{"id":94,"date":"2004-10-02T20:39:02","date_gmt":"2004-10-02T19:39:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stationstudios.ca\/blog\/index.php\/2004\/10\/02\/our-new-arrival\/"},"modified":"2024-11-17T08:40:43","modified_gmt":"2024-11-17T13:40:43","slug":"gear-roadtrek-170","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stationstudios.ca\/blog\/gear-roadtrek-170\/","title":{"rendered":"Gear: Roadtrek 170"},"content":{"rendered":"

Both Robin and I have always liked camping; I’ve done lots of canoeing and backpacking as well. However, after a tent trip to Banff National Park in 1996, Robin put her foot down and said that her days of sleeping on the ground were over. Can’t say I blame her. Not wanting to give up on the outdoors, we looked into RV’ing. We rented a couple of RV’s while we were in Calgary, once for a week’s trip to Jasper National Park and once for a two-week trip to Vancouver Island. The lifestyle really suited us: we got to go into the great outdoors in the national and provincial park systems while sleeping well at night and having some of the comforts of home with us.<\/p>\n

When we moved to Texas in 2003, it became quickly apparent that, without family and friends in the area, we were not leaving the house very often and were getting that “cooped up” feeling. This led us to look into getting our own RV so that we could explore Texas and the south by doing extended weekend trips plus the occasional one-to-two-week trips.<\/p>\n

We like small RV’s. No forty-foot long behemoths for us. We really liked the Pleasure-Way<\/a> van conversion RV we had on the Jasper trip a few years ago, so we focused on similar models. After reviewing many different models from a range of manufacturers, we decided on the Roadtrek<\/a> 170 Popular, which is built in Kitchener, Ontario, close to where I went to university. Locating a dealer in Texas was a little more difficult: Roadtrek does not have a dealer in Houston. We visited Stahmann Sales<\/a> in New Braunfels, TX and were pleased with the people and service there, so we ended up purchasing from them.<\/p>\n

The one we purchased was a dealer demo model, so it had some mileage on it already. However, it also had the full set of options on it so this was a reasonable tradeoff. We did not add a lot of additional items but the ones we did were important to our enjoyment of the Roadtrek:<\/p>\n