I Used to Take Her Popup Camping. Now She Has Her Own.

When Jackie was a little girl, Matt used to take her out in a Coleman popup every year around her birthday. Birthday weekends at a campground. Birthday dinners at Cracker Barrel — every single year, to the point that she still won’t set foot in one. That’s a true story, and it’s in the video.

Then life did what life does. The popup went away, Jackie grew up, and camping became something her dad did with Debi and a 110-pound dog named Grizzly.

A few months ago, she called. She’d bought her first popup camper — a 2011 Flagstaff with an electric top, air conditioning, a furnace, and a kitchen. Then she called again with the part that got our attention: she was towing it to Hocking Hills herself. From Akron. Three and a half hours of highways, foothills, and the kind of winding roads that make first-time towers sweat.

She had never towed anything in her life.

A First Popup Camper and a Full Campsite Crew

We met her at the Hocking Hills KOA — Matt, Debi, and Grizzly on one site, Jackie and her boyfriend Madhu a few rows over with their two dogs, Nacho and Sulky. Three dogs, two rigs, one campground. The math on that alone is worth watching.

What followed was a weekend of firsts. Her first campsite. Her first popup setup — including a discovery about that Flagstaff roof that changed the whole job about thirty seconds in. Her first shakedown trip, which is what RVers call the maiden voyage where you find out what works, what doesn’t, and what the previous owner never mentioned.

Matt walked her through the systems the way his own experience taught him — and somewhere in the middle of raising the canvas, the Cracker Barrel story came out on camera, unscripted. It’s the best ninety seconds of the episode and we’re not spoiling a word of it here.

Hiking Old Man’s Cave With Three Dogs

You can’t camp at Hocking Hills and skip the trails. We took all three dogs down to Old Man’s Cave — which, on a summer weekend, is equal parts natural wonder and crowd management. There was hiking, there was water, there was a group photo situation on a bridge that took more coordination than the popup setup. Grizzly ended the day more tired than we’ve ever seen him.

And then there was pizza — from Pizza Crossing in Logan, the shop we make a point of hitting every time we’re near Hocking Hills. This trip, dinner turned into a meetup: Drew and Jackie Zoeller of Zoeller All-Over on Facebook, fellow Alliance owners from the Allies community, joined us. Swapping road stories with people who tow the same brand, while your daughter trades notes from her very first weekend out? That’s the kind of evening that’s the actual reason any of us do this.

Then It Was Our Turn to Learn Something

Here’s the part we didn’t see coming. Jackie’s weekend went nearly perfectly. Ours ended with damage to our fifth wheel — on a hitch-up Matt has done hundreds of times over fifteen years of RVing.

The campsite’s slope, a noisy checkout morning, and one moment of not hearing a spotter combined into a mistake that experienced RVers will recognize immediately — and newer ones need to see before it happens to them. What exactly went wrong, what it did to the rig, and the one cheap piece of gear sitting in our glove compartment that would have prevented the whole thing — that’s all in the video.

Fifteen years in, and the campground still taught us something.

Watch the Full Episode

Jackie’s arrival, the setup, the Cracker Barrel story, three dogs at Old Man’s Cave, and the hitch-up moment we almost didn’t publish — it’s all in Episode 50.

New episodes every Sunday. Subscribe on YouTube so you don’t miss what happens when we finally weigh this rig.

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