Introducing! Our Venture Stratus 281VBH (and a First Trip to Don Carter State Park)

Look what we got! Meet our new Venture Stratus 281vbh:

Longtime readers might remember our LAST new trailer and how I called it our biggest impulse buy ever.  There was a little more forethought put into this purchase, but it still happened pretty fast.

Up until maybe January we were nearly certain we would be keeping our old trailer, a Jayco Octane toy hauler, for at least one more season. But we also knew a change would be coming sooner or later, and the more we looked into it and played around with numbers, the more it made sense to go ahead and go with sooner. A few different financial factors came together to make the switch seem reasonable: low interest rates, stimulus money, money saved by not going on a long trip last year and made because Dave taught summer school instead, plus the fact that it was a great time to sell a used trailer and we weren’t likely to do as well on it if we waited.

We were having trouble finding the model we wanted locally, so we ended up buying through Wholesale RV Club instead and had a very good experience with them. Originally we were going to go to Cincinnati to pick up the trailer when it was ready (it was coming straight from the factory), but then we ended up having it shipped to Dunlap RV about an hour and a half north of us; they’re part of the same network of dealers and are just now starting to carry Ventures, so they’ll be where we go for any warranty work. We sold the toy hauler on consignment; someone came all the way from St. Louis to get it, and said they’d been looking for that floor plan for a year. So I hope they have as great a time with it as we did.

Why a new trailer? Our toy hauler took us all over the US (and some of Canada), and we have many amazing memories of our trips with it. And it was a great trailer for us for a long time. But we decided it was time to move on for a few reasons:

*We picked out that particular toy hauler largely because it had a unique mid-bunk design–so it had a front bedroom with queen bed, a big bed that came down from the ceiling in the back and stored back up at night, couches that folded out underneath, and then two single bunks in the middle by the kitchen.  But the bunks were small, and we were down to one kid that could fit in them comfortably and one more who was stuck using one with his feet hanging off the end. We had already ripped out the couches to put in a day bed for another kid to sleep in, and now we were looking at needing to do more modifications if we wanted comfortable sleeping space for everyone.

*I wanted something a little smaller and more nimble. There’s only so small we can comfortably go with 4 kids, 3 of whom are adult sized…but the toy hauler was just really big. It was just under 34 feet long, and also quite tall and 6″ wider than a typical trailer.

Interestingly, Dave–aka the person who actually tows the trailer–didn’t care much at all about getting something smaller. Apparently he was not as affected as I was by experiences like the time we got stuck on a tree on Prince Edward Island. Also, I pointed out to him, while he’s the one who tows, I’m the one who does the bulk of the trip planning and campground picking, so he doesn’t ever see how many campgrounds I pass up after reading about narrow roads or tight sites in the reviews.

*It’s just fun to get something new with a whole new set of fancy features that didn’t exist or weren’t common back when we got the toy hauler.

So then we needed to decide which new trailer to get, and to do this I looked at pretty much every single travel trailer that exists that might reasonably sleep six people.

At first I thought we’d be ending up with another toy hauler. This was Dave’s preference at first, for bike-hauling purposes. I looked and looked and looked and found a few really interesting floor plans that could get us into a shorter trailer but still work for sleep space. We were particularly intrigued by the Grand Design Momentum 21G, which gets you under 27′ by putting the queen bed up front on a slide and tucking the bathroom in next to it. But there were a couple of drawbacks, including the price and being stuck with a very heavy toy hauler hitch again. We didn’t have any problems with the hitch weight on the old toy hauler, but I did tend to fret about making sure we weren’t overloaded and that we had enough weight in the back to balance it out…and I just wanted something a little less stressful. Plus the idea of living for months at a time in 27 feet was a little daunting and storage space looked a little sparse in the 21G. It also would, again, have meant making modifications and tearing out furniture to find sleeping space for everyone.

Finally we gave up on innovative toy hauler designs and went the other direction and started looking at the very standard bunkhouse floorplan that every manufacturer makes: double over double bunks in the back, a sofa and dinette on a slide, and a front bedroom with queen bed.

Given that every manufacturer has this same (or a very similar) floor plan, how did we land on our Venture Stratus?

I don’t really remember. I looked at SO MANY trailers.

But here are some features we really like that helped us decide:

*A walk in closet! As you can see, we’ve already managed to put a lot of stuff here. We’re planning to keep the kids clothes in here, along with jackets, shoes, TV trays, extra seating, stuff to make s’mores, etc. etc.

*a fancy fireplace/electric heater: this is a pretty common feature these days, but we were excited to get it. For one thing, it changes colors and that’s really cool. Also it heats the RV and saves propane if you’re hooked up to electricity.

*factory installed bumper hitch receiver: this is how we’re going to try to make up for not having a toy hauler to load bikes into anymore. There’s a hitch receiver on the back of the trailer that’s rated to hold up to 250 pounds, and we plan to get a bike rack to put back there.

*Dave would like for me to mention the slam latch doors on the outside compartments; they latch automatically when you shut them.

*Good sized tanks: this was important to us as we often camp without a sewer hookup, and there are a bunch of us. And there’s a surprising amount of variation in tank size between different versions of this same layout. We have only a 32 gallon black tank, but a 45 gallon fresh water tank, and 64 gallon gray water.

*Solar: having a trailer pre-wired for solar also isn’t unusual these days (I think the toy hauler was, too, in fact). But we like it. And we added a single solar panel and controller on to ours, with hopes of adding to the set up over time.

*Shortish: There was a time when I thought we might be able to stay under 30 feet. In fact, we were first looking at the Stratus 261vbh, which is just like the 281 except it only has a dinette instead of a dinette plus couch. But we finally decided we’re still a couple of kids leaving home away from being able to manage it comfortably. But our new trailer does come in under 32 feet, which seems to be on the shorter end for this floor plan.

*Fancy decor: the Stratus has the uber trendy modern farmhouse thing going on, which is not really my usual style…BUT it’s worlds better than the ugly brown floral prints that most trailers came with not so very long ago. And better than the very basic, very neutral, but still very dark palette of browns and tans that our last trailer had. I’ve already bought way more decorate-y stuff for this trailer than for our last two combined. I think that’s because the basics that are there are so easy to work with; the last two seemed like overwhelming jobs. For the toy hauler in particular, I always had a lot of big plans, but they never came to fruition (they might have had we held on to it longer). It was such a blank slate that we spent a lot of time playing around with different furniture and furniture placement and never got around to the making it pretty part.

This post is going to get very long. But that’s okay, because we have a NEW TRAILER!

Let me give you a quick tour. (I’m going to save talking about all the exciting trailer shopping I’ve done for the house blog, I think, so eventually there’ll be a more in depth tour over there).

Somewhat unusually, the door is toward the rear of the trailer, so you come in and find the bunks on one side and that walk in closet on the other:

The other door there is the bathroom, tucked into the corner by the bunks:

And then you have the main living space:

We upgraded from the jackknife sofa that comes standard to a tri-fold sleeper sofa so that we’d have another sleeping space for a big kid. The dinette also folds into a bed that Abe can fit on comfortably, but, umm…see that space under the bunks back there? The bottom bunk folds up so that you can store a bike or whatever there while traveling, and it’s also the perfect size for a dog crate during the day. And it’s also the perfect size for an 8 year old to sleep on the bedroll that we still keep in our bedroom at home for him when he has bad dreams and wants to come into our room at night. So Abe slept in that little cubby our first weekend (hat tip to Jeremy and Stephanie from RV Atlas for the idea; they have similar bunks w/cubby in their trailer and at least used to have a kid sleep there). We’re hoping he’ll continue to find this fun and comfortable so that we don’t have to convert that dinette every night (or keep it converted and lose the dinette), but we’ll see. We also have one kid off to college and another one who just has one more year of high school, so there will be fewer and fewer trips with all four kids along I imagine (sniff). But we have a full house for this summer’s trip at least.

Anyway! Also you can see that there’s a real life pantry (albeit a pretty small one) in this trailer, which makes me happy. There’s a ton of built in storage space (as opposed to the toy hauler, which had lots of empty space but you had to make it into storage space on your own), including a big pass through exterior storage compartment.

And then the kitchen!

I’m loving this kitchen. Our toy hauler had pretty much zero counter space, so the little rectangle of it in this one feels very luxurious. And there are some fun features like a charcuterie board that fits into the sink (you know your trailer is fancy when it comes with a charcuterie board) and a drying rack (Dave is obsessed with the drying rack)

The seemingly unusuable triangle of counter behind the sink bothered me at first, but then I stuck that crate back there and some fake plants and felt much better.

I had a lot of fun with my mini-gallery wall, complete with my first foray into mixtiles:

And finally there’s the bedroom. We realized after we got it home that it’s a full size queen and not a short queen like our toy hauler. I’m a little surprised at how spacious the bedroom is, given how relatively small the trailer is, in fact:

You can’t really tell from the picture, but one cool Venture feature is that there are little bedside shelves behind the wardrobes instead of having the wardrobes go all the way to the wall and creating a lot of unusable space in the back.

We took it out for the weekend to give everything a try (that’s probably the only trip we’ll get in before our big summer trip in June/July), and we loved most everything about it. But here are a couple of things we either don’t love or are withholding judgement about for now.

*there do not appear to be any vents for heat/AC in the bathroom

*speaking of the bathroom, the water heater is quite a ways away from it, and it takes awhile for the water to heat up in there….which is a potential problem in a trailer with a tiny water heater and/or when you’re trying not to fill up your gray water.

*speaking of THAT, while there’s a lot of gray water capacity, it’s split between two tanks: one for kitchen water and one for the bathroom. We’ll see how that goes.

*we like the big front windshield that really brightens up the master bedroom (brightening not apparent in photo since I had the blinds closed), BUT we’ve heard some reports online of people having trouble with leaks in them. So we’ll hope they got the kinks worked out before they built ours.

What we’re really loving is great the space is for hanging out together; having a slide again after years without one feels really luxurious. There are certain things I loved about not having a slide (not having one more thing to maintain/worry about breaking, for example), but I can’t deny that they give you so much more space! We did forget that we had a slide when we first got to the campground, parked too close to the wall, and had to back up and adjust so the slide would have room. Oops.

Our maiden voyage was a return to Don Carter State Park in Gainesville, GA, just about an hour and a half from home. We camped for the first time with my brother and sister-in-law–something we’ve been meaning to get around to doing/find time for for years now. So that was very cool. They have a (also cool) VW bus, but they went with a tent for this trip so they could bring along kayaks on their car’s roof rack. So Dave and Sean and Rebecca all did some kayaking on Saturday morning, while the kids and I did a short hike.

Then in the afternoon we checked out the Gainesville location of the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. We have a membership to the one in Atlanta that includes this location, but we’d never been before.

It’s small, but lovely: there’s a fun children’s garden, a nice assortment of pretty flower gardens, and also some wooded trails at the back of the property.

Big and little kids all enjoyed the children’s garden:

 

This wood was supposed to be for building a house, but the kids turned it into a giant jenga game instead. One which lasted a surprisingly long time.

We wandered onto one of the trails without really realizing what we were getting ourselves into; none of the trails are super long, but they are decent hikes with a lot of up and down, so you can get some actual exercise on them. Plus they’re nice and have cute little signs:

You can get a beer or other refreshments at the building behind the vistors’ center:

And then you can look at other pretty stuff and take some family pictures:

And aside from that, we did a lot of hanging out at the campsite and having fires and whatnot.

So all in all, a lovely inaugural trip!