I’ve always liked roaming around. I’ve criss–crossed the United States (and a bit of Mexico and Canada) on a motorcycle, camping along the way. I’ve driven from London to Ulaan Baatar. I’ve driven a caravan through the Outback on a trip to Australia.
When I moved to Austin, the two of us drove the contents of my storage unit across the country in a box truck, stopping to camp along the way. Together, we’ve done car camping road trips, hitting a half dozen national and state parks over a few weeks. And we rented a camper van in Iceland to see the sights of the ring road.
When Covid hit, we realized that RVing was a good way to get out into the world without spending lots of time on planes. For our first few trips, we tried various motorhomes, but quickly came to the conclusion that we didn’t like bringing our whole RV with us when we drove to trailheads. That led us to towable campers, where we could drop off the house part of it and just take the car part with us on outings. We rented a Scamp to visit North Cascades and Olympic National Parks, and visited the Casita factory only to discover that they had an 18 month wait . After doing some more research, and a test trip in a camper we found on Outdoorsy, we decided that the travel trailer that we liked the best was the nuCamp Tab 400.
Now the next question: what do we tow this thing with? We’d rented pickups for our early towing adventures. They were a mixed bag. We found that rental companies would only let you tow with a 3/4 ton pickup or larger, which meant that they were all enormous. Many of them smelled terrible (because they were diesel or because rental work trucks don’t get treated nicely). The Tab is fairly light, but not light enough to tow with a passenger car or a crossover. I toyed with the idea of buying a Tacoma (which I regret not doing, because I could have sold it for more than I’d paid for it and avoided some rentals).
Ideally, we’d use an electric vehicle. When we towed with pickups we got startlingly bad gas mileage. With renewable electricity forming a larger and larger share of the electric grid, EVs are becoming more environmentally friendly, so we really wanted something electric.
In 2020, I put down a deposit on a Rivian R1S. I’d honestly despaired of it being delivered after they pushed the estimated delivery date back and back again. But finally it’s here! It has power to spare for towing, and so far its range has only fallen by about half while pulling Tourtoise.
