Welcome Sharon. The others have pretty well said it all. It took me a while to get up the courage to do this alone and I spent a lot of time looking a rigs and researching on line. Being on a tight budget and needing a vehicle that I could us for both my pleasure, work and whatever else, I bought an 18ft. Rockwood Mini Lite and have been using that for the past two years. That frees my truck up for every day use. Since I work summers on one of our Michgan State Parks, I only use the trailer for a couple of overnigh camping trips at a time.
Right now I am getting to a crossroads of sorts in that I am getting ready to retire in a couple of years and want to spend the summer of 2014 traveling to some of the Western States I haven't seen yet and am not sure just what I want in terms of an RV to do that. There are pros and cons to both towing and not towing, so you kind of have to figure out which way you want to go.
As the others have said, there are lots of different rigs, ideas, suggestions etc. on this forum, so ask, respond and enjoy.