Small Travel Trailers to Tow Behind a Class B RV

We're on the hunt for a small lightweight travel trailer that can be towed behind a camper van. Today, I'm going to talk all about why we want a small travel trailer, some of our requirements for it, different models we're looking at, and the pros and cons of traveling with a small trailer. Why do we want a small travel trailer? Number one, to bring friends and family along with us. When we did our summer trip with mom, mom spent a lot of that summer in the camper van with us. Now, our camper van has seating for four, and it's great to have those people with us when we're going down the road, but if we bring mom or friends and family along, it would be nice to have a separate sleeping area for them with their own privacy. Since we have seating for four, we really only have sleeping for three in the camper van, and this would give us that extra room we need. I think the one who's going to be most comfortable tonight is Charlie, who has stolen your bed. Second, I got a new motorcycle. Now, for those who missed our previous videos about it, I got a Yamaha FJR 1300. Now, this is a big bike weighing in somewhere around 650 pounds. I also have a Suzuki DRZ 400 that we have been carrying on the back of our camper van and our truck camper. Now, the DRZ 400 was bought specifically so we could put it on a motorcycle rack and bring it with us, but the Yamaha FJR is way too big for that, so we need a way to carry that around the country with us. Third, we like to bring extra gear with us now that we have a home base and we have a place to store that stuff. So, when we go to a lot of events and expos, a lot of times what Kate and I like to do is set up kind of a camping area where we can invite fellow van lifers and everyone else at the expo for a barbecue, a campfire, that type of thing. So, bringing things like our solo stove, pizza oven, all that sort of stuff with us to those events would be great. Fourth, we also want to be able to go camping with our F-350 Leo. We used to have a camper on the back of that truck and now that it's just a truck, if we want to go do some serious off-roading and camping, we can use that to tow the trailer with us or we can take our camper van and put the trailer on that as well. With the why out of the way, now comes the what. So, here's our list of requirements for this lightweight travel trailer. First, this travel trailer needs to be 3,500 pounds or lighter. While we can tow up to 10,000 pounds with our pickup truck, our van can only tow around 3,500 to 5,000 pounds depending on how much weight is in the camper itself. So, we want to limit the trailer to be as light as possible. We also want this trailer to be enclosed so that when we have a motorcycle, our gear and other things in it, we can close it and lock it up. Now, I've had a lot of experience towing motorcycles around because I used to take mine to track days and events like that. So, we always took them in open motorcycle trailers and you would just throw your stuff in there, get to where you're going, unload it and you're good. But you never wanted to leave it someplace because you never knew who might run off with your stuff. So, having an enclosed trailer that we can lock up, regardless of what's in there, is going to be invaluable for us. Plus, it'll keep all of our stuff out of the elements. We also need to have sleeping quarters for at least two people in this trailer. If we're taking friends, we have seating for four people with seatbelts. So, two additional people in the trailer would be perfect. Since this is going to double as a possible camper and we're going to have things like motorcycles in there that can vent gases, we're going to need ventilation such as a roof vent plus windows that we can open to air out that trailer. Now, let's get into some of the nice-to-haves. I think first on that list, especially if we're going to be bringing people with us or camping out of this camper during the summer, we're going to need air conditioning and some sort of power system. Next would be a bathroom of sorts. Something with a shower plus a toilet. That would mean we'd need a water system and potentially a water heater among those other amenities. Another nice-to-have would be the ability for the trailer to be wide enough to fit two motorcycles or the ability, since we do have a home base now, to take our big riding mower and put it in the trailer so we can take it down for service or other things that need to get done to it. Since we are thinking about doing some off-road trips in our truck, it would be nice if the trailer had off-road suspension to deal with some of the trails that we might be taking it on. Now, before I get into the rest of this video, I would really love to know what you've seen that kind of fits these requirements and some of the nice-to-haves and definitely leave a comment below because we are still in the searching phase and I know a lot of you out there have a lot more experience with trailers and tow-behinds than we do. To give you an idea of some of the trailers we've already looked at and considered, first is the Winnebago Hike. The reason I like that is it has a very nice sleeping system. It has a full kitchen, bathroom, along with a nice lithium battery system that can run the Truma AC unit. There's also a large garage area where you can put things in and strap them down. Unfortunately, it's not made specifically to take motorcycles or gas vehicles. On the other list is the Intech Flyer. Now, they have multiple sizes of this, but the way it works is it's essentially a cargo trailer made for taking side-by-sides, motorcycles, ATVs, things like that, which would be perfect for us. And then the sides fold down and they have kind of like tent sleeping areas, which, you know, I think that's fine for short trips, especially if we have friends with us. And then it also has storage and a sink and some other amenities along with air conditioning. We've also been considering going the DIY route and getting a cargo trailer, building those out to our own specifications, similar to our friend's trailer that he built out. Now, his trailer is way too big for what we're thinking about doing, but the concept remains the same. If you haven't seen the video we did of our friend's trailer, I will link to it up here. So now that you know what we're looking for, let's take a bit of a step back and I'll give you some history on where we've been to where we are today. Now, before Kate and I ever hit the road, I was really into motorcycles. Every weekend, I would go riding in the canyons. When they were available, I would take my bikes to track days. Every day, almost, when I was going to work, I would take my motorcycle. I had an SV650 at the time. That was my daily rider. And I had a Graves R6 as my race bike. Motorcycling is really in my blood. And when I got the DRZ400, that was my way of reintegrating that into our lifestyle. Since we could carry it on the back of our camper van and our truck camper, it really started to open up things for me a lot more. Unfortunately, Kate, who loves to ride on the back of the motorcycle, just wasn't comfortable on the DRZ. So that's why I now have the FJR1300. She loves the back of that thing, finds it super comfortable. And I would really like to, as we're traveling around the country, bring that bike with us, hence the trailer, be able to take Kate on a lot of these roads and things and experience the country in a different way. Now, when we first hit the road, we actually had a trailer. Kind of. We had a 30-foot Class A. And because we had such a large motorhome, we were towing a Jeep Wrangler behind us. It was the four-door model. We quickly began to understand that the more RV and trailer that we had, the harder it was to go places. So when we would get into a new town and things, we would have to park the RV somewhere, disconnect the Jeep, and then go scout places out. Because sometimes when you are, I would say we were probably about 60 feet long, it's hard to get in and out of places easily. You really had to plan ahead. Then when we decided to go smaller, before we got our camper van, one of the things we were considering doing was taking our Jeep and towing a small travel trailer behind us. So us looking for small travel trailers is nothing new. Now that we have the home base and we have a place to keep it, and we can kind of pick our own adventure as we're going out, we can bring the camper van, the trailer, the truck, the trailer, just the camper van, whatever suits our needs for that trip, we now have the base to do it from. Especially if we take the motorcycle, we can now use the trailer as our base of operation. So Kate can take the van wherever she wants. I can take the motorcycle or we can both go together. Whatever works. Now I've already mentioned most of the pros. That's being able to bring a bigger bike, multiple bikes if we want to, extra gear, the enclosure, so we can keep our things out of the weather and keep them protected and locked up. It'll also allow us to have extra sleeping space for friends and family we have with us. So we've covered all of that, but let's talk about the cons because there really are some when you have a travel trailer with you. When your camper is larger than a standard parking spot, it begins to be harder to find parking and you start to have to plan more to go different places. One of the things we love about having a camper van is that ability to be very nimble and park in a standard parking spot. The only thing we're really limited by is the height on the camper, which aside from going into a covered parking lot or a drive-through, it really hasn't affected us. When we were traveling across the country recently and we were bringing the U-Haul for our friends, even though that U-Haul was a small trailer, we started to find limitations on places we could go. So crowded parking lots and places where we couldn't just slide into a normal spot, we had to plan ahead and we had to look for places where we could park that camper with a trailer. There are also limits on where we'd be able to go and camp in a camper with a trailer. For example, when we've gone through Yellowstone, certainly there are places, especially at the bigger visitor centers where you can park a vehicle and trailer. But once you start driving through the park itself, there's a lot of small pull-outs and parking lots and things like that, that if you have a larger RV or a camper and a trailer, you're not going to be able to stop at. We've been to a lot of those places around the country where having a trailer is going to limit or prevent you from going into those places. Beyond limitations with parking, there are also going to be limitations with camping. When you have a trailer, you need a larger camping spot. So if you go to an established campground, you're going to need that larger spot. Whereas if you're in a camper van or a smaller vehicle, a lot of times you can take a tent camping spot or some of the smaller spots they have reserved for minivans or things of that nature. You can slide right in there, but you can't do that when you've got a trailer with you. There's also added maintenance and costs that go along with having a trailer. There's going to be insurance, registration, maintenance with the trailer itself and making sure that's good when you're going down the road. And if you blow a tire or other things, there are going to be more things to worry about when you're going down the road. And finally, it's going to cost more in fuel. Obviously, a trailer is extra weight that's going to be adding drag to your vehicle. And when we were towing a trailer with our van, we noticed our MPG went down at a minimum of one to two MPG as we're going down a flat highway. We've been in a class A motorhome. We've been in multiple class B camper vans. We even built out a friend's utility van into a camper, but we've never been in a trailer before. I know a lot of you have, and I would love to know again, if there are any trailers out there that you think fit what we're looking for, please leave those suggestions in the comments below. But also, if there are pros and cons or things I'm not even thinking of because we haven't experienced trailer life, I would love to know that as well. If you're new to trailers as well, and you're interested in a list of trailers that are 3,500 pounds or less GVWR, head on over to our website, weretherussos.com and search for small travel trailers. I've also done a number of walkthroughs of small travel trailers that we will link to in the description below, but stay tuned for next week's video, which will be one of the trailers that I spoke about in today's video. Thank you all so much for watching. If you enjoyed this, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and head over to our website, weretherussos.com for more info. Thank you all again. Bye. My second book, Tales from the Open Road, The Adventures and Misadventures of RV Living, is now available for sale on Amazon. Read all about the ups and downs of our first year and a half living on the road full-time.