Northstar Truck Campers: The Pop-up Life Style

I hesitated at first when we started looking at Northstar truck campers line of pop-up campers. To me, pop-ups would always be associated with those ugly little boxes you see being towed behind overloaded station wagons full of screaming kids. If the tiny little wheels on the trailer didn't spin off on the highway, you knew that when they got to the camp ground, before dad could get the trailer unfolded all those kids would get lose from the car. Then you would have to spend the weekend dealing with them, throwing rocks when you were trying to fish, throwing pine cones at your tent, asking stupid kid questions when you just wanted to relax by the camp fire, or trying to sneak a peak at your girlfriend when she went down to the stream.

All these things were going through my mind when we first walked onto the Northstar truck camper lot. To be honest, a pop-up truck camper was a new concept to me. The idea of a hard-side truck camper was familiar, and I had been around a few of them. Hard-sides are comfortable, if a little cramped. They make sense because you can carry them to where you are going, and still have the pickup to do pick up things with.

My college room mate used his truck camper to gather a whole winter's worth of fire wood in a single weekend. In the spring, before the forest fire danger  got too high, he would hitch a utility trailer behind the camper and head into the woods. When he got to the spot he would be cutting, he used the campers landing gear to get it off the truck, then we would spend the next couple hours filling the pickup and trailer with logs. While he went into town to unload, his girlfriend and I would work the chainsaw and have almost another full load by the time he got back. Sometimes we had three loads cut and loaded on the first day, and four were all we really needed to keep the house warm all winter.

Pop-up truck campers are a totally different beast from pop-up trailers. Where the trailer is about getting a tribe of kids into the woods economically, the Northstar truck camper pop-up is about finding adventure by covering some serious miles. Those miles do not have to be on improved roads, either. The pop-up camper is the overwhelming choice for any number of long distance expeditions.