How did this happen (Part 1)

The adventure begins for Sharon and I (Jason aka JDog).  It's been a whirlwind of decisions over the last three weeks since I was let go from my job at Rogers due to restructuring.  We decided to do a cross Canada trip to take advantage of our Canada 150 parks pass.  Its been a bucket list item to roadtrip across this great nation from coast to coast.  I've never been to the Maritimes, so what better time than now to do it.  

We had toyed with the idea of buying a VW camper van, but the showstopper was always ... no toilet or shower, so we started looking at bigger conversion vans and possibly motorhomes.  We quickly found the Airstream Mercedes van and loved it, but its expensive!!  Sharon fell in love with the Bambi Airstream, but I said we need a decent sized bed, I don't want to have to crawl over each other to get out of bed.  I noticed the 23fb (front bed) was the smallest Airstream with a queen sized bed.  It checked all the boxes for us, we would later find out that these are extremely rare to find used. 

We found some old Airstreams online and noticed a 2012 23fb out in Langley that was practically brand new, not knowing that this was a rare gem, we talked about it for a few days, and then I called Bill (the owner) and it was still available.  We told him we would call him again the next day to set up a time and come look, Sharon told me not to call and forget about it, perhaps we were nuts to follow her airstream dream (the price point being the major set back for her),  but something inside me said, I should call and just go look, no harm in that right!  Of course she was a beauty and we loved the little Airstream and basically bought her on site.  However,  one major challenge, we didn't have anything to pull our new family addition, or anywhere to put her in the short term.  We headed to Langley bypass to look at trucks, we found nice trucks at all the dealerships and quickly narrowed our search between GM and Ford.  The Ford dealer let us take a beauty of a fully loaded model out for a spin and we took her over to visit our future Airstream.  We probably would have bought her that night, but the dealer in Langley insulted us on both my car and our little island truck (that we would leverage as a trade in), so we decided to keep looking.  

Looking all across Craigslist, Kijiji and other RV sites I realized there really weren't any models close to ours for sale across North America, plenty of new ones and plenty of vintage 27-31 footers, but nothing in the middle.  We acted quickly the next day and told Bill we would buy the Airstream, which we paid him for and he agreed to let us keep the trailer on his property until we rolled out on our trip.  Bill has been a super nice guy and showed us all the different systems and helped install my new Curt weight distribution hitch.  Thanks Bill for all your help.

Now back to the truck...groannn we still needed a truck!  We started to look at some used trucks and found a couple nice looking trucks at a dealer close to downtown.  Benny was there to help us and we of course gravitated to the new trucks and found a great truck (that turned out to be at their dealership on the Island)  It had the tow package and all the features we needed to make this a safe journey, and the dealership agreed to install tow mirrors so we made a deal that included trading in our old truck and we decided to keep my car, as I still love my Subaru.  We headed off to Osoyoos for a week at a friends condo, when we got the call from Benny that our tow mirrors wouldn't work, as they would not have any power features unless installed at the factory.  We were going to Kelowna for a day and decided to stop at the Ford dealership there to look at mirror options.  We met a nice, but fast talking salesman, who convinced us that we didn't need the tow mirrors, and he could get us better discounts, even though we already paid a deposit and had a deal signed, he assured us we could back out of the deposit.  We found a 2018 F150 that was almost identical to our 2017, but wasn't silver to match our Airstream, but we really liked the new look.  We agreed to this truck and paid a deposit and they assured us that in BC its illegal to hold a deposit unless you have taken ownership and insured the vehicle.  We phoned the other dealer, and their store manager was obviously not happy and told us they wouldn't refund the deposit and we would have to file a claim with the VSA to get our money back.  We told Kelowna this and they started digging as well.  He phoned us and told us we should be able to get out deposit back but no guarantees.  So I did the honourable thing and got Vancouver to knock another $600 off the truck and we stuck to the original deal.