In the spring we engaged a fantastic company in South Carolina to help us find and customize a Travel Trailer. They are Karlee and Weston Marsh and we love their design style! After an extensive process of learning more than I knew there was to learn about trucks, SUV’s and pulling a trailer, we’ve narrowed down our selection criteria to a very thin slice of the potential market.
Well, today Weston found a hardly used Travel Trailer and we purchased it! It is a 2018 model year Keystone Crossroads Sunset Trail Ultralite Model 289QB (more on why RV’s have ridiculously long names some other day!).
The Details of this Travel Trailer for our Family of 6
- Length: 32 feet
- Dry Weight: 5,400 lbs
- Max Cargo: 2,000 lbs
- Max Weight: 7,400 lbs (this means it’s towable with a 1/2 ton SUV!)
- Slides: 1
- Layout: front master bed, center main area, bathroom, rear bunk room
The Plan for Customization
Out of the box, this Travel Trailer won’t work for our family. The challenge is finding something with “quad bunks.” It’s really, really hard it turns out. Most Travel Trailers out there are designed with a “bunk room” but don’t have four bunk or “quad bunk” rooms. They’re designed for a smaller family who won’t be living in it full time. What makes things worse is that they may come with 2 or 3 bunks, and inevitably also have a dinette plus usually a fold-out couch, so the “sleeping capacity” is still 6 or 8 people, but let’s face it, living full-time with a kid sleeping in the living room isn’t a great solution.
So, our fix to this RV industry problem is to customize. Weston and Karlee will come up with a plan that converts this Ultralite, towable beauty into something that can fit our family too. Plus, they’ll update the style of it from “dark coffin you never want to live in” to something along the lines of “modern farmhouse on wheels.”
So, stay tuned to see what the result is!