And the Tundra Rolls, Travelin' with the Trauflers

 This was our first trip in our brand new travel trailer.  Until this trip my total experience with towing a trailer this large was the 115 mile trip from the dealer to the lot where we store the camper.  Needless to say, we were rookies with the travel trailer.  Thanks to extensive reading in several travel trailer related Facebook pages I thought we had a pretty good handle on what to expect.  We chose Lake Wateree State Park because it is really close to home (a 30 minute drive from our house to the campground).  We towed the trailer to the campground with no issues at all and with the exception of my almost running the driver's side of the trailer into an oak tree (thankfully I saw it with about 6 inches to spare!) we got to the back in site safely (site 55 if anyone is curious).  Now I had had a 17 foot bass boat many, many years ago and had no issues backing it but this was twice as long and you can't see over it so I was wondering how it would g...

 Our trailer is an Apex Ultra Lite  293RLDS  by Coachmen.  Our particular camper is wired for 50 Amp service and has a single air conditioner (15,000btu).  The weight of the trailer as shipped from the manufacturer was just over 6700 lbs and I have found that the tongue weight (loaded for a trip) is actually about 50 pounds lighter than the 832 lbs listed on the Apex site.  We do not tow the trailer with water in the fresh water tank and always empty grey and black tanks before leaving the campground.  We have added/changed the following things with the trailer for safety and/or ease of function reasons: Tires-   We changed out the Chinese made Castle Rock tires for Goodyear Endurance tires.  Both tires are D rated tires but the Castle Rocks have a bad reputation for blow outs and poor quality. Cameras-   We had the dealership,  Bob Ledford Adventure Motor Homes , install both side and rear view  cameras on the trailer prior t...

Robin and I have been talking about creating a blog for months and with the calendar turning to 2021 it seems like the right time to get it started.   We took possession of our brand new 2020 Apex Ultra Lite 293RLDS on March 28, 2020 from Bob Ledford's Adventure Motorhomes, Greer, SC (thank you to our OUTSTANDING salesperson, Kathy Flowers).  Since then we have put 3,127 miles on the trailer. Our trips to date have been (I may expand on some of these in later posts): May 2020- Lake Wateree State Park, SC (shakedown trip)  I learned on this trip to pay close attention to not only the road but also the TREES!  I came within six inches of brushing our new camper up against a small oak tree in the campground. June 2020- Cliffs of the Neuse State Park, NC.  Robin and I learned a valuable NC State Park lesson.  They LOCK the gates at night and DO NOT give you the combination and do not open them until the next morning.  I won't go into details but suffi...

 Welcome to "And the Tundra Rolls, Travelin' with the Traufler's.  We are Mike and Robin Traufler.  We have been married for 27.5 years.  We started our camping adventures recently and wanted a place to document our memories.  We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!!