courtesy of Christopher Hodapp
FIGURE 2-6: Travel trailers can be short or long or anywhere in between.
TRAVEL TRAILERS, PARK TRAILERS, AND DESTINATION TRAILERS
Occasionally, you’ll encounter the terms park trailer and destination trailer. These terms have very real distinctions when it comes to the trailer business.
An RV type of trailer is a travel trailer, which means it’s meant to be moved around — it has wheels, it’s fairly self-contained, and its utilities like water, power, and sewer hookups are meant to be temporary. In other words, you can travel with a travel trailer. Duh.
A park trailer (also known as a park model), on the other hand, is a different sort of beast. The RVIA pretty narrowly defines a park model as a trailer meant to be hauled someplace and then have its wheels and hitch taken off and parked pretty much permanently. Hence, the name park model. Although a park trailer may have slides to increase the interior room, it can’t be any bigger than 400 square feet on the inside. Lots of park models have big “cathedral” picture windows, high ceilings, sliding-glass doors, ceiling fans, fireplaces, extra bedrooms, and other amenities and comforts of a house. But park trailers don’t have generators or freshwater, blackwater, and graywater tanks, because they aren’t needed. All utilities like electrical, water, and sewer lines have to be hooked up securely, as they would in a normal house. When you see a park model, it usually has a covering around the base, called a skirt, that covers up the pipes, heating ducts, drains, and other stuff that would normally dangle down in a house’s basement or crawlspace. They often have a deck built on and a semipermanent stairway leading up to the door. Even a semi-attached carport is a pretty common addition.
For all intents and purposes, a park model is designed to be a small house that stays put. Can it be moved if necessary? Yes. But it’s a major undertaking to do it when your park model is, er, parked. Even if you get wanderlust and decide to disconnect everything, jack it up, and reattach wheels and a hitch, park models are often wider than RVs, which are limited to just 8½ feet. That makes them an oversize load as far as the U.S. Department of Transportation is concerned, which means that a commercial truck has to move it into place or haul it anywhere else. You won’t be moving it yourself with your Ford F-150 pickup.
A destination trailer occupies a fuzzy space between the travel and park trailers. Like a park model, destination trailers are big, with lots of square footage inside. But a destination trailer is designed so that you can tow it (or have it towed) to your favorite vacation or retirement spot, and still have the option of easily changing your mind when somebody abruptly builds a warehouse overnight, blocking your view of the mountains or your path to the trout stream. The wheels and the tow hitch stay on a destination trailer, they’re under the 8½-foot width limit, and the temporary campground utility hookups all work just like an RV.
Travel trailers are designed to be at least marginally aerodynamic so that they’re easy to tow without driving like a cinder block on a windy day. Not so with a destination model — they’re meant to be moved, just not every other day. Like park models, they can have giant windows and sliding-glass doors, ceiling fans, high ceilings, and lots of space. But a destination trailer still adheres to the 8½-foot width limit, so if you have a truck that’s robust enough to move it, you can go find a new happy trout-filled place far from that warehouse without a lot of problems.
In the following sections, we walk you through some of the specialty kinds of travel trailers you may want to consider.
Toy haulers or sport utility trailers
If you ever thought wistfully about owning an RV but just couldn’t bear the notion of going anywhere without your motorcycles, bikes, trikes, ATVs, snowmobiles, canoes, golf carts, or race car, the toy hauler is for you. These trailers have the usual RV amenities of a kitchen, dinette, couch, bedroom(s), and bathroom, as well as an additional empty space in the rear with a fold-down ramp. Drop the ramp, push all your big stuff in, lash it all down, and hit the road. Some versions even let you reconfigure the ramp as a raised, outdoor patio deck after you’re done unloading.
The goal of most RV designs is never to waste valuable space, and many toy haulers are set up to do multiple duties. The garage area may have a TV, flip-up bunk beds, or fold-out couches you can open up after you park and pull out the Harley. Some have a second bathroom, so that campers outside can use the facilities in the “garage” without traipsing through your living room. More compact ones may convert the garage area into the main bedroom with a fold-down Murphy bed or one that lowers from the ceiling, figuring that you won’t need to sleep until after you’ve dragged all your stuff out at the campsite. Others make use of the garage area to set up a home office. There’s tremendous variety in these types of trailers, with more introduced every year.
Toy haulers come in many sizes. There are toy haulers as short as 19 feet that have enough room for a motorcycle, an ATV, or a couple of mountain bikes. The biggest ones are fifth-wheel trailers, which give you the ultimate combination of indoor living space and a big garage. Just be aware that a fifth-wheel trailer requires a beefy truck to haul it. (More about fifth wheels later in this chapter.) And there are also several toy hauler motorhomes on the market. Instead of towing a small car behind, we’ve seen these motorhomes with a golf cart, Mini Cooper, Fiat, or Smart Car tucked into their onboard garages.
Lightweights
One result of typical cars getting smaller every year has been that the RV business has had to get creative when it comes to building and marketing trailers that can still be towed without a pickup truck or hefty SUV. Back in the days of yesteryear, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, the average American car was a colossal, steel behemoth, with a V8 engine and a transmission capable of powering an M1 tank. You could haul around a 40-foot aluminum trailer with an average fully-packed family sedan or station wagon, and still have plenty of horsepower left to drive it up to the top of Pikes Peak without breaking a sweat. But that hasn’t been true for several decades now. In the demand for smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicles, the auto manufacturers have split their efforts between making littler (and seemingly identical) cars, while building massive and increasingly luxurious pickup trucks. The average “full-size” SUV in the 2020s is a pale imitation of the ones that dominated the market in the 1990s and early 2000s.
We talk lots more about tow vehicles in Chapter 7. The point is that not everyone wants to buy or own a pickup truck. If the only thing you have to haul a trailer with is a two-door, midsize car with a 4-cylinder engine and little more towing capacity than the average riding lawn mower, there are still towable options to consider if you lower your expectations a bit and keep the word cozy in mind.
Most so-called lightweight or featherweight trailers tend to tip the scales at 4,000 pounds or less. But be aware that adjectives like these are about as informative as seeing the word FRESH! on