Re: The long RV journey ends. I hope.
Reply #17 –
Nice to hear from you, Fern! How are you and Absaroka doing?
"no bathroom would be a dealbreaker for me, especially for full-timing."
Ah, but I won't be full-timing in the Trillium. (There are people who do, but they're hardier souls than I.) I may travel for a few weeks or even a couple of months at a time, but I'll be able to return to the luxury of my Airstream.
"Did you intentionally choose one without [a bathroom] for a reason?"
I chose this Trillium on the advice of a friend, who has owned and restored several small Boler/Scamp/Casita type fiberglass trailers as well as a couple of small motorhomes. Apparently this is one of the best of its type. But no bathroom is obviously a serious limitation. Instead, I have a Porta Potti that stores under one of the dinette benches. It has a three-gallon cassette, and I have a spare cassette that also stores under that bench. I had never seen one of these firsthand before, and it appears to be a well-thought-out design. (I haven't used it yet, though.) When the cassette is full, its gate valve seals it off and you can pick it up by its handle and carry it to a dump station. A swiveling 3" nozzle lets you direct the flow to the hole.
My friend's reasoning was basically this: 1) I need a trailer I can tow with the Outback, and that means a thirteen-footer. 2) It is possible to find one that size with a bathroom, but that bathroom is like a phone booth... and the rest of the living space is squeezed down as well. 3) With the floorplan I have, I can pull out the Porta Potti into the middle of the room, and then as my friend says, "You'll have a bigger bathroom than your Lazy Daze!" Which is true. :-)
And when I'm not using the bathroom (99% of the time), I have a really very nice living space, with a twin-sized bed at one end, a small but adequate two-seat dinette at the other, and a kitchen and tall closet in the middle. In addition, there are several cupboards, open upper storage shelves running around the front and back, and storage under the dinette benches and under the bed.
Of course, what I don't have is holding tanks. As mentioned, the Porta Potti holds only 3 gallons per cassette. And there's no gray tank. The kitchen sink drains to a fitting on the trailer's left side, and I have a five-gallon jerry can to set outside and let it drain into. I do have a 13-gallon freshwater tank (with a Shurflo pump). This is a long way from my Lazy Daze's or Airstream's tankage. It's going to take adjusting to.
The Trillium does have an outside shower, as did my Lazy Daze, but I've found those not to be very useful. When boondocking, I can wash myself by heating water on the stove and then pouring it over my head from a bucket. In between baths, I use Burt's Bees body wipes daily to freshen up. As long as I don't work up too much of as sweat (and being lazy, I rarely do), they work fine.
One thing I love about the Trillium is that it has jalousie windows on all four sides, plus a FanTastic vent fan, so air circulation is excellent--and the windows can be left open in any but the windiest rainstorms. I hear they can be a bit drafty in winter, but I won't be using this trailer in the colder months. (It has half an inch of open-cell foam insulation, so it's not going to be comfy in really cold temperatures.)
"What you're missing is a quality Laser Disc player."
Touche! And a place to store a few hundred 12" discs, of course. LOL! Guess I'll just have to get by with the movies on my MacBook's hard drive. But given this mini-trailer's small size, I have a feeling I'll be spending more time outside. It does have a Fiamma awning, by the way--just like my LD's, only much shorter.
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