HQQTIE in Alaska
This is the story of why and how we got HQQTIE.
In case you were wondering…. HQQTIE got this spelling because the license plate HOOTIE was already taken in Maine. So was Hootie.com. We still pronounce it the same.
We wanted to explore the country in a smaller class A motor home. We knew we wanted to go to many of the national parks and some parks have size limitations. We found that most national parks would allow an RV up to at least 30 feet long, but some exclude larger ones.
So we started looking at motor homes under 30 feet that had the features we wanted, such as a fixed bed and good storage. We also wanted a walkable roof and large storage tanks. There are hundreds of different floor plans out there. Every RV had a few drawbacks so we started doing a lot of research. To make it harder, they change their floor plans every few years. So when we found a plan we liked, it was usually only sold for a few years. Motor homes also vary widely in price. Motor homes lose a lot of their value in the first few years and then level out. We also found that most motor homes have very few miles on them. So we wanted a used late model with low miles.
So then we started searching for a motor home that was four or five years old that had low miles at a reasonable price. That narrowed the search to the Georgetown 270s that was made for four years(2014-17). The search was on. At any given time, there were only three or four for sale in the whole country. We just had to wait and watch for one with a good price. We watched and waited for several months. We finally saw one in Texas in February 2020 with 3500 miles at the best price that we saw so far.
Now to vet a motor home from Maine, to see if it was worth flying down to Texas for, was a challenge. JoJo said she knew somebody down there that has had campers himself for a long time. We got in contact and found he lived only several minutes away. Wow! what luck! You can be in Texas and still be eleven hours away.
We had our friend go look at HQQTIE and he gave a favorable report. I then called the dealer and put down $500 on condition of a final inspection by me. So on March 1st I flew down and made the deal on Monday March 2nd and flew home the next day. They said they would store it until early May when we would drive down and pick him up. That’s when we started noticing all the severe weather they were having in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Every week there was severe thunder storms, hail, tornadoes and flooding. Needless to say we were anxious to get HQQTIE home.
May finally came around. Since the rental car market then was devastated we got a cheap one way rental and drove to Texas in 32 hours. The plane tickets were almost free but there was no way we were getting on a plane with the Covid pandemic. So on Cinco de Mayo, we picked him up. We now had a bed, bathroom and kitchen and took a leisurely few days to drive HQQTIE the 2000 miles home with no issues. Ninety percent of the vehicles on the road were truckers at that time.
So another part of our retirement plan was falling into place. Now we just had to clean and customize HQQTIE to make him our own.
When you drive a motor home instead of a truck and tow-able camper you are without a small vehicle to run to the grocery store or go exploring. This makes a tow vehicle a handy addition. So we got the Jeep below.
