March Madness & The Carlson Crowd

For the second year in a row The Carlson Crowd has conducted a highly regarded contest during the NCAA Basketball Tournament. In 2007 Kirk won the first ever “Bragging Rights Traveling Trophy” award for picking the most correct victories among the 65 team NCAA tourney.

This year it was Mom Carlson who won the title. The winner of the annual contest wins the right to possess the “Bragging Rights Traveling Trophy” plaque for the year. This week the coveted plaque arrived via UPS from Kirk. Connie has proudly displayed the plaque in the family room for the year.

For the contest this year we used the Yahoo! Fantasy Sports Tournament Pick'em online format. This is a free online contest format that is completely automatic. All the scoring is done automatically after the actual teams in the tournament play each game. Each family member is able to log on to the contest web page to check his or her progress and post comments. It is a fun event for us every year and we look forward to the Carlson Crowd March Madness contest with eager anticipation.

This report was filed by The Commish!

Carlson Family RVing History

Last weekend we picked up our new 5th Wheel trailer. It was an interesting experience! The trailer is beautiful, comfortable and amazingly hi-tech with lots of cutting edge features. Still, camping is camping and we had a typical adventure over the three days of learning the ropes on the Keystone Laredo 265RL.

The day we did our orientation was like a beautiful summer day – although it was still March. We stayed in the campground at the RV dealership for several days to test everything out, and the day we left was a mini-nightmare. It was cold, rainy and we had a dozy of a time hooking up to leave. From that we both caught colds that resulted in laryngitis later in the week. Such is the camping lifestyle. Not always perfect, pretty, or universally enjoyable. But still, we love it!

All of this brought me back to our Carlson family history with trailering down through the years. Our first experience was when we borrowed Roy and Bev Hodge’s tent trailer in the summer of 1969. Kristy was just two, and we took her to Chattanooga and the Smokey Mountains for her first visit. I remember a cold, rainy and leaky night in the Smokies.

Then in 1972 we bought a Bethany Teepee trailer that we took to the Black Hills, Wyoming and Colorado. Again there were memorable experiences of cold nights in the Rocky Mountains and Kirk’s resulting trip to the hospital in Cheyenne, Wyoming. In a few years we moved up to a fixed wall 16 ft. Shasta travel trailer that we dragged all the way to California. Later we acquired a 19 ft. Corsair that had our first bathroom and shower.

From 1978 to 2002 we were out of trailering, except for onetime in the 80’s when we rented a large pop-up camper that we took to Michigan and Indiana. Here are some pictures that remember our “traveling trailers” over the years.