RV REVIEW
By Howard J. Elmer
Travel Lite 840RS Designed for a rough-country getaway or the desire to go where others don’t
Truck campers have been around for over a hundred years. Photos of units that date to pre-World War I can be found easily on the Internet. These are often homemade, but some did come out of factories. Look for photos of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison on camping trips with Model T's rigged up with custom campers. These very early RVs were the products of those men with inventive minds who immediately grasped the potential of a ready-made rolling platform to build on. Today the product is very different, but the purpose and point are the same. Mobility and comfort are the hallmarks of the truck camper—in fact for “certain” camping situations there really is no substitute. Travel Lite of Indiana builds campers that fit just about every version of pickups offered by truck companies today. Long box, short box, HD pickups right down to the new mid- size offerings. If you have a truck, they probably have the appropriate camper for it. In my case I have been testing the new Titan XD pickup
from Nissan. This is a full-size crew cab pickup with a 6.5- foot bed. This is the all-new truck with the 5L Cummins diesel in it. Having already towed a variety of things with it I figured dropping something on its back was the next step. That’s where the Travel Lite came in. With a dry weight of 1,965 pounds it really didn’t stress the truck that much. The frame is more than beefy enough and the engine puts out 310 hp; but the number that is eye-brow raising is the 555 lb-ft of torque that comes on at a low 1,600 rpm. So, much like a hermit crab and its shell, I doubt the truck even felt the camper on its back. While having the camper on the truck is the “point” of this RV—it has to be explained that this arrangement accommodates two very different, yet important aspects of the RV experience. The first is the rough-country getaway. Hunting, fishing, exploring, motorized recreation—or just the desire to go where others don’t—falls into the prime uses of the truck camper.
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