Christopher Hodapp - RVs & Campers For Dummies

Photograph courtesy of Christopher Hodapp

A towable RV is just what it sounds like: an RV with wheels under it that has to be pulled around by a separate tow vehicle. Most people simply refer to them as trailers or travel trailers . Towables are usually described by their total length, along with a few specialty designs or functions: travel trailer, fifth wheel, toy hauler, pop-up , and teardrop . (We cover those specialties in the following sections.)

The travel trailer (see Figure 2-6) is the classic American RV, and they’ve been around for almost a hundred years (or longer, if you stretch the definition). Trailers are the modern-day equivalent of a wagon pulled by horses. Emperor Napoleon famously had a carriage he took on campaign with many of the luxuries we think of today in an RV. After his final defeat at Waterloo, it was displayed all over England for years and wowed the locals.

In the RV universe, trailers are the most common vehicles you’ll encounter and unquestionably the most economical. When you stroll through your first RV show or wander onto a dealer’s lot, the sheer number of trailers you’ll encounter can be overwhelming, like an endless all-you-can-eat Las Vegas smorgasbord. There are more sizes, shapes, models, variations, options, and prices of trailers than you can chuck a badly aimed stick at. Travel trailers can be as short as 8 feet or as long as 45 feet. They can be 4 feet tall or more than 13 feet tall. They can come with no slides or as many as six. They can sleep one person or a dozen.

Trailers are usually designated by their overall length. According to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, (RVIA), the length stated in ads and catalogs, on websites, and on an RV’s factory sticker is supposed to be the complete length of the trailer, from the very front edge of the hitch coupler in front all the way back to farthest tip of the rear bumper.

When you go shopping, one of the biggest discoveries you’ll make is that a 30-foot trailer has more indoor living space than a 30-foot motorhome. The reason is what’s up front, or what isn’t. A motorhome gobbles up really important indoor real estate with its cockpit (where the driver and a passenger sit and the steering and driving controls are located). A trailer doesn’t need any of that, which means more usable room for you to spread out at the campsite.

You probably already noticed that some trailers have more wheels under them than others. Shorter, lighter trailers (usually 23 feet or less) will only have one axle and set of wheels under them. Anything longer than 23 feet will probably have two axles and four tires. Only the heavyweight giants of the trailer world (like fifth wheels) have three axles and six tires. All those extra wheels spread the weight around to keep a heavy trailer from bending its axles and prevent the tires from wearing down prematurely when it’s fully packed.

Photographs courtesy of Christopher Hodapp

FIGURE 2-6:Travel trailers can be short or long or anywhere in between.

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.