May 2026 7 min read Family travel

A Fond Goodbye to Our Tioga

We are selling our 2003 Fleetwood Tioga 26Q, but this is mostly a thank-you note to the camper that carried our family through so many good years.

The Tioga parked at a mountain campground in Cherokee.

Practical details

If you are interested in the camper, the photos, facts, and contact form are all at rvforsale.jrtb.me.

This post is for the less practical part.

The Tioga parked beside an open western landscape with bikes on the back. — Bikes on the back, big country all around.

The Tioga parked against a dramatic mountain sky. — The Tioga looking very at home under a dramatic western sky.

It is hard to explain what a good family camper becomes over time. It is never just a vehicle. Ours became a tiny kitchen, a bunk room, a rainy-day game table, a changing room, a snack bar, a lookout point, a refuge after long hikes, and the place where the whole day got retold before bed.

The Tioga parked in the desert with family standing out front. — One of those classic family-trip moments: desert road, kids, and the Tioga.

The Tioga parked with the Grand Tetons behind it. — The Tioga with one of the great backdrops of the whole trip.

The Tioga carried us through our big Around The States in 80 Days! trip, and then through years of smaller trips after that. Looking back through the imported blog and our photo gallery, what struck me was how often the camper was not just in the background. It was the setting for the memory itself.

James and Connie in front of the Tioga. — A very happy early chapter.

The Tioga at White Sands with bikes on the back. — Still one of my favorite Tioga photos: White Sands, bikes on the back, whole adventure ahead of us.

The front of the Tioga parked beside a pine tree and open landscape. — Another roadside chapter from the long loop west.

Kids peeking out the cabover window of the Tioga. — An all-time favorite from the old blog.

Children peeking from the Tioga's cabover window. — The cabover window was practically its own little stage set.

Kids sitting in the cab of the Tioga. — And this one, too. You can almost hear the pretend driving.

What I loved most was the continuity of it. We could wake up somewhere new, spend the day out in the world, and come back at night to the same little kitchen, the same books, the same blankets, the same familiar feeling of all of us being tucked in together. The camper made every place feel a little more like home, and every homecoming feel a little bigger because we had been out there together.

Stepping up into the Tioga during a stop on the trip. — Even the unglamorous in-between moments are part of what I remember fondly.

The Tioga parked in soft evening light with a flag nearby. — Parked for the evening and ready to be home for a night, wherever home happened to be.

The Tioga parked beneath tall trees and Spanish moss. — It looked good under Spanish moss, too.

The Tioga lit up at night in Cherokee. — And it wore string lights surprisingly well.

There were the big-sky photos and the scenic campsites, of course, but some of the memories I feel most tender about are the smallest ones: breakfast in the camper, the girls tucked into their spaces, puzzles on the dinette, bikes leaning nearby, everyone a little dusty and a little tired and happy in exactly the same place.

And yes, if you have read From BASIC to Websites to Apps to Agents: The Next Wave of Custom Software, you can probably guess what happened next: of course we built a whole little for-sale website for it.

That felt fitting. After all these years, the Tioga deserved better than a rushed marketplace listing and a pile of unlabeled photos. It deserved a careful handoff. The site is our practical attempt to do that well.

But the real thing I wanted to say here is simpler: this was a wonderful camper for us. It held a meaningful season of our family life. We loved the miles, the campsites, the chaos, the coziness, and the version of ourselves that existed inside those trips.

If you want the memory-lane side, the old Around The States in 80 Days! posts are still delightful to revisit.

I hope the next family loves it the way we did.

Thank you, old Tioga.