Specifically about hard sided trailers, some apply to motor coaches and pop ups also.
Pluses:
Sleep in your own bed.
Eat your own food prepared in your own little kitchen.
If you have a place to park it at the house, if can be ready to go or not, work on it if needed, and hitch it up and leave.
There’s always little things to be done to them or little upgrade projects, which are kinda fun.
Go anywhere. Kinda.
Minuses:
If you have to park it elsewhere, storage places and rental fees.
Same thing with those little projects or maintenance, you won’t keep up on them if it’s not at your house. It’ll be a pain to go get it to do those things so it’ll add a week of screwing around with it before every trip.
Almost none at low prices are built well. Even high prices aren’t. They’re going for light weights because people don’t want to buy heavy duty tow vehicles and light weight means crap construction.
No matter how nice of a system it is, black water tanks and dealing with them sucks. Get good gear and be careful and you won’t have Old Faithful at the dump station, but there’s no getting around that dealing with dumping your own poo is fairly nasty. You just deal with it.
Driving. I love driving. I love towing. But a true cross county trip is still an ass kicker in the seat all day. Three hours in a jetliner will get me anywhere in CONUS and there’s times it just makes more sense.
Price. To get a decent quality rig it’s not going to be cheap. You can pay for months and months of really nice hotels for the price of nearly any RV even used.
Gotchas:
Depreciation. Don’t buy new if you can’t afford to lose a lot of money driving it off the lot.
Insurance. Someone said the tow vehicle covers the towed trailer but check that. Mine didn’t. It wasn’t expensive to add it but if we had wrecked it towing it home with that assumtion we would have been screwed.
Tires. If you buy new or unknown used, immediately take the tires off and throw them in the garbage. The new ones suck on most brands. It’s one of the easiest places for them to hide that they’re saving money for a profit.
Warranties. Don’t buy anything. They all suck and have all sorts of “outs” for the warranty company. And don’t expect jack from the manufacturers. They’re all cheapskates and will wiggle out of anything.
Our story:
We camped all over the place in a pop-up for two decades. Even did our honeymoon trip in it. We like camping. We don’t mind “roughing it”.
About five years ago we decided to buy a camper. We went big. We got a 35’ fifth wheel and the one ton Dodge Cummins to pull it. We loved it.
At the time my work was such that I could work from home every day so we thought we’d bolster up the cellular data and Karen would meet me at X and/or her schedule is fairly flexible with advanced notice too, so we’d take some long weekends of four days and wander.
Job change. Didn’t happen. We loved towing the beast to OSH and the occasional weekend outing to the mountains but one that big requires RV parking and hookups or our Honda generator if camping on BLM land or similar. “Boondocking” as they say. But it was awesome. All the comforts of home, big TV, easy chairs, big queen bed. We loved it. But...
It sat. And we get hail. Every summer. So that’s thre short story of why we didn’t want it sitting out here in the prairie getting its butt kicked all the time.
We also had one bit gotcha that wasn’t awful but wasn’t great either. The roof peeled back. Clearly on a two year old new fifth wheel at the time, a manufacturing defect. They fought and fought and fought with me over it and finally I caved and just paid for the stupid repair. And then added some modifications of my own so it couldn’t ever happen again. Dealership tried to help. They got nowhere.
Sooooo... we sold it. And took a depreciation hit. But we figure we saved ourselves thousands and thousands in hail repairs.
Lesson learned. We would do a nice RV again but out here, we would need a shelter or a barn built to put it in before we’d do it again. In other words... a hangar.
We also learned we don’t have enough time to go as often as we’d like. And frankly we loved the detachability and price of the trailer but next time it’s motorcoach and it’ll cost a lot more. Reason?
We like to keep rolling and Karen doesn’t want to learn to tow, even something small. So we’d shell out the bucks for an easily driveable Class C she could drive and the ability to wander back and throw lunch together or stretch legs or even lie down for an hour.
If... she’d learn to tow something smaller, we’d change to a better driving truck with an auto and go that route. Or... an in bed camper. But if we’re going to mess with in-bed we might as well just have a drivetrain under the thing that’s permanent.
I was doing all he driving. And that makes for wicked long days even though I enjoy it. Buy something you both can drive.
And nothing unless there’s a shelter or barn built first. Love having the rig at the house. Hated seeing radar shots of purple going over the place when at work or in town.
And the final straw in ours was... I wanted more flight ratings and that takes TIME. We simply weren’t going to use it for anything but OSH for years. So it got put on consignment and sold. Got a decent price out of it considering how much we could have lost on depreciation on a new one, and moved on. We’ll go back to RVing again someday.
