only decreasedthe mpg of our RAV4 a bit: we should be getting 40 and we’re now getting 33.

So overall we’re very happy with our GO both on and off the road. We have yet to see another one in our travels, so a few people have been intrigued enough to come over and ask about it. But in general the campgrounds we’ve stayed at have not been crowded, and mask-wearing is definitely the norm wherever we’ve ventured indoors. We’ve also been taking a lot of backroads where the traffic is minimal and social distancing is a given. We’re staying safe and life is good.