I take a Club Camper on the road every year. Not a test drive. Not a weekend. A proper multi-week trip where I cook in the kitchen, sleep in the bed, fix whatever breaks, and come back with a notebook full of things I want to change, keep, or tell our customers about. Road Trip 2026 was the longest one yet. Here’s what I learned.
The Morning That Justified Everything
I’m going to start at the end, because the end is what stays with you.
Somewhere in Himachal. High enough that the mornings are cold in a way that Bengaluru never is. I woke up early, maybe 5:30, because the light was doing something through the window shade that I couldn’t ignore. Opened the trailer door. The mountains were there. Not the mountains you see from a hotel balcony, framed and distant. These were right there, filling the entire view, close enough that the pine trees on the nearest ridge were individually visible. Mist sitting in the valley below like cotton wool. No sound except a stream somewhere to the left and a bird I couldn’t identify.
I made coffee on the stove. The LPG clicked, the flame came on, the kettle went on, and I sat on the trailer’s step with the door open and a steel mug and waited for the water to boil. That’s it. That’s the whole scene. A man sitting on a step drinking coffee and looking at mountains.
Except it’s not. Because this man runs a company that sells these trailers, and most of the time I’m in Bengaluru talking about spec sheets and tow ratings and meeting our visitors. The spec sheets don’t mention the step. They don’t mention the coffee. They don’t mention the fact that at 5:30 am in the mountains, the only thing between you and the view is a door you can open with one hand. That’s the product. Not the specs. The step.
The Things That Went Wrong
I’m going to be honest about this because there’s no point in being anything else. You can’t sell trailers and pretend they don’t break.
The tyre. Karnataka, about four hours from Bengaluru. A rear tyre on the trailer picked up a bolt. Not a blowout, which is dramatic and obvious. A slow puncture, which is subtle and sneaky. The tyre pressure monitoring system flagged it. We pulled over, found the bolt, pulled it out, plugged the hole with the plug kit that lives in the trailer’s storage compartment, inflated with the 12V compressor, and were back on the road in about twenty minutes. The plug held for the rest of the trip. I drove it to a tyre shop when I got back to Bengaluru for a proper internal patch, but the roadside fix was solid. This is the kind of thing that sounds like a crisis when you’re imagining it and feels like a minor pause when it actually happens.
We published a whole guide on this: What Happens When Something Breaks 400 km from Home. My team wrote that article before this trip. This trip proved every word of it.
The LPG situation. This one was my fault, not the trailer’s. I didn’t check the gas level before a stretch where I was cooking three meals a day for several days straight. The cylinder ran out mid-dinner. Not mid-morning-chai, which would have been inconvenient. Mid-dinner, with a half-cooked dal on one burner and rice that needed another five minutes on the other. The flame sputtered, went low, and died. Both burners, simultaneously. There’s a specific feeling of foolishness that comes from standing in a trailer kitchen with a pot of half-cooked dal and the knowledge that you, the person who runs a caravan company, forgot to check the gas. I finished dinner on a small camping stove I keep in the tow vehicle for exactly this kind of stupidity. The next morning I swapped cylinders at a gas agency in the nearest town. Lesson: check the cylinder weight before a long trip, or carry a spare. We now recommend this in our First 90 Days guide because of this experience.
The parking disaster. I found a property on Google Maps that looked perfect. Open land, shade trees, near a river, rated 4.2 stars. I called the owner. He said yes, come. I drove two hours to get there. The “open land” was a construction site with a JCB parked where my trailer was supposed to go. The “shade trees” had been cut down for the construction. The “river” was still there but it was now behind a wall of excavated dirt. The owner seemed genuinely confused about why this was a problem. We found another spot forty minutes further up the road, at a chai stall owner’s backyard, which turned out to be better than the original plan anyway. That’s how it goes. The planned spot fails. The improvised spot is better. I’ve seen this happen enough times now that I’ve stopped being surprised by it.
The electrical trip. Running multiple appliances at the same time. The breaker tripped. Silence. Darkness. Two seconds of thinking “something is seriously wrong” followed by the memory of the breaker panel, which is inside the cabinet next to the door. Opened the panel. Flipped the tripped breaker. Everything came back. Turned off the water heater. And all appliances ran fine. Total downtime: maybe ninety seconds. This is the thing I try to explain to buyers who worry about electrical problems. The trailer’s electrical system is designed to fail safely. The breaker trips instead of the wire overheating. It’s a feature, not a flaw. But it feels like a flaw the first time, which is why we cover it in detail: Safe Towing Guide.
The Kitchen Diary
I cook every meal when I’m on the road. Every single one. Not because I’m trying to prove a point (although I am, a little). Because eating roadside food three times a day for weeks isn’t sustainable, it’s not enjoyable after the first few days, and frankly the trailer kitchen is better than most dhabas I’ve eaten at.
Here’s what I cooked on this trip, or at least the meals worth mentioning.
The dosas that worked. I carried batter from Bengaluru in a sealed container in the fridge. It stayed good for three days. The tava heated evenly on the two-burner stove. The dosas crisped properly. The coconut chutney I made fresh at a campsite (coconut from a roadside vendor, green chillies, a handful of roasted chana dal, salt, water, the small mixer grinder that lives in the trailer) was better than most restaurant versions because the coconut was fresh. I filmed one of these cooking sessions at a partner destination; it’s up on our social channels: Watch it here.
The lesson: the trailer kitchen does 90% of Indian cooking brilliantly. The remaining 10% (anything involving a tandoor) is better left to a restaurant. Know your kitchen’s limits and work within them.
The midnight chai. This is the one that gets me every time. Waking up at midnight or 1 am, not because anything’s wrong, just because you’re in a new place and the sounds are different and your brain is alert. Getting out of bed. Walking three steps to the stove. Making chai in the dark, by feel, because you’ve done it so many times in this kitchen that you know where the pan is, where the tea is, where the sugar is, without turning on a light. Taking the chai to the dinette. Sitting by the window. Seeing whatever’s outside, stars or fog or rain or a sleeping village. Nobody is awake except you and whatever animal is making that noise in the trees. The chai tastes different at 1 am in a trailer. I don’t know why. It just does.
The complete guide to cooking in the trailer kitchen, including the LPG system, ventilation, and what cookware to carry: Caravan Cooking in India.
What Nobody Tells You About Sleeping in a Trailer
You sleep better in a trailer than in a hotel. I know this sounds like something I’d say because I sell trailers. But it’s genuinely true, and the reason is simpler than you’d think: it’s the same bed every night.
When you travel by hotel, every night is a different mattress. Different firmness, different pillow height, different room temperature, different ambient noise. Your body never fully settles. You sleep, but you don’t rest. In the trailer, the bed is your bed. The same mattress you slept on last night and the night before. The same pillow. The same blanket. The AC set to the same temperature. The blackout shades doing the same job. The only thing that changes is the view outside the window, and you don’t see that when you’re asleep.
By the second night of a road trip, the trailer bed feels like home. Not metaphorically. Literally. Your body recognises it. You fall asleep faster. You wake up less. You come out of the trailer at 6 am feeling like you slept eight hours because you did, which almost never happens in a hotel room on the road.
The worst night’s sleep on this trip was the first night, which is always the first night, because you’re in a new environment and every sound is unfamiliar. The best night was somewhere around day eight, on a plantation property where the only sound was rain on the trailer roof. I’ve stayed at plenty of hotels that charge ₹15,000 a night. None of them have produced rain-on-the-roof sleep.
The Conversations at Every Fuel Stop
This is something I didn’t anticipate when I started this company, and after three years it still catches me off guard. The trailer attracts people. Not crowds, not mobs, just people. Curious, friendly, genuinely interested people who walk up to you at fuel stations, chai stalls, parking lots, and scenic viewpoints and ask some version of “What is this?”
On this trip alone: a truck driver who circled the trailer twice before asking if it was a mobile hospital. A family at a petrol pump who thought it was a food truck and asked what we were serving. A retired army officer who knocked on the door at a campsite and asked for a full walkthrough, which I gave him, and he left saying he’d visit the showroom next month (he did). A group of college students who wanted to take photos with it and asked approximately forty questions about the bathroom.
These conversations are exhausting sometimes. But they’re also the raw market research that no survey can replicate. Every question someone asks at a fuel stop is a question that our website needs to answer. “How much does it cost?” led to our Cost of Ownership Article. “What car do you need to pull this?” led to the Tow Vehicle Guide. “Can you really cook inside?” led to the Cooking Guide. The road trip isn’t just a trip. It’s a listening exercise.
What 10,000 km Taught Me (Again)
I’ve been doing this for years now. Building the company, importing the trailers, converting the gas systems, tuning the suspensions, selling the rigs, supporting the owners. I know these trailers inside and out. I can diagnose a water pump issue from the sound it makes. I know which seal fails first on which model and why. I know the torque spec for the wheel lugs and the exact angle to set the WDH bars.
And every single time I take a trailer on the road, I learn something new. Not about the trailer. About why the trailer matters.
The trailer is not a product. I know we sell it like one, because that’s what companies do. We talk about specs and features and price points because that’s what websites are for. But the trailer is not a product. The trailer is a way of being somewhere. It’s the difference between visiting a place and being in a place. When you check into a hotel, you’re visiting. When you park your trailer, you’re in it. You’re cooking there. You’re sleeping there. You’re waking up there. You’re having chai at 1 am there. The place enters the trailer through the open door and the sound on the roof, and you enter the place through the step you sit on in the morning.
That’s what 10,000 km taught me. Again. The same thing it teaches me every time. The step is the product.
Follow the Trip
Road Trip 2026 has been documented across our social channels. If you want to see the cooking, the campsites, the breakdowns, and the views in real time, follow Club Campers on Instagram and YouTube.
If this piece made you curious about the trailers themselves, the whole range is here: Enthusiast Range. Our best-selling compact trailer has its own deep dive: Catalina 134RDX. For families, the 164BHX: 134RDX vs 164BHX.
And if you’re the kind of person who reads a 3,000-word article about a road trip in a trailer and thinks “I want to try that,” come to the showroom. I’m usually there. I’ll walk you through the trailer the same way I walked through it with that retired army officer at the campsite. Except at the showroom, you won’t have to knock.
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Kanwal is the founder of Club Campers, India’s importer and customiser of US-built imported travel trailers. He takes a trailer on the road every year and comes back with opinions.