A home away from home
(Sorry, please be careful with rotating your neck, some photos are not in proper orientation and it does not allow me to adjust them :) :)
To most of the travellers, a home away from home means a hotel, a cabin, a short-rented house or anything which provides you a temporary shelter. However, a home away from home means a travel trailer for me.
I like camping in summer time. At the very beginning, I was going camping by tenting. It was fun to sleep in a tent and breathe the fresh oxygen-rich forestry air. But, if it is a rainy day, then it would be a different story and it would be very appreciable if there would be a roof sheltering you and your family. It would be totally understandable that you can be jealous to people living in a trailer at a camping site while you are curling in a damp and cold tent.Thereafter, I always casted my eye on the neighbour’s trailer, wondering how it would feel if we could have a trailer at camping site. At the very beginning, it was almost impossible for us to have a trailer: it is expensive, needs a lot of care, related knowledge, and most importantly, it requires a towing vehicle. Please don’t argue with me that RV would also be an option.
With the above jealousy in my mind, I started to pay some attention to trailer related issues, and I found that tent trailer would be the option: towable by an SUV and not extremely expensive and it is doable to first-time owner. Then there came our very first first tent trailer. Even now I still believe a tent trailer is a smart idea for camping: it is towable with most of the vehicles as long as the vehicle has the tow hitch. As it is light and small, it could be parked at almost all types of camping site. Some people may have no idea about tent trailers, and here are some basic explanations: a tent trailer is a living space under a foldable roof, it has beds, table, cooking stove, sink, fridge, and heating furnace. The roof needs to be cranked up at the camping site and folded down during traveling. It was very exciting to have our very tent trailer camping trip.
However, after several trips, we started to put our expectations a little higher. Setting or unsetting a tent trailer takes time; it is not convenient to access the packed stuff in the trailer as it is folded down; it does not have a shower or bathroom in a tent trailer. So my next goal would be light-weight hardside trailer with show and bathroom. Trailers usually weight from several thousand pounds to over ten thousand pounds. The bigger the trailer, the more the weight and requires a vehicle with more powerful towing capacity. Trailers longer than 30 feet usually weigh over 6000 pounds and some can be over 10,000 pounds, and may require a truck for towing.Usually a medium to large SUV could tow 2500 to 5000 pounds. My vehicle can tow 7000 pounds at the most, so a trailer weighs under 4000 pounds would be ideal.
My first hardside trailer is a 22 feet long, fiberglass walled, with a queen size and a bunk beds. This trailer sheltered us in many beautiful places and provided us a brand new way to enjoy nature. We had a lot of good memories with this trailer. I felt guilty about selling it when we decided to move to another city.
We could not live a summer life without a trailer and I bought a larger one which is 27 feet long, with three single beds, one full-size bed, powered jack and awning, and of course it weighs more and a little harder to tow for my previous vehicle. To make the towing less challenging, I updated my towing vehicle to a more powerful version with a diesel engine. We have had a lot of good moments and memories with the current trailer. Almost all the weekends, this trailer provided us with shelter no matter if it was rainy or sunny, hot or cool, windy or calm. Let the pictures talk.
At the end of this summer, I owned another new unit which has a slide-out. It is so spacious like a 2 bedroom apartment on wheels. Love it so much and will try it out in the coming 2022 summer days. My son was very demanding and he wants an RV instead of a trailer. Unfortunately I could not afford an RV.
After having this home away from home, it added countless moments which are impossible without it. Most importantly, we have more time to spend together with family members and close friends. These moments are worth the money and time I spent on these trailers, homes away from home. Friends, if you don’t have a trailer, please don’t hesitate to get it. You will never regret it.
