He had been at it for weeks — listings, floorplans, comparison after comparison — and somewhere in that stretch the criterion that mattered surfaced and did its work. If he was going to boondock, he told the camera, he did not want his living power tethered to his traveling fuel. That single line eliminated a whole class of units he had been circling. What remained were the Forest River Foresters, and among those, a 2018 Forester 2401W MBS. Don't ask me what any of that means, he said of the designation, and moved on. The name was not the point. The energy architecture was.
By the time he sat down to record, the commitment had already been staged. He had called the dealership and told the salesperson, in his account, essentially everything he had said in his previous video on the subject — so they would know what to expect from him. Price was worked out over the phone, before he ever set foot on the lot. Two thousand dollars went down on a credit card, refundable. He named the pressure tactic aloud before it could be used on him: somebody else might buy it. The deposit was structured deliberately — it would reduce the principal he'd need to borrow, and if he chose to pay it off from the card later, he could. It gave him flexibility, he said, that he really needed right now. He acknowledged the whole thing might feel a little rushed. He left the exit intact anyway.
Then he shared his screen, and the room became doubled — a house he was about to leave, and a listing standing in as the surface of the thing itself. Twelve photographs, which he noted was not many. He scrolled back to the beginning. One exterior shot, only one, and he said plainly it would have been nice to see more, and then said that was exactly why deposits come back. He thought it looked beautiful. He moved inward through the frames.
The trade-offs came one at a time, each one stated rather than smoothed over. No oven — and he did not soften that. When he had imagined his life on the road, an oven had felt important; choosing a unit without one felt like a big deal, and he said so twice. He turned it over out loud: a small retrofit someday, campfire cooking, a Blackstone, options he would figure out down the road, and if it came to it, a trade into something else. The small refrigerator was also, in his words, kind of a big deal, though it seemed to be simply how the Foresters were built. Where a second sleeping berth would have been, this unit had cabinets — meaning that on nights parked somewhere without room to run the slides, he would sleep on the couch. He understood what he was giving up. He wanted the storage more. Everything isn't going to be perfect, he said, especially when you're getting one this small.
Against those, the things that pulled him. No bunk over the windshield — he had found that overhang distracting in other units, and wondered aloud whether its absence made this one more aerodynamic. The bath kept the sink and the toilet in the same space, unlike the 2019 he had considered; having the sink elsewhere had felt weird to him. And the bed, tucked into the corner. He had lain down in one of these during his looking, and he remembered the feeling — safe, comfortable, a good place to be. He had a feeling this one would be similar. Some of the photographs he searched for and could not find, describing from memory what he knew was there.
Eighty-four thousand out the door, he said. After the deposit, everything included, taxes and all. It felt right. He was heading to the dealership shortly after the recording ended, to inspect the unit and probably close. He would not be driving it home that day — the dealership would keep it a couple of days — but sometime next week, he told his viewers, they could expect to see that thing in his driveway. He said he was so excited, repeated it, and then set a boundary around it in the same breath: he was not going to let the excitement make him make any rash decisions. The details, after all, had already been worked out ahead of time, on the phone, before arrival. My dream is coming true, he said. Then he said it was time to get ready, and went.