Our Aliner is lightweight, but because our tow vehicle has a very low tow rating, it´s been important to keep the weight of both our baby SUV and our camper trailer at a minimum.
Photo of a gray and black Honda Element and an
Aliner Scout in a wooded campsite.
We did several things immediately to keep these weights down.
There is a huge amount of information about towing a camper on the internet, most of it confusing and contradictory. If you have a massive truck, you´ll likely not have to think twice about towing a light camper like an Aliner. If you drive an elderly Element, as we do, you probably need to think very carefully about what you are doing.
Photo of a folded Aliner Scout backed into a campsite
behind a gray and black Honda Element
I´m not going to cover any specifics about all of the various methods of figuring out
what´s a safe weight to tow: tongue weight, various ratings, or so on. All I will cover here is how we determined if we felt that we could tow our Aliner Scout safely. Your mileage (quite literally) may vary!
We were lucky enough to have a great salesperson to work with when we bought our camper. (That´s not something you´ll probably hear every day!) She was super helpful, and did everything she could to get these newbies on the right track.This post is more of a list than an article (and it´s short on photos!), but it may be helpful, all the same.
Since we got our Aliner, we´ve been camping every chance we could. We camped the night we bought it — in a thunderstorm, 120 miles from home! — and stopped camping that first fall only when burn bans were put into place which kept us from making the campfires we love.
Our first meal in our Aliner Scout. The meal, set out
in the dinette side of our camper, was homemade baguette;
green grapes; multi-colored grape tomatoes on stainless steel
camping plates; a slab of orange Mimolette cheese (on a cutting
board with a purple knife); and a green Granny Smith apple.
We recently bought an Aliner Scout, a hard-sided popup camper. We´ve been looking for ways to find tranquil moments, and this turned out to be our solution. Simplicity and convenience are really important to us, and our tow vehicle is a near-vintage Honda Element with a low tow weight limit, so camper weight was also a critical consideration.
Photo of an Aliner Scout triangular pop-up camper in woods
showing a blue rug outside the door, hiking sticks to the left of
the air conditioner, a love seat to the left of the camper, and a
picnic table further left. There´s a fire ring in front of the
picnic table.
This post discusses why we chose the camper we did, and what we considered when making our decision.