Campers hit the road lightly in tiny trailers
Posted on Saturday, September 6, 2008
Brian Endter’s 30-day road trip this summer from his home in Bend, Ore., to his native lands of the Midwest unfolded like an American greatest-hits tour: national park campgrounds, stops in the Tetons, a visit to Old Faithful. His 6- and 4-year-old sons were ecstatic when a buffalo wandered through their Yellowstone campsite, and they relaxed in his father’s cabin in northern Wisconsin. Good times. The funny thing was, the trip wouldn’t have happened but for one thing: a new trailer / tent hybrid called the SylvanSport Go.
Endter, 41, a special-education teacher, had done his homework: Flights for his family of four and renting a car would have cost around $ 3, 000, which seemed prohibitive. He didn’t want a motor home. “I don’t want to sound like an elitist,” he said, “but I’ve never been interested in the hotel-roomon-wheels RV thing.” And Endter didn’t have a vehicle powerful enough to pull a full-size pop-up camper. Then he read about the Go, released in stores in April, in an outdoors magazine.
By day, the Go is a gear-hauling utility trailer. At night, it opens into a hard-roofed tent that sleeps four. The willowy unit weighs only 800 pounds, meaning the Endters can tow it with their four-cylinder Honda CR-V. Their gas mileage dropped from 27 or 28 miles per gallon to 21 or 22 mpg, but that now seems like a small price to pay.
Back in the glory days of guilt-free driving and dirt-cheap gasoline — around 2004 — motor home aficionados worshipped at the altar of size. Who cared if a 34-foot luxury RV got 6 miles to the gallon ? Now things are different. A fill-up for a diesel-swilling movable McMansion might soon cross the $ 500 threshold. Credit is tight, the economy is concave, and motor home sales have tumbled each year since peaking in 2004; this year is shaping up to be the worst overall since 1992. Analysts are predicting that the RV industry has yet to hit bottom. But there is a ray of hope in the new wave of smaller motor homes and campers that can be towed by any car — like the Go.
“There is absolutely a trend toward downsizing in the RV industry,” said Craig R. Kennison, a consumer leisure industry analyst with Milwaukee-based Robert W. Baird & Co., a wealth management and private equity company. “I don’t think the lifestyle is going away, but I think people are pursuing it in a different way. And the companies that innovate to meet consumer demand best will be the survivors.”
This concept of tiny, towable campers is not new. The Teardrop trailer, a 750-pound unit that stretched less then 9 feet in length and featured a svelte, curving shape to match its name, has attracted a loyal following since its introduction in the 1930 s. Camp-Inn of Necedah, Wis.; Little Guy Worldwide of Canton, Ohio, and SoCal Teardrops of Ontario, Calif., still manufacture trailers based on the original designs, as do a smattering of small custom builders. One of them, Jack Schonfeld of Pineville, La., also moderates a Web site called Teardrops and Tiny Travel Trailers, www. mikenchell. com / forums, on which aficionados share construction plans and advice.
In the first half of 2008, the site’s membership has nearly doubled, from 4, 000 to 7, 000 members, Schonfeld said. “The growth has been phenomenal this year,” he wrote, “and I attribute that to rising gas prices and folks wanting to downsize their camping activities.”
Two annual summer events for Teardrop enthusiasts — in northern California’s redwood country and in Virginia — were both sold out this year, with about 300 attendees going to each from all over North America.
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