When when you talk to fellow campers in the midwest about a truck camper, they look at you a little funny.

We’re comfortable with the travel trailers, the big Class A RVs, and even some of the smaller class C, but they simply don’t see truck campers. 

It’s small (not really).  It needs a bigger truck (definitely).  And it may not be for you.  But there are some key benefits, one of which was being able to bring our boat along with on a trips without taking 2 vehicles.  There are other reasons, which we’ve discussed in this previous post.

There are just as many truck camper options as there are options for RVs – you can get hard top or soft top campers, wet baths vs dry baths (like other RVs), slides or no slides… it’s amazing to see all of the different options for different camping styles!

As far as our decisions go, we wanted something that could be used for year round camping if we chose.  So, a 4-seasons camper was a must.  We weren’t that particular about wet or dry baths, but slideouts seemed to be a bit of a conversation topic.  

The idea of slideouts are great – they provide more room in a small footprint.  However, they do add a lot of weight and add another level of complexity to the camper (so potential future mechanical failures).  And…if you’re planning on doing some serious off-grid boondocking, a rig without slides would most likely make more sense.  This is also the decision point between needing a big truck and a HUGE truck!

But the value of having a spacious rig won out!  We ended up choosing a truck camper with 2 slide-outs, yep!  And, as a result, we required a dually to handle the large payload.  We found a used 2016 Dodge Ram 3500 dually to help us with that endeavor.  We do have a diesel which helps with gas mileage, but it did negatively impact payload.  Yet another tradeoff.

Why a Host camper?  After looking at Lance, Northern Lite, Arctic Fox, Cirrus, and Eagle Cap, we ended up choosing Host.  I think what got us was the drastically different layout from the inside.   We also chose a truck camper with a very different inside footprint, which really made it seem more like a mini home than a truck camper.

As part of our pre-retirement checklist, our plan was to find a camper to enjoy now but have it comfortable enough to do longer trips during retirement.  How long depends on whether you ask me or Gary!  I’m more of the “let’s sell our house and go full time RVing”, and his response is “uh.. how about a trip for 2-3 weeks?”  Luckily, we have some time before we would have the opportunity to make that decision.

In the meantime, we’re focusing on places to go that are fairly local and investigating ways to stretch out our vacation days.