Welcome   Specifications  Rants N Raves  Trip Reports  Modifications  Product Reviews  Links  Coming Attractions  Trailer Tips  Site FAQ  Forum  Calendar     

Your Hosts: Dave & Kristi Smith, Portland, Oregon, USA

Hello and welcome to our camping blog! This site is intended to chronicle our adventures with “Wally”, our Tango travel trailer and give me a place to document some of the things I've done to (hopefully) improve it! We gave up trying to keep a separate trip diary, photograph libraries, product recommendations, campsite reviews, etc. and instead just stuffed it all here! That way anybody can browse to their heart's content and all we need to do is send them the URL!

As you can see in the Links tab I built a similar site for our previous trailer and people really seemed to enjoy it; so hopefully this new one will achieve the same level of success! You'll quickly discover I'm a fairly active DIY guy and pretty much fearless about tackling nearly anything (often to the dismay of my better half), This trailer is my latest creative outlet and I enjoy puttering around with the modifications nearly as much as actually camping!

Some background: Kris & I are both in our mid-fifties and have been camping in the Pacific NW from a young age - I was about five when my family started dragging me out to the woods! We've been married 30+ years and tent-camped the first 25; then got tired of sleeping on the ground so we moved up to a Chalet folding A-frame trailer in 2004. After enjoying the hell out of that little rig we wanted some more civilized creature comforts (i.e. bathroom, full-time bed, clothes storage, etc.) so last year we bought the Tango at the Spring Portland RV Show. In retrospect it probably wasn't the ideal time to take this plunge because soon after gas prices went through the roof and then the economy tanked; but we're not looking back and have a full itinerary of trips planned this year!

So feel free to look around! I try to keep this site up to date often and always welcome your constructive feedback. I'll even try to keep my acid comments to a minimum.

PS: for you technical types, this site is a data-driven (SQL) Reentrant Active Server Page that allows online additions & editing. That basically means everything you see is stored in a series of tables - text, URL's to links & pictures, code for the little widgets, etc. - and is rendered into HTML when you view the page! So theoretically once I finesse the core code that performs all this magic I can update this site from anywhere in the world (with an Internet connection of course) without having to remember a bunch of programming. And God knows how hard it is for an old duffer like me to keep up with that stuff (in web years I'm like 118)! Of course, since this is about version 20 that may be more of a goal than reality!

Enjoy!

PPS: Wally got his name because of a tendency to…well…wallow as we motor down the road! Seemed like a natural to us…

 
Over 4687 Served!