Getting this beast into our sloping driveway off the alley at our DFW home was not for the faint hearted! Glad it’s regular storage spot is in a shed on our Kansas property.
My love affair with travel trailers started early. My best friend in grade school lived across the street from me. In her driveway was a little house on wheels trimmed in turquoise aluminum and shiny chrome. It had a stove, tiny fridge, dinette, a couch that converted into a bed, and a cramped bathroom, which I never had the occasion to use.
Every once in a while, Amy’s mom generously allowed us to play in the camper. A time or two we even slept in it, but we used the bathroom in her house. I fell in love with that little trailer, but alas, I had to wait a long, long time to get my own. Almost 50 years.
I spent seven years in Girl Scouts and got to do some camping, but my family never went camping. It wasn’t my mom’s idea of a fun vacation. A cabin in the mountains or my grandparents’ lakehouse was as close as we got.
When the Fix-It Farmer and I got married, we did quite a bit of tent camping, we stayed in our friends’ pop-up trailer, and we rented a few travel trailers. But we never bought our own camper because we were saving for our kids’ college expenses, replacing cars, and buying Plum Prairie Ranch (think paying two mortgages).
Along the way, I dropped little hints about how much I liked campers, and I waited… and I spent a lot of time researching and daydreaming.
Fast forward to 2020 when practically every other person is buying an RV. Why? Probably because staying in a tiny house on wheels is more attractive than staying in a hotel IN THE MIDDLE OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC.
Folks still wanted to go on vacation, and they probably figured camping was one of the few options available. A camper makes it better because you’re taking a lot of the comforts of home.
We’d been thinking about purchasing one for the last few years, especially after visiting our daughter in Montana and having to stay in an airbnb and hotel when our goals were to see the great outdoors and hike.
I’d researched and daydreamed for years about the camper I wanted. Since we bought a slightly used pickup a few years ago, I knew we wanted a towable. Motor homes (and even camper vans) are often three or four times as expensive. With a trailer, you can’t access it while you’re driving down the road, but you can leave it in a campground while using your tow vehicle to explore.
5 questions to choose the camper that’s right for you
What’s your budget?
How much do you want to spend? Conventional wisdom says you’ll get more for your money with a used RV, but I found shopping during COVID that people were pricing their used RV’s at the max. And they sold them fast. I inquired about a few, and they were gone before we could go see them. With what we wanted, a new camper was not much more than a gently used one. And we got the regular manufacturer’s one year warranty. So we bought new.
We also bought a trailer with aluminum siding instead of fiberglass. Aluminum, commonly called stick and tin, is cheaper and easier to repair. Some folks prefer the smooth sides of the fiberglass trailers, which sometimes have nicer fixtures and amenities. Fiberglass walls and aluminum framing trailers are lighter for the same footprint than aluminum with a wood frame, a consideration for a lot of SUV owners. Although we chose stick and tin, we settled on a mid-range model that included some nice features you wouldn’t find on the cheapest trailers. Here’s a great reference, if you’re wondering which one to pick.
What type of RV do you want?
Do you want a driveable or a towable?
Driveable RVs come in Class A, Class B, and Class C. Class A are the big boys of the RVs with engines. They come in diesel and gas-powered versions. Diesel is common in luxury motor homes. These RVs look like buses and range between 30 and 40 feet in length. Class B motorhomes are camper vans and the smallest of the bunch. Don’t ask me why Class C is the mama bear. I don’t know why they chose this naming convention. Class B usually ranges between 20 and 25 feet and have wet baths and couches that turn into beds. Good for solo travelers or couples. Class C often has a cab over the driver’s area for an extra bed or storage and is often 25 to 30 feet, providing more room for larger groups.
Towable recreation vehicles are fifth wheels, toy haulers, travel trailers, hybrid trailers and pop-up campers. Fifth wheels require a pickup for towing, and almost all of them are too heavy for the common half-ton pickups on the road. You need a three-quarter or one ton pickup, which can cost you quite a lot. Toy haulers have ramps and compartments for four wheelers, golf carts, motorcycles, whatever kind of smallish motorized toy (or kayak or canoe) you want to take along. Travel trailers are the most common of this category and can range from a 3,000 pound 15-foot teardrop towable by a modest SUV to a 40-foot 12,000 pound trailer with multiple slide-outs requiring a larger pickup. Hybrids and pop-up campers have canvas sides for portions that slide out for beds or pop up for all the head room inside the trailer.
If you’re buying a trailer, how much can your vehicle tow?
Our Ram 1500 is equipped with the towing package and can tow almost twice as much as our camper weighs.
If you’re planning to purchase a travel trailer, know the towing capacity of your vehicle. Our 2015 Ram 1500 4X4 has the towing package and can handle a maximum of 10,000 pounds. That gets us into a lot of travel trailers but not many fifth wheels (pay attention to max tongue weight with fifth wheels). Our trailer weighs a little over 5,000 pounds, well within the truck’s capacity. We towed a 4,000 pound hybrid trailer with our 2005 Durango, and it did okay. Make sure you count the weight of the people and gear – look at the gross vehicle weight of the trailer and make sure your towing vehicle handles that maximum. Also, you need to be aware that when you’re towing, your gas mileage will go way, way down. When we towed our new travel trailer from DFW to PPR, we got less than half our usual highway MPG. That component needs to be factored into your travel budget and your plans for stops along the route.
What type of camping do you want to do?
Will you take it to a full-service RV park near the beach and park if for weeks at a time? Do you imagine camping in national parks or in the middle of public lands in forests or desert? The longer of a camper you have, the fewer options for camping. For camping in national parks, 25 feet is kind of a sweet spot. Under 20 feet, and you can camp wherever camping is allowed. Also, the bigger the rig, the harder it is to maneuver on winding, rough roads.
You want to know all the dimensions of your RV: height, width, length and ground clearance. I studied charts like this one because I want to visit national parks, but the camper I really wanted was between 25 and 30 feet. I decided to forgo the 16 percent of national park campgrounds that don’t allow my 28 foot 9 inch travel trailer.
What are your must-haves?
Your must-have amenities likely will determine your length.
The big one is how many people you want to sleep. More beds mean longer trailers. Are you traveling with kids or teens? You might want an RV with bunkbeds. A LOT of travel trailers and fifth wheels have what they call bunkhouses. I wanted to have some extra sleeping space, but the hubby and I didn’t want bunkbeds because 80 percent (or more) of the time, it will just be the two of us. Our camper can sleep five in beds, if necessary. We have an RV queen for two, a U-shaped dinette that can sleep two adults (if they’re comfortable snuggling) and a jackknife sofa for one adult.
Do you want a slide or no slide? A slide provides extra space inside but adds to the weight and the list of things that can break on your trailer. We decided in favor of a slide because of the spacious feel it gives inside the trailer. Our camper’s dinette is in a slide with windows on all sides, which adds light, in addition to the space.
Another length-impacting factor is dry bath vs. wet bath. A wet bath is where the toilet gets wet from the shower. Maybe you have a fold-down sink to wash your hands and maybe you have to wash them at the kitchen sink. I’m voting for a dry bath. Also think about whether you want an oven. Camper ovens are tiny, and if you’re not into cooking or baking, you can find lots of campers without them. Some have microwave ovens with a convection feature that’s supposed to substitute for an oven. The size of fridge also often corresponds to the size of the camper. Small campers usually have single doors with a tiny freezer compartment (think dorm fridge).
My must-have list
When I asked myself what were my must-have amenities, I knew I wanted a dry bath and I wanted a fridge with two doors, one big enough to hold groceries for longer camping trips. And ice cream. Don’t forget the importance of ice cream.
Here’s the u-shaped dinette and the electric fireplace that does a great job of heating the camper.
I also had to have a dinette. This is a controversial topic in today’s market. A lot of very nice couple’s campers have nifty recliners and a little table that goes in front of them and no dinette. Many people don’t want them. My camping dreams of childhood included sitting at the dinette for meals, playing games, or working on a puzzle. I also like the space for working on my computer. I rejected a lot of really nice travel trailers because they didn’t have dinettes.
An oven also made my list because I like to cook. I wanted the option of baking cornbread, muffins, and cookies, although frozen pizza likely will be the most common food baked therein.
When we went to look at trailers at an RV dealership in our area, one trailer stood out from the rest. It was in our budget and had the dry bath, dinette, sleeping space, and oven. We especially liked the floorplan. It had an RV queen (six inches shorter than a standard queen but the same width) in the front, a dry bath in the middle, and the kitchen, dinette and sofa in the back. We liked the slide-out, the spacious 10-cubic foot fridge with separate freezer, and the oven. It included an electric fireplace in the living area which was nice to have. But it lacked storage.
The Wildwood 24RLXL we bought had much better storage in this area, plus a bedroom closet vs. identical floorplan of the Grey Wolf 24RL. Note the payloader visible in the back window. This is the camper’s storage shed at PPR.
The trailer we liked was a Forest River Grey Wolf 24RL. When I went home and did more research, I found the exact same floorplan in the Forest River Wildwood X-Lite 24RLXL and Forest River Salem Cruise Lite 24RLXL. Those two models had the same basic floorplan, but they had more cabinets, more easy access storage, and a closet in the bedroom.
The salesman at our dealership was able to find us a Wildwood X-Lite 24RLXLthat he could bring in from a sister RV dealership, and we bought it. I’m glad I didn’t settle for the one that lacked storage.
Why we purchased when we did
We knew we wanted a camper before summer of 2021, but decided to get it before Christmas because we wanted a place for our three girls to sleep when we went to Kansas. They couldn’t sleep at grandma and grandpa’s house like they usually do because of COVID concerns. Shawn drove up several days before the girls and I got there, so he could set up the trailer next to the cabin.
He had to trim some trees, remove extra fencing by the gate, and put a skirting around the bottom so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. He used rolls of reflective insulation that he clipped and stapled underneath the trailer. Then he put a small outdoor space heater inside the skirting. That worked to keep the pipes from freezing when the temperature went into the teens. He had a small temperature sensor that he placed near the pipes with a portable readout device, so he could monitor it.
Rolls of reflective insulation clipped and stapled into place, plus a small space heater keep pipes from freezing.
The only issue we had was when the furnace ran out of propane in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve. We had icicles form on the hose and a small iceberg in the water inlet area. If the girls had awakened us, we would have switched over to the other propane tank and told them to crank the electric fireplace. Fortunately, we don’t think there was any permanent damage to the trailer. The pipes underneath stayed warm from the space heater and skirting. In fact, it was warmer under the trailer than inside of it!
Note: Camping when temperatures are below freezing is VERY challenging and requires extra prep work (skirting, space heater, uninterrupted heating). Some RVs have insulated and heated underbellies. Still, those are only good to certain temps and require constant heating. Camping stores sell heated hoses for these situations. I don’t think we would ever go camping in this kind of weather, but using the camper with the skirting and extra heat source worked okay at PPR.
Expect imperfections, even in a brand new RV
One thing you need to understand about recreational vehicles is this: it’s more like a flimsy house than a car. Things WILL go wrong, even on a brand new one. We lost a decorative cap on one of the hubcaps on its trip to Kansas. A piece inside the hubcap was loose. I heard it rattling around before Shawn left with it, but we couldn’t locate the sound of the noise. If you hear or see something that doesn’t seem right, pay attention!
I’m calling our camper Xena because it’s an X-Lite, and I like the idea of a trailer that’s a road warrior fit for a princess! For the record, Shawn is not down with the naming of the trailer. But he calls it my mid-life crisis, so I’m naming it! We’re storing Xena in a shed at PPR that already has a 30-amp outlet. The previous owner must have had an RV inside. It takes up almost half the shed. The other half has an old pay loader, or wheel loader.
Anyway, we went to PPR in January, and I wanted to get a few items for the trailer and see if the 30-amp power worked. When we opened up the hatch for the retractable power cord, the plug had disappeared inside the trailer. I ended up spraying cooking oil on my hand so I could slide it inside the hole and fish out the plug. It took a while, and Shawn went to do other things. I made sure I put my phone in my left pocket. If my arm got stuck inside, I could call him to come help me.
I did rescue the plug, and the outlet worked fine. Yay for power in the storage area! I could put the slide out while I worked inside the camper and have the electric fireplace running to keep me warm.
Now I’m looking forward to Xena’s first official camping trip, hopefully in late March. There’s so much to learn, and I can hardly wait! I finally realized that dream from 8-year-old me!
A lovely photo taken by my Fix-It Farmer (who BTW got in trouble for climbing the windmill when I wasn’t there). The trailer is almost as big as the cabin.