I practically grew up in a camper. My father was a career Marine, and so a lot of our equipment was Marine Corps green. I thought everybody's equipment looked like that. We traveled back and forth across the US four times moving from one place to another. Even now, decades later, I feel at home among the tall trees. We had a trailer that was sort of oval shaped, 12 feet long, 6 1/2 feet wide. There were four of us. We had a rule: "Only one person standing up at a time." It had an ice box. I slept in a little cot above my parents' bed. The dining room table slid out and the booth-style seats made into a bed for my older brother. No bathroom. My brother always said he was going to write an autobiography entitled "Fifty Yards to the Outhouse."
My husband and I started camping when our oldest was about 15 months. We camped every summer--tents and sleeping bags on the ground. I had a Coleman stove. We washed dishes in a plastic tub. No paper plates for us. We have great family memories of those days. I love thinking about our two boys sitting beside the water chucking rocks and listening to them go ker-plunk! The sound was higher or deeper depending on the size of the rock. When they were older, they skipped rocks across the surface.
When they were grown, we got our first fifth wheel trailer--a 27 footer. We did a lot of traveling. Now we are snowbirds and travel in a 32-foot fifth wheel. It has everything except a dishwasher. Very comfortable, and we can actually stand up in the bedroom. We still love traveling. We keep it fully loaded with everything but food so that we can leave in about an hour's time.