Vistabule Teardrop Trailer Review: Four Rainy Days In Northern Minnesota

Hi Clint, Fifty campfires here and we're about to head to the North Shore in Minnesota on our last field trip of the year and I'm particularly excited about this one because the Vista Buhl

teardrop

trailer

s are connecting us to the

trailer

to The next

four

days

before we hit the road, I'm here with Steve Corcoran, you're the general manager of Vista Butchie Rock trailers, just give me a quick rundown of how you guys got started, so mr. bule is about eight years old, we've been growing pretty fast over the last few years after the first phases of, I guess, design refinement.

Burke Taylor, the founder, started in 2011 in his garage, building one just to get his hands on the materials I love. It's really that you know, he started the story of the garage after being, you know, kind of a designer, artist, carpenter, fine carpenter, he got to work after doing this kind of initial kit build to design something that was about much more, I suppose, the deficiencies. From what he saw in what was the real drop trailer, it was so good that he reduced it to a scale that you know, this is something I can work with.

I could build this in my garage, but a lot of the shortcomings of claustrophobic interiors, you know, not enough light. small doors, not very robust galleys, etc., yes, I'm going to start redesigning something from scratch, so I'm referring to number one, which is still not here at the moment, but really the form factor is what it did in that first attempt. Well, from there, there have been iteration after iteration of fine refinements and they just shine a little brighter. It seems like with every production run, I love them, they are absolutely beautiful and I'm excited to hit the road, so let's go.

Let's go out, let's start at the front. The option we have in this case is a cargo box, which has been great. I like a lot. I also bike a lot and that's another option you can do is get a bike rack and you could easily put two bikes on the front here and then on the top we have an 830 watt solar panel and they are incredibly thin solar panels and, As we have been traveling, we have been charging the battery all the time. which is pretty awesome okay one of my favorite parts of the Vista Buell

teardrop

is the back part where all the cooking happens which they call the kitchen this is pretty cool it's actually been very enjoyable for us to use it me too.

I will say, like I said, it rained quite a bit up here and I've seen pictures of these things before, it was hard to tell how much overhang there really is up here and it was raining quite a bit there last night and there were three of us. of us standing here cooking doing things hanging out and we were all out of range completely dry here to cook was pretty amazing we still go over what we have here we have a stove here of the Dometic two burner stove which has been pretty fantastic . We also have a 35 watt CFX cooler that you've talked about before on the site.

It is an excellent cooler that connects to the system's battery. It's full of all our foods right now. I've got a sink here, we've turned the pump on, so when you turn the pump on we get the water, all the power for the entire trailer is right here, it turns off and on, we've got a ton of drawers in this. On the side we have our plates and everything else, all that and then we have these slides open and there's quite a bit of storage under the sink, so we have two bags full of groceries under there that we haven't had any problems storing equipment with or anything. so, we have cutlery up here, a couple of holes back here for wine or olive oil or whatever, you're going to use all of our spices here and others as a kind of built-in spice rack so those things aren't It doesn't wobble when you travel , which is really nice and then we have 110 power here, so you have to be grounded to do this if you want to use that other really cool feature that this one has.

There's a little readout down here that Victor says about power and that's the battery readout and what's quite interesting is that there's a Bluetooth app that your phone will connect to so you can open it up. it shows me that we have 84 percent of the battery left it tells me what the voltage is it just tells me the current that is running dry right now which is only 0.2 amps pretty good light more than enough also here last night I was surprised to be able to help so was There's also a little gooseneck light here if you want even more or if you want less because this thing was really bright last night for cooking, so cover the back, let's talk a little bit more about the inside.

Meeting space so that everyone who tends to get on one of these has the same experiences. Once you get in here and sit down, it's surprising how much space there is and how comfortable the headroom you have when you look in from the outside. They are fairly small or compact units, they are easy to tow and easy to travel with, why don't we cover the ventilation first? So obviously we have the fan on top here and this one here has the upgrade of the The remote is pretty awesome, it opens automatically, it's only running it at like 30%, but the really cool thing about this setup is that you can set the temperature here, simply turn on the thermostat and the fan will turn off and on to regulate the temperature.

Inside the doors there are also windows that can be opened and there are several different types of levels of how much you want them to open or close. The same also applies to the windows at the rear and then also at the front down. here we have two we have two little scoops there's even more airflow so I can push this in and open it right there let's go ahead and talk about power so we have two USB ports on either side of this which is pretty good. Also, as we come back here, there's a gap in between, so it's fun to have it complete.

Of course, you can close them. You can close these two privacy screens if you don't want them to extend completely. when you want to get to bedtime, so as you may have noticed, here on this back window we have this little privacy panel that goes in here, these ones here will go ahead and slide down and then there's just a little These are all these really interesting and cool little design features that make a lot of sense, so we have a rod here that goes down and then we have the window covering here and then on this top side, all this damn guy. it goes all the way down like this and you know we have this kind of sink here, but I guess I thought that was a really cool feature that they have, they have this thing here as far as storage goes, there's a lot that we have storage. on either side of the front, the back here goes all the way to the back of this living space, so there's plenty of room underneath here, there's also this guy, so when it's time to grab a bite, it's pretty easy of doing. so we just have this, there we go, so that's our table, which is pretty easy to set up.

I like the stores in here easily underneath and like I said, there's so much storage underneath that the table doesn't really take up that much space. let's go ahead and lower the bed so you can see what it looks like that way so here's what it looks like with the bed down it's very easy to put up and down lots of lighting options. Here we have these two really bright ones on top that are if you're playing cards or something and you want a lot more light, you can have them. I have two turn signals here in the back that are quite slippery, one further in. in the middle and then in the front here I have these two gooseneck LEDs that I was using towards the end of the night, just a little bit of light to see what you're doing before you go to bed, lots of storage. storage more than enough storage for a weekend for a couple of people pretty easy this one here falls a little and I actually use it for my shoes that were a little wet last night so I could open it it was raining take off your shoes throw them in there, you don't have to worry about the game at all, which worked great and then save it here too, okay, it's the last day of the trip here in Minnesota, we're back and I wanted to give a couple final thoughts on what it's been like traveling with the Vista Buell teardrop trailer.

The things I loved first of all I think was the size, you don't even really know what it weighs behind the car. 1,500 pounds and I didn't even feel like it was there when we were traveling. The battery and solar panel on top worked perfectly. Absolutely incredible 100 amp hour battery. 130 watts of the really thin type of solar panels that we have on top. I've been here for

four

days

, we've been running the Domenica refrigerator the entire time. There were a couple of nights where it was pretty cold so I turned the heat on inside and we're still on.

I checked this morning, we're still at about 70% for battery which was amazing, also obviously the back of the kitchen where you cook is amazing, the fact that everything is ready to go, it worked perfectly, a couple of considerations o things you have to think about a little bit because we had SO much rain up here, I will say with a design like this you have to be more aware of that and I wish I could do it again. I think we're taking the time to make a tarp out of one. side and I think they even have an option where you can do that, but we sure put up a tarp because when it's raining and you open this and put the beds down, it's the beginning of your bed right here, so if you're wet and your boots are wet and everything is wrong, and it's comfortable and super amazing.

You have to find a way to come in dry so we could have been more proactive on that side. The other thing that was really cool about this trip is that I got to experience it as a solo trip and then my wife joined us on the last leg of the trip, she had the opportunity to come and she was very curious about it. to find out what they would be like if they feel comfortable how they work what the kitchen is like so it was a lot of fun we both felt there was plenty of space to sit and have a beer in the evening playing cards was super fun that's what we thought it was fantastic a deaf yes you want to go down the teardrop trailer type of route, this should definitely be in the lineup to see a lot of things, we've seen a lot of them at trade shows and I think it's hard to find the the way they have these, the amenities they contain, the way they are carefully designed, so they are absolutely something you will want to take into account - that is the Vista Buell teardrop trailer that