Trailers where slides do NOT block access?

coolmom42 wrote:
Just to explain my reasoning.... we are about to be 2 retired adults doing extended travelling with the RV. We have some 3 week trips from TN to Idaho under our belts, and are planning 2-3 long trips (4 weeks or so) each year, and possibly to Alaska. We stay mainly in national forest campgrounds often in remote locations. It's not like we are weekend campers at KOA a couple of hours from home. I don't want to be stuck at the back of the world with a stuck slide and a non-usable trailer.

Our current couple's trailer is the first we've ever owned with a slide and when deciding to buy it I still did have some trepidation about the slide. In earlier years we did a lot of long distance traveling / camping with our boys, often thousands of miles from home, and the one thing I wanted to avoid was having to deal with a slide issue of any kind so far from home. Forum pundits ramble on all the time about how rare this is but I can recount numbers of times we were camping somewhere and a campsite neighbour would be bitching about slide issues he was having with his rig ... and no, I'm not exaggerating. That's why in those days I knew that for us our decision to travel with a non-slide trailer was the better choice and it's only now that our boys are older, no longer camp with us, and we usually now camp no more than a day away from home that I'm willing to take the chance with a slide model. Yes, our current slide could fail but it's just a small sofa slide, I do know how to retract it manually, and biggest advantage of all - it doesn't interfere in any way with interior access so if it ever did fail it wouldn't be a trip ending calamity. Despite what those slide pundits will always tell you there are good arguments in favour of non-slide trailers. Although to date we've not had any issues with our current slide I'd have definitely considered the new non-slide Coachmen Freedom Express 204RD I mentioned earlier, especially if long distance traveling was part of intended use, but it wasn't in the lineup at the time. Sometimes K.I.S.S. is the better choice. ;)