A
short story.
My wife and I live in Whidbey Island Washington. This year we finally replaced our well traveled 01' Nissan Xterra that had towed everything from my 22' C-Dory, popup trailer, to a Dirt track race car. We had a 23' Chevy Colorado Trailboss built to our liking, put a camper shell on it and have really enjoyed running it up the mountains.
While on a three week work trip to Fallon Nevada, I had just about seen everything there was to see in that small town by about day two. On the third day, after driving by this cool little trailer in a car lot I decided to swing by and have a look, if nothing more than to kill some more time...Turns out the small trailer was a Dweller 13.
The salesman was a nice younger gentleman who actually had done his research on the trailer. He took his time, opened everything up, talked over all of the details and let me crawl all over the thing looking for issues.
I have owned everything from a big name popup to a 33' 5th wheel that my wife and I lived in for three years in Dallas Texas. I have a CDL and haul my excavator with a 1 ton on a gooseneck. Most trailers are junk, period. You kinda get to know it is what it is and accept that it's going to need work. My 5th wheel had to go all the way back to Indiana for warranty work to have a new slide put in, front cap pulled and new wall built, and the other slide pulled for a repair on its wall. That's an extreme example, but not uncommon..
I was impressed on the build quality. That's what got my attention. China built or otherwise, its built far and above any other large scale manufacturer. The wiring was run through clamps, not just laid out like spaghetti. Nothing was haphazardly thrown together hiding behind a door or cabinet. It was a nice looking, solid built little trailer.
I thanked the salesman for his time and went back to my hotel room and began to read and devour every bit of information about OBI and Dweller the internet had to offer. Which brought me to this site. I read all 72 pages, waited to be approved by the Mods for a few days, then went back and looked over the pictures I couldn't see..
- No manual, fine...
- Change shocks maybe, fine...
- Dealer and manufacturer communication issue, no suprise there either...
-some folks dont like the hitch, fine...
No rot issues, no major leak issues, no screams of "I'm getting a lawyer" talk.. I'm in!
It's a trailer. And this one was marked down to 29k. Do I need it, no, but we had discussed getting another one if the price was right and it fit the tow profile for the Colorado.
So now I call the wife and send her the hour long video from ROA. She listens to my rambles and then says nothing about it for the next three days, so I figure it's a pass from her. On the fourth day she asks when I'm buying the trailer! So back to the dealership, another two hours crawling over the camper looking at everything. Made the dealership test tow it with a small 1/2 ton to make sure it tracked well enough. Then offered 25k to which they happily took.
This last Thursday I flew out of Reno at 6am, got home and loaded the truck with gear, tools to swap shocks if I thought it was needed, waited for my wife to get done with work at 2:30pm and down the road we went back to Fallon.
Hitched the trailer. Made three stops for 30lb propane bottles, a fill of the front water tank and a Wally World stop for some other trailer essentials..
Though Hwy 80 to 199 pointed the loose direct of the coast, then north..
To be continued...gotta go to work to pay for my bad habbit of buying trailers in other states out of boredom...
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