mkirsch wrote:
If you call them "worries" you probably shouldn't buy that particular camper. Camping should be worry-free. When you're constantly worried about plowing into a sudden low bridge around every blind corner, it's no longer fun and relaxing.
There are a couple ways to address that:
1. Get the popup.
2. Drive like you know what you're doing, quit worrying about it, and be confident that you can deal with the situation should it arise.
Unbelievable dumb comment. A hard sided camper is going to require less than 12 feet of clearance even with gear on top of the roof. All overpasses and bridges are a minimum of 13'6" above the ground. Go to any state website where they post areas with clearance problems to alert commercial truckers and see if you can find a single problem on a state highway or interstate. They don't exist.
If I stop for groceries on a trip or my wife or I want to use the toilet we do not want to have to raise the camper before we can go inside. We carry camera gear in the camper and we can stop at a pullout and get inside and grab what we want in minutes without having to first raise the camper. When we are done we head back onto the road without having to first lower the camper.
Talk about worries, with the popup we would be worrying about the crank mechanism breaking or worrying about leaving it up if we left the campsite for a hike or worrying about it up in bear country or worrying about leaving it up by accident and driving off with it raised.
The one place where a popup helps is when going on offroad trails with no real road as such. Then the lower center of gravity is a definite asset. But that applies to less than 1% of the people who own and use a truck camper.
