Some things we're in perfect agreement about
- The ways that people use these trailers are impressively different, with not just with different destinations, but also very different loads and different altitude requirements. In the West, we have people driving high in the mountains and camping in unimproved or marginally improved camping areas. In the East people are most often staying in campgrounds with hookups, and only rarely encounter elevations of more than a couple thousand feet. Some people live in their TailManors full time or travel 10,000 miles per year, some people use them 5 nights and a few hundred miles per year.
- There are different needs for tow vehicles because of this. One man's rig is another man's misery.
- A tow vehicle and trailer can be overloaded if you are not careful about what you take along and what you tow it with. It's hard not to have your TrailManor weigh in at the MFR's brochure number plus 500 pounds, and it's easy to put another several hundred pounds aboard.
- A weight distributing hitch is mandatory for lighter tow vehicles.
- The only way to know exactly what you are towing is to weigh your vehicles when they are loaded for the road, by axle, in hitched and unhitched configurations if you use a WDH.
- Towing in every case needs to be approached with an abundance of caution, with reduced speeds and greater following distances than the way one might drive otherwise.
- Towing is a complicated business because the guidelines are not as black and white as we would like them to be. Know your rated specifications.
- Safety is ultimately about your own decisions: How you drive, What you drive, How you pack, Where you choose to go. It's not how fast you can go, it's how fast you can stop that counts.
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