Elizabird
My partner, Albatrossity, mentioned in a recent On the Road column that we traveled to Montana in a teardrop trailer to visit his daughter Ellen, and a little spatter of interest in the trailer arose in the comments. As the owner of the trailer, I asked WaterGirl if I might-should write a little guest column and she said, Sure! So please let me tell you how delightful it is to travel this way, after decades of tent camping (and especially backpacking with decreasingly gung-ho knees). The teardrop in question was fabricated in the town of my own birth, Boulder, Colorado, by Colorado Teardrops. (Note: This column includes brand names but is in no way, really and truly, any kind of paid endorsement.)
I wanted a teardrop light enough to pull with my Subaru Crosstrek; large enough to sleep both the 6’4” Albatrossity (so named in part because of his 6’ un-feathered wingspan) and me; made in the US (because we need to have some manufacturing jobs in the country); and generally simple in design and features. I chose the Canyonlands model with big, rough-roadable tires (which won’t come much in handy when towed by my car, but could with Albatrossity’s Rav4 Prime); a queen-sized 4” foam mattress; a battery that can handle lights and a small fan, rechargeable with solar panels or cigarette lighter in the car; a moon roof through which to watch meteors (though it was mostly cloudy at night during my August trip); and other details I’ll mention along the way. The towing weight is 1180 pounds, nicely below the 1500-pound capacity of my car. I placed my order in September, 2021 and delivery was scheduled for January, 2022 (one of the shorter turn-around times I came across for such orders). “Delivery” meant Albatrossity and I drove from Manhattan, KS to Boulder, CO to pick it up and then scurried back home quickly with a snowstorm about 6 hours behind us. That was a little anxiety-producing… I’m good at anxiety production, so that wasn’t the last time, but the trips since have been great.
The first camping trip was to Big Bend National Park in Texas. My usual backpacking friend, Gina, was very enthusiastic about my new purchase and we scheduled a trip for the second week of February. This could have resulted in weather disasters (once the two of us took shelter in an old church that opened the sanctuary to stranded travelers when a March snowstorm closed the highway in New Mexico), but did we think seriously about that when preparing to have a shakedown trip with a brand-new camper? No, we did not.
For years we’ve referred to one another with a hyphenated middle name of “Louise,” like Thelma and Louise, but neither of us wanted to be Thelma. So: Elizabeth-Louise, Gina-Louise. Quickly I recognized that the trailer really was a kind of girls’ clubhouse (It has maple paneling! Cute shelving! A stainless steel “kitchen” counter!) and pretty quickly the vessel was christened the Louisa May. Here Louisa May rests in an overflow lot below the Chisos Mountains, as we wanted to drive up for a mountain hike while moving from one to the other of two reserved campground stays. You can see the curtains I made through the window. The bubble on top is the vent and fan. The tongue box up front holds tools, jacks like the one visible (two others can be attached to the rear for extra stability and leveling on rough ground), wheel chocks, and occasionally rocks that look like they should be taken home. You may notice it doesn’t have a standard hitch connection. This one is designed for travel on rough terrain and also, I think, makes it less likely some jerk will back up to your trailer and try to haul it away while you’re off hiking.
On The Road – Elizabird – Travels With TeardropPost + Comments (23)