AWESOME Tiny Teardrop Camping Trailer For Solo Woman Traveling | FULL TOUR

Hello this is Patrick with New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel. Today I got a very special guest for you. I got Janine Pettit with Girl Camper Magazine and she is going to give us a tour inside and out of her teardrop trailer. So join us. Hello Janine and welcome to New Jersey Outdoor Adventures. Hi Patrick thanks for having me on the show. I'm a huge fan and a fellow New Jersey resident. I'm here at what we affectionately call the swamp and I am camping in my 2018 off-road adventure Liberty Outdoors Max. This is the largest teardrop trailer that they make and I would love to give you a tour. Come on inside. Here we are. So here I am. This is the perfect solo woman trailer. I love traveling in this camper. I have been up in the Tetons, Glacier, Yellowstone in this and I've been all over the South. I've taken it down to Texas. I have logged thousands and thousands of miles on here. To me this RV is the perfect solo woman traveler adventure cabin and as you can see I have it kind of decorated like a cabin. I love the cabin feel. I custom ordered this about two and a half years ago. This will be my third summer using it and I purposely chose the dark cabinets which remind me of the cabins that we used to stay in when I was a kid growing up on the lakes in Wisconsin. So I love the vibe in here and I wanted to recreate a cabin feel in here. So a couple of things I did let me show you. I wallpapered because you can't have too much wallpaper. This is a wallpaper called Woodland Creatures and it's made by Spoonflower and it's peel and stick. It doesn't take much to put it up. Comes off really easily so if I ever sold this and somebody didn't like it it peels right off leaving nothing behind which I really love. Now another one of the features I love about this I got the big three-way four cubic foot Dometic refrigerator. So three ways I can run this on battery, shore power, or propane. I usually run it on propane because it cools off much quicker on propane. I have a full wardrobe here so this is really cool. I want Patrick to come along and show you because I'm kind of proud of my organizing in here. I use these cubes by M Design. These things are so great. I've got about 15 articles of clothing in each one of these things. I don't hang things up but you see I added a rod here. When I come back from the shower that is where I hang my towels to dry. I got cosmetics and a couple tools. These are all my socks. I got my sleeping socks, my hiking socks, my walking socks. So all different kinds of socks right in there. They actually make those for the refrigerator but I repurposed it and this is where I keep the things I don't use all the time. My hats and hiking down hiking vest. I pile them up in there. I added a piece of metal in here and as you can see I have my motor vehicle stuff if I ever get pulled over and I need to show that. But I've got some magnets and some clips in here and if you see here all my RV tires. Here's my PSI 50. My truck tires are 35. You know how hard it is? Take a piece of chalk, white chalk like a teacher uses, rub that on your tire. When you get that number write it down so you don't forget. So this is great. The thing I love about this trailer is in addition to this giant wardrobe because most teardrops make you choose between one or the other. I have a full pantry as well. Again I use these containers from M Design. So I've got all my food right here. I can pull this out, lay it on the counter, pick out what I want. Paper towels and then all these little airtight containers in here and I can see what I have going on in there. So tons and tons of storage. It's an east-west bed and it is a queen size and Patrick I am going to ask you to just swing around so you can show people what I got at the foot of the bed. I took out my um there was a television in here and I took that television out. I never watch TV and if I do I'm likely to stream on my laptop and this is an electric heater which I really really love. I can turn the heat off and just look at the flames or I can have them both on and unlike your power driven um heater in your camper this one doesn't kick on all night running a fan. So I really enjoy this a lot more. Let's show you something down here. So this is a fantastic kitchen that I got going here. I love that the stove is flat here. This is a corning top I can cut on it. It came with a cover for the sink. I've got some water in there but it's a super deep sink in here so when I'm on a long trip I can throw a few things, throw my bathing suit in there if I come back from the pool and rinse it out. It's a nice big sink big enough to wash stuff but I have extra chopping space. This moves around. It's got a sprayer nozzle. The running joke in our house is this a nicer faucet than we have at home. So I still do have a microwave up here. I don't use it too often. Usually just store bread in it. This is my upper cabinet. Again M Designs. I really love this system. So the plates were always sliding all over. Now if I'm serving company I can just pull this out and all of my plates are here. I can take that to the picnic table. I decorated the inside of my cabinets. This is where I keep all my thermal and coffee things and then when I'm done this sticks back up there and when I get where I'm going all my dishes are in great shape. These are what I call my camper china. This is enamelware made by a company called Golden Rabbit. Too much for me to try to pass by. These are absolutely gorgeous and I love them. I did all my curtains here. I took them out and I changed them. I really love the windows in this camper because I can very easily open this here and I can adjust it but what I love is I have a privacy screen that pulls up from the bottom and then if I have the window open pull the screen down I can still have airflow but I have privacy. So as a solo woman traveler I love the option of having that airflow but nobody can see inside and on a nice day those just hide away. I close the window and nobody can see it. I got to show off this top drawer. Another one of my recent projects of organizing the camper again by the company M Design. Lucky for me they fit perfectly so I can pull anything out that I need there. I got a two burner propane stove. Lots of storage under here. There I've got all of my things I need for cooking, storing and then all my cutting boards because I actually have a lot of company in the Girl Camper world so all my cutting boards fit right in there and they stay in place. One of my favorite features in this RV is this giant drawer underneath. Literally holds every single thing I cook with. So I've got my electric fry pan in there. I've got my vintage just like the one my grandmother had. This is the percolator the Farberware six cut percolator. If you're not making coffee in this take the guts out of it. Fill it with water and you've got instant hot water if you don't want to use your hot water or you're running on um you're trying to save. Put your hot water in the sink there and you've got instant pot. You can also cook soup in this which I have done. So everything I cook with fits in this drawer and it has a great lock on it too. And there underneath are this is my fuse panel here and it has a ducted heating system so that comes out there. Another little storage shelf up here. The storage in this trailer is phenomenal. 57 square feet of interior storage and 37 square feet outside. Now when I'm traveling alone this bed this table folds down to be a twin bed. If my husband is not with me generally I have this folded down and I just use it like a couch which I really love. I'm gonna show off my cushions because in my former life I was a seamstress and I recovered all the cushions in this camper because I like them to look a little more home decor rather than industrial. I finally aged out of having to choose fabrics that kids won't destroy. It's just me in here so I get to have whatever I want. So I love this little nook up here. When I'm sitting here and I'm at work the view with these windows is phenomenal. I've got this fantastic full corner view here and I always joke that it's the best corner office in the world. There's a hidden television that goes up on a button in the dining room. So there you go. And this is made by Furrion and it's on a special stand so it doesn't vibrate a lot. I don't watch it very often. My husband loves it though and I can put a DVD in there and watch it here. I'm not sure how messy my bathroom is but I also have a wet bath in here. So even though this wet bath is very small they went and put a really nice shower head in here so that adjusts down and I can actually shower in here and nothing on this back wall gets wet. The fantastic fan up there which is really nice to have. I use it all the time. I keep a squeegee in there so I'll just squeegee that down and turn on the fantastic fan. I have a teak wood mat on the floor here so when I am showering in water pools I'm not standing in it and my towel isn't standing in it so when I get out I can squeegee that down. And it's just the standard RV toilet there. If I'm at a super clean campground I'll go over to the bathroom there but usually I just jump in there and rinse off before I go to bed at night and I covered the door. It had a kind of a smoked glass but I just wanted to cover it you know. I don't want my husband watching me shower and I added these baskets on the on the front right here. I keep them these are my blankets for when I'm sitting out at the campfire so if it's a chilly night and then there's some little extra toilet paper rolls and these are all my shopping bags I take when I go to the grocery store. So I have a little broom here that I sweep out with a 13,500 BTU air conditioner there and let me tell you I'm not afraid to use it. I do not like to be hot. Oh that's my smoke detector. Yeah I painted it black so it would blend in and and actually right here is is my little Dometic. This turns on my heater or air conditioner and I just keep this this little pretty sign over. I also have solar here so I have two 100 watt solar panels on the roof and I use an AGM battery on my camper here so I've really enjoyed having the solar power. Just last year started getting into a little more boondocking. I think it's quite fun. It's kind of exciting to meet the challenges of preserving your water or conserving water. I played a game with my husband where we went to Rocky Mountain National Park eight days in one site and we were not going to move that camper to fill up that tank and we made it to the eighth day. That was a lot of fun. So I have built-in LED lights all over. They're on a central switch that I can turn on at the front door but this is what's fun. These switches each have their own individual so if I want the kitchen lights on but I don't want the bedroom lights on I can turn those off. I have another giant storage drawer under here. This is where I keep another pile. I keep all of my towels in here. So I use these Turkish towels. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. They're a really loosely woven cotton so they're really really absorbent and they're pretty. Aren't they pretty? They come in a six pack for maybe $29. These things dry really great. What I love about them is you can go into the shower and wrap your hair in this and dry your body in it but this is super great to bring to the pool with you and lay on your chair at the pool. You can wrap it around you at the beach like a sarong. You can put it on your picnic table and use it to keep the bugs off of your legs. If you don't want to sit on a bare bench you can use it as a tablecloth. So these things are multi-multi-purpose. In fact I am taking these with me this summer because I'm doing the entire length of the Colorado River by raft. July 28th I'm launching and I'm going to be taking two of these with me and I've been told that it's 114 during the day and it drops down to 99 at night and everybody told me you've got to bring a Turkish towel because you get a collapsible bucket and you dip this in water and you wring it out and you lay it on top of you as you're sleeping on the inflatable mat and that is how you're able to get to sleep when it's 99 degrees outside. So these are super great. I keep them all here. They pop in here. I have a raincoat in there too and I keep some of my extra little shower flip-flops and little shoes in there. I'm really really it has taken me almost the full two years to get my storage system here. I want to draw your attention to the floor real quick. As you can see I have wall-to-wall carpet which some people find so strange in a trailer but I actually love it. The first year I had this the floor that the manufacturer put in here it has really deep grooves in it and it let me tell you that held dirt. I always had to get a scrub brush and scrub it clean all the time. It really held on to dirt so I just made a paper template of this floor and put a remnant piece of carpet. The whole thing pulls out. I can shake it but I actually keep a little shop vac in the tail of my truck and I just pick the dirt up on this really quick. So these are some of my treasures from my travels here. This little maple syrup can was very similar to one my grandma had. I usually at springtime now fill this up and put a little flower in there. This was a can opener I got at a flea market for a dollar along my travels. I actually use this little thing right here. It's an old ribbon. It says typewriter ribbon and actually here's my earrings right here. I actually always lose earrings when I'm traveling so I keep my earrings in there and a little serrated knife I got at a flea market for a dollar. This little Hill's Brother can. Hill is my maiden name so I really like this. I keep my paper towels in here but this actual can was on my dad's workbench in our basement for 40 years full of all the little loose nails and screws that he would throw in there when something needed to be repaired. He would shake it out and look for just the right screw and when he passed away I grabbed that off his workbench and I love having it there. Some of the things up here are postcards from various trips. I love old vintage pennants so I pick those up if they mean something to me. If I have been to that park then I get those. One of my favorite features of this bed area here is this window. It's called the Stargazer window and I only have it open a crack right now but this thing can open really wide. I can remember laying in this bed at Badlands National Park. Watching the most incredible lightning storm and I was so tired from like a 12-hour driving day but the whole silhouette of the mountainsides was lighting up with the lightning and I could barely tear my eyes off it. So many nights I have sat in this bed watching the stars and listening to the rain. It's going to rain tonight and I'm going to enjoy that. I'll show you one more thing on my way out the door here. This is my control panel here. So this is my switch that'll turn on the whole interior set of lights. I've got my water pump here. I'm hooked up to shore power now but there's a great lighting system here. There's an LED on the outside, the awning and as you can see my handle lights up right here. So if I'm visiting a girlfriend and I come back my handle is all lit up telling me this is your trailer and then I have the whole stereo system and a DVD player. It has outside speakers here. I've got USB ports here. This is an interior lighting system so let me turn off those lights and turn on my nightclub lights. There it goes. Dim and then light it back up. So it's my nightclub lighting. It's like an airplane runway lighting and then this is all my sensor system tells you. See my tanks are full. I check all my tanks here. My gray water is about a third. What is that? Oh that's my just my LPG. So good to know I have lots of propane. I mean I just think for me it is the perfect perfect RV. There I go again with my dual the privacy screen but still has the airflow. So welcome home right? Camco makes this and it's a great little step. I want to show you something that happens with this. This does not come off. This is a step cover and it's got little loops that grab the dirt off the bottom of your shoe but it's not one that you have to take on and off. It stays on all the time. It folds up with it. So outside here I'm going to go inside and close this in order to show you something. There we go. That television we just talked about comes off the stand and mounts right here and here is the plug and here is the cable. So let's say it's game day and you want to sit out here and watch the game, get a fire going, pull up your lawn chairs, get the TV going. You've got the surround sound speakers out here. You got your awning that comes out. So this is a Thule awning. It works. It's not automatic. You have to take it out and crank it and I've got LED lighting going a couple different places. So I could turn off that. I could just have that or I could I usually just leave the handle on because I feel that's very bright for other campers that might be around you. This is the off-road model so I have the taller tires. The suspension is higher on here. I had the other version first and I decided I was camping out west so much that I did want to have the off-road. I don't really go off-road but a lot of times when you're just traveling out west, not so much here in New Jersey, what we consider off-road is just regular life for people out there. So I may take a turn and it'll take me 20 miles down a gravel road and I actually prefer these tires. So this is the vent for my stove. This is the propane vent and I have a hookup right here. It's a propane hookup. If I wanted to connect my grill out here, I could do that automatically. I got to show you this. I've got a pass-through. Let me show you. I got a little light in there. So I try to stay a little organized in here. Everything for leveling my trailer is here on the right hand side. Here's my, just put that back and all my electric and hoses go on the other side. So when I pack up in a couple days, I'll stack all that here. But come on over to the other side. I want to show you something about this window. When I first saw this trailer, I thought I would be uncomfortable sleeping here because this is where I sleep because I thought that window was so low. But you can see how the trailer tapers out and I'm 5'4". I cannot see in there. No one is going to be able to come up. They'd have to get a stool to sit up there. So I've got my leveling jacks right there and I do have an additional hitch here. I actually keep threatening to get a bicycle rack and I might get an electric bike. This might be the year of the electric bike for me. This is where the sewer hose goes. Kind of dirty in there, right? But then over here, I keep all my electric hoses there. My power defender. Gotta have the power defender. Have any of you thought about doing this? I'm going to take this out and show you. This is where, this is one of those containers you buy at Christmas time to put your wreath in. But I bought one to keep my hose in. So this is the Camco hose. If you don't have one of these, you're gonna want a hose with no memory. You know when you're trying to wind up your hose and it's going six different ways? Camco makes this hose called the Evo. It's got no memory. You can do anything to it and it's going to wrap however you want it to wrap. So this thing is really cool. I'm going to wrap it up later and put it in my little Christmas tree box and that slides right in there. I don't know why I still carry all these extension cords with me because I've never used them. But I do also have a cable right there. So if I was at a campground that had cable television, I could plug that in. I think in the two and a half years I've been camping, I used it two times. So here is my outside shower, which is locked right now. Used it once maybe in the whole time. And I've got another outside light right here. I mean, honestly, I don't even know where the button for this one is. There it is. I never use it. But actually, I personally, I do this thing. I always want to be at a campground before dark. But this is for when you're arriving at a campground and it's not light out anymore. This allows you to see. This is the vent for my refrigerator. And if you come over here, this is the fresh water supply right here. And here is my black and gray tanks. This is another. Campco just came out with that. It's clear. So if somebody came by and pulled out one of your things and you didn't know it, you're not going to get a surprise when you take that thing off. You're going to know ahead of time. And so this is the vent that is hooked up to my hot water heater, the hot water heater there. Now, this is something I'm going to have to figure out what that's all about. I think that is from when I winterized. But anyway, this is someplace you want to make sure that bugs are not making a nest. Some people put a screen right there, but that is where it is. And then this is cable. So there's one in the front and one in the back. I think I've only used that one time. It has really nice coach lights on it. Here is in my front end business here. And I'm just going to jump over. So the kind of weight distribution hitch I use is something called an ease lift. I really like this for women, especially most weight distribution hitches load up from the bottom. This drops in from the top and then I can load it right onto here. And the thing I love about this one too is the pin is built in here. So when I push that button, I'm not going to lose this. It's hanging here. So I'm not always like, what happened to the pin? Sometimes, you know, you put them on your bumper or something, then you drive away. So after I load my weight distribution bar, I put that in there, release the pin, and that thing is not going anywhere. I got a Lippert electric jack. I know it's probably good for me, but I don't like it. So I love the electric jack. That is really great thing to have. One of the things that I love about this trailer and all the extra detailing they did here is that this is all enclosed. So I have one propane tank in here and I have my battery covered in there as well. I went ahead and installed an on off switch for the battery. That was before I put solar. I keep it on all the time now because even if this is sitting in my driveway, the solar is keeping my battery topped off. Before I had the solar though, that was a real issue and I was always coming out to a dead battery. So if you do not have solar, I would highly suggest you spend the $40 on that switch. It's going to save you so much aggravation. So this is really nice because all of this stuff is covered all the time. And again, I've got this fantastic big window. I love my little beehive door on my trailer. I've got one, no two, two more things to show you. I don't think I showed you. I hardly use this because there's so much storage in here, but I've got a nice decent sized space underneath the cabinet there. I'll show you what I keep here. This seems silly, but a roll of brown paper at the campground never run out of things to do with this. I roll this down the middle of my picnic table. If the tables have a lot of splinters on them, I roll this out and sit on them. Then I bundle it up and it's kindling. It's my bundle. So I always have a roll of brown paper with me. And one of my favorite features here is my little hidden insect screen door. So I love that I can sit at my table, have that screen pulled and get the full view instead of just the window. So I use that all the time. Janine, thank you very much for taking the time to give our viewers a tour of your beautiful camper. You shared a lot of awesome storage tips. Can you give any tips to our viewers? Maybe there's some first time RV buyers out there and they're looking to jump into this lifestyle. I'm sure when you first started this process, you had some hurdles to overcome. Is there any tips you can share? Learn and go. Don't be afraid. That's what I want to tell people. Don't be afraid. There are people out there. RVers are the nicest people in the world and they're always willing to help you. But you don't have to go out and buy a big truck and a tow vehicle at a camper. Just get your feet wet by getting yourself out to a campground. Find a community to camp with. Head over to girlcamper.com where we have Girl Camper Guides all over the country. Find one near you and sign up for a trip. Don't worry if you don't have a trailer. You can buy a $20 Ozark tent at Walmart. You can rent a cabin. You can van camp. Just get out there and then meet those people. Walk around. See what people are towing. Start to get a feel for what you like. But the first step is to just get out there. That's a really good tip because you don't know what you don't know. And a lot of people that are interested in this lifestyle might consult with some friends that maybe can't relate to it and say, Oh no, you can't do this. Oh yeah. So I got to tell you that turn off those naysayers because listen, when I started doing this, I didn't have a single girlfriend who did it. In fact, I had a girlfriend who told another girlfriend, Janine joined a subculture. As if that was a bad thing. I did join a subculture, a subculture of women out there going places, doing things, helping each other and having a ball. So turn off those negative people talking in your ear and get on Facebook. Get on our community spaces. Join the Girl Camper Facebook page. There's 37,000 women there every day. Hey, does anybody know what this whirring noise is that goes on when I turn this on? Six people answer you within 60 seconds. Hey, does anyone know how I can stay warm? I'm going to tent camp, but it's dropping down in the thirties. How should I stay warm at night? A hundred people answering that question. Join the people who are going to encourage what you're doing and not the people who are going to tear your ideas down. Patrick wants to know why I started girlcamper.com. I grew up in a camping family. Camping is some of the happiest memories that I have. My dad was a guitar player and a banjo picker and our campsite was always the place everybody circled around singing songs all night long. Happy, happy stuff. And then I married a non-camper. You just think when you take someone camping, they're going to get it, but he didn't. So I found out there are women out there doing it. And I said, you know what? I'm going to stop waiting for him to come around. I'm just going to get out there and do it. But because I grew up in a camping family and because I drove my parents' motor home from Chicago to New Jersey, when I was 17 years old, I wasn't afraid. I had a dad who taught me every step of the way. When I got out to that campground and I saw women pulling up in little tiny six cylinder Toyota trucks with big giant 1980s RVs attached to the back, I said, wait a minute. We want to have fun, but we want to be safe. So I started writing a blog telling people how to make sure their tow vehicle matched their camper, how to be safe when they were out there, what's a good weight pulling ratio. I just started educating women, sharing what I knew. And that grew into girlcamper.com where we have all kinds of great tips and fellow writers and Girl Camper magazine. In that magazine, we really try to talk about the camping lifestyle. It's not a magazine about RVs. It's a magazine about camping. I used to stand at Barnes and Noble going, why are there six different issues of backyard chickens and there's no camping magazine? So I started one. And Girl Camper magazine is all about giving you the information and set in really beautiful setting on really beautiful paper, something that you're going to want to keep and read over and over. It's full of encouraging stories about women who did this and are succeeding at it. And you know what? Once you set that goal and you get out there and do it, there's something that happens internally where you're now going to say to yourself, okay, I did this. What can I do next? What else is on my bucket list? Maybe you'll find yourself floating down the Colorado river with no Wi-Fi for eight days, sleeping on the beach and think, how did I get here? Well, I got the courage to do things that I wanted to do. And I did that by joining the Girl Campers, learning how to tow and getting out there by myself with my friends and doing things. So that's why I started it. I was here at this park last weekend, I believe it was last weekend. And you had some of your followers or some of the people in the group here camping, a whole group of women campers. My peeps, my New Jersey peeps. Those are my camping buddies. They had probably the best setup here at the campground. And they had a really good time. I went over and met with them. So it's unbelievable what you're doing and what you're providing a beautiful service to the community. Other than the Facebook and the website, how else do they follow you? I know you're pretty big on Instagram. Yeah, I got a good Instagram following. So it's girl underscore camper. Yeah, somebody already had Girl Camper, believe it or not. So girl underscore camper were easy to find. I do have a little YouTube channel. I can't do a magazine, Instagram, a Facebook page and YouTube. So I have to count on people like Patrick to share us on YouTube. And you can find me on CampCo's YouTube channel. CampCo sponsors the Girl Camper podcast. So you can listen to the Girl Camper podcast and get some tips on how to get started. And if there's one thing I could say to women who are on the fence, they're looking at us like Patrick was here and he saw Debbie and all the girls last weekend, having a blast, right? There's no wrong way to camp like a girl. I don't want people to think that if you don't have a rig like this, you're not one of us because it doesn't matter how you camp. It only matters that you get out there. And once you're out at the campground and you're sitting around that fire and you're telling stories and laughing with the girls, it doesn't matter what you go back and sleep in. You're out there, you're doing it. Janine, thank you very much for taking the time to give us a tour of your beautiful camper and sharing a lot of awesome information for the viewers. Well, this is Patrick with New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel. Hope you enjoyed this video. Please like this video, comment, share and subscribe. I'd love it. And we'll see you soon. Thank you.