If you’ve read this blog for a while or even had the misfortune of standing behind me in line at the grocery store, you know that I am NOT a high maintenance individual. No, I don’t mean that I’m not a regular bather… but there’s an excellent chance that my daily shower does not involve shaving and didn’t include putting on makeup or a bra after the fact.
That means I’m pretty hard to shop for, especially when it comes to sentimental holidays like anniversaries, Valentine’s Days, or Mother’s Days. It’s like you know you SHOULD get me something special and meaningful, but you also know that’s totally not who I am and you’d be wasting your money and wasting my “I get a present!” holiday. Instead, I want the far-out things that I really could buy for myself but that I don’t get, mostly because I wasted our weekly budget on vegetables, polio shots, and orthodontia for the kids.
Last year, after squirreling money away for a long time and arguing with my husband for years about whether or not it was actually a good idea, I bought myself the World’s Ugliest Camper. To most people, that’s an accurate description. To people in the “camper world,” it’s the most glorious object ever to grace the highways. It’s a 1966 Serro Scotty Sportsman, and yes, it even has the teal-blue color scheme. I love it! It sleeps three, tows easily behind my little Toyota, has a fridge and a microwave and an AC unit, and most important, it has a toilet.
All of my camping horror stories are for another blog post, so before you start bitching about how “that isn’t camping!” let me tell you that my first camping trip happened when I was 11 days old. It lasted three years, and I was in college before my parents finally admitted that it wasn’t a camping trip, we were just homeless. They called it camping to avoid any finger pointing from the school system and to prevent damage to our self-esteem. Trust me, folks, I’ve roughed it.
Unfortunately, one thing this camper doesn’t have is what’s known as a holding tank. Luckily, I read a lot, so I happened to find that out the EASY way through online research into my new camper instead of by actually taking a poop in my camper without having it hooked up to a sewer. Those ABC After School Specials were right… it pays to read.
So when I told my husband–to his face, even–that I wanted a poop box for Mother’s Day, you’d think by now he’d have been used to it. Instead, he did that thing where he closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose while thinking really hard about how to respond. When his vision returned to normal, he just said, “Where would a man buy one of these poop boxes if he was going to purchase one for his wife?” He actually had the good sense to smile and looked relieved (haha! RELIEVED! AS IN, HE RELIEVED HIMSELF!) when I told him it was already in the Amazon shopping cart online.
Because Amazon is awesome and they actually care about both Mother’s Day and hygienic pooping, my giant box arrived two days ago. I only ordered the 12-gallon poop box because I wasn’t really sure I could lift and dump (haha! DUMP!) the larger sizes without causing a biohazard cleanup. Trust me, I’ve had two kids and changed diapers for a grand total of seven years… 12 gallons of piss and shit is more than anybody should have to put up with at one time.
This morning, in honor of Mother’s Day, I snuck downstairs to the front porch to open my gift. Inside the Amazon box was another box, this time from the fine poop-boxing folks at Thetford. It contained my poop box!
AND IT HAD BEEN OPENED! OH MY NORSE GODS, THIS POOP BOX HAS BEEN RETURNED! SOMEONE BOUGHT IT AND DECIDED, “NO, YOU’RE NOT THE POOP BOX FOR ME!” AND RETURNED IT!
I inspected every angle of this thing for any tell-tale signs that it had actually been used, short of actually putting my nose to the hose opening and inhaling. I checked the wheels for signs of scuffing, I checked the hose connectors for anything suspicious. I did find a horrifying smear of something that turned out to be a lubricant around the hose lid and, after convincing myself that it was very unlikely that this poop box had been connected to a trailer where they filmed porn movies and this was the remnants of pooped-out anal lube, I realized it was to make the tiny cap spin on better.
As you can imagine–also from reading this blog for any amount of time or standing behind me in the grocery store–I’m a little unstable. This box could have been hand crafted in my front yard by OompaLoompas and I still would have wondered if one of those little shits (get it? SHITS!) had defiled my poop box when I wasn’t looking. It’s good to be suspicious about these things, nay, healthy even. And now, much like my parents’ alternate reality of my childhood, I get to complain for years to come about my husband buying me a Mother’s Day gift that had been soiled. My poop box is actually very clean (thanks to the bleach it’s currently soaking in) and now I don’t feel bad asking for something crazy for my birthday.
Lorca Damon 
You should be a part of a contest for one of the best websites on the net.
I will highly recommend this blog!
Oh, you hit the nail on the head. I have duplicates of everything in there, even the toothbrushes! All we literally have to do is throw our clothes in it and hook it up to the car. Like you said, I can buy the food when I get where I’m going. Tent camping used to take eight trips from the attic to the car, and then three weeks when I got home of hearing my husband complain about all the camping gear I’d dumped in the garage!
The real problem was that by the time we got off school/work on Friday and actually got to our campsite (assuming I’d loaded the car like a good mom BEFORE Friday), then I was stuck pitching a tent by the light of the car’s headlights, then putting in the air beds, the sleeping bags, etc., then trying to change clothes and brush teeth at the bath house… NOPE. I back the camper into the campsite, plug it in, connect the hose, and we’re done. If I wanted to get fancy I can put the jacks under the rails and spread out the awning, but I can also sleep quite well if those things wait until morning!
Only you could have made this gift even worse than it is!
Hilarious – and I congratulate you on purchasing the camper, and arranging for WHAT YOU NEED.
Happy Mother’s Day – and remember, that thing isn’t going to be any cleaner when you use it, so the bleach is more symbolic than anything: ‘only my poop.’
I am so envious! ‘sleeps three, tows easily behind my little Toyota, has a fridge and a microwave and an AC unit, and most important, it has a toilet’ Teal with envy, in fact.
If you can tow a camper with a Toyota, I should be able to with a Buick Tessara minivan, and now I know what I want. It sounds like freedom.
It’s AWESOME! I’ll say the best part is the ability to back the car up to it and just GO. No hauling our gear from the attic, no looking around for a flashlight that actually has batteries. I LOVED my tent camping trips with my kids when they were little, but we had two fateful trips: one trip to the beach was SO HOT that I ended up taking the tent fly off so we were sleeping in just the screened walls. Then it got so hot that I still had them take their long t-shirts off and sleep in just their undies. Everyone walking past our campsite could have seen them, so no, I didn’t sleep AT ALL.
The other trip was the October weekend that ended up being the coldest on record in our state’s history for that month. We didn’t change clothes all weekend because we couldn’t be undressed long enough to do it. If we hadn’t driven so far we would have just gone home. As it was, we ate in restaurants and when we were back at the campsite, the girls just sat in their car seats to get warm.
I, therefore, have experienced it all, and now have a camper with heat, air, lights, and a toilet!
I can’t recommend this enough, and I have no qualms about saying I only paid $3K for it. The seller wanted to upgrade to a bigger camper for a cross-country trip, and he wanted to recover what he’d put into this one in fixing it up. I got a real bargain and the thing is absolutely perfect!
I couldn’t upload photos of my actual camper to this reply, so here’s a link to what they look like.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1966+serro+scotty+camper&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=A1ZPVd-WCcOHNsyIgRA&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAg&biw=1252&bih=638
Also, the Shasta company (campers, not the soda) has re-released its signature camper that looks just like mine. They’re brand-new and they’ve only made 1,941 of them (in honor of the 1941 release of the original camper), and they retail for about $15K. They’re gorgeous though!
You are encouraging me. Tiny isn’t a problem, if you’re going to spend the time outside when you get there. And pulling it with the regular car sounds perfect.
Thanks for the pictures!
How are the beds – and can you buy them decent mattresses. I’m not sure about ‘sleeps 3,’ as the better half snores, but it’s worth looking into.
Mine includes a single bed where the original manufacturer had actually put one of those drop down tables and booth seats. One the other end of the camper used to be a sofa-style bench that also slid down to make a double bed. The previous owner decided they used it more for sleeping than for sitting, so now it’s just a full-time twin bed and a full-time double bed. They have very nice memory foam mattresses that the last owner put in. He and his wife each used to take one bed, but my two girls and I have been very comfortable with me and Offspring the Second in the double bed, Offspring the First in the twin bed. It helps that I’M the snorer, though! And that the younger child is a snuggler.
Sounds like heaven – the ability to just cut and run, with no more effort going to a grocery store somewhere else for the weekend, than what you would do at home.