What to Buy, RV, Fifth Wheeler or Travel Trailer

We basically had three options, a travel trailer(caravan), a fifth wheel or a full blown Recreation vehicle or most commonly called an RV.

There are advantages and disadvantages for all of the above.

Travel trailers;
Are much cheaper and it's common for them to have a slide out, this expands your living space substantially. They come with all the mod cons you would expect with many configurations. For example a 2013 Forest River CHEROKEE GREY WOLF 18RB with a total length of 24' 8" from Holman Motors Ohio is only $14,221-00, I reckon you would pay upwards of $50,000-00 here in Australia! As previously stated we wanted to do our trip in a more "American" way so we discounted the travel trailer optional tempting as it was.

Fifth Wheelers;
We had previously inspected a fifth wheel on our last trip to the States and having inspected one at Holman Motors Ohio we had a fair idea on what to expect. The advantage of a fifth wheel is you get a fair sized “house” 30ft in length with two slides for your money. For example currently you can get a new 2012 Keystone Laredo 266RL which is 30" long for $21,933-00, yes you also need a truck (a Ford 250 will do the job) to tow it but they are pretty cheap also. Check out cars.com there are plenty on the market. The advantages of a fifth wheel is you can unhitch your truck to do your sight seeing, shopping and all the other things you need to do without pulling your trailer with you, same as towing a travel trailer. Another advantage of towing a fifth wheeler is, it is much more stable as the weight of the pin is directly over the back axle where its meant to be so no highway swaying.

Recreational Vehicle (RV)
RV's are fantastic to see they again offer great value and leave the Australian equivalent for dead! Truly these are amazing and with something like 7 million RV's in the US they have truly got it right, seeing is believing! Just check out the PPL web site.
RV's come with two engine types gasoline and diesel, with diesel commonly called a diesel pusher on account the engine is in the rear.

With an RV unless you hitch a small car to the back you more or less have to pack up and take your RV with you no matter where you go, makes sight seeing rather difficult. An RV is more expensive but is much bigger and the cheaper ones run on petrol and generally diesel RV’s are dearer again. So we excluded the RV option as to expensive as they can be dearer and the cost to buy a small car added to the set up costs.

So taking into account all of the above we decided to go with the fifth wheel option, great value for money, mobility and plenty of highway stability.

Next step new or used?



- Posted by RnR on their IPad

Location:Brisbane