In-depth look at our brand new Dutchmen Kodiak Cub travel trailer (2021 model 177RB)
Hi I'm Mike and this is Mike's Road Trip. "Get off the road..." "All right." Hi I'm Mike and I'm Miha from World Travel Bug. We just recently purchased this travel trailer behind us and we know there are a lot of you out there considering doing the same so we thought we would share with you what went into the decision of buying this Kodiak by Dutchmen yeah for starters this is made out of fiberglass versus aluminum and there are a lot of benefits to that it's lighter weight it resists dings it's got a better design profile and it's a little bit more aerodynamic yeah and we wanted a trailer with all creature comforts but compact and lightweight at the same time yeah so we're towing this with a half ton older pickup so we needed something that we could easily tow so why don't you come along with us and we'll show you the ins and outs and give you some rationale of why we made certain decisions and hopefully it will help you in your decision making process when considering a travel trailer yep so come along with us we'll show you around let's go one of the things we both really appreciate is the fact that this has stabilizing jacks now they're not leveling jacks which is completely different these are stabilizing jacks so that you can just make the whole unit more stable when you're walking around inside so you just press this button and these lower all by themselves and you'll see a lot of these travel trailers where you have to take a hand crank a lot of people buy a drill um to lower them under four typically uh that you'll have to level the entire trailer with but this is so much much easier to have these power stabilizing jacks yeah and they really do make a big difference with them up or down really when you're in the trailer and the jacks are up it's moving so yeah it really does and you know there are a lot of other things outside uh like you have the TV bracket here in case you want to put a TV outside but you have the power outlet right here uh and here you have a cable uh jack jack and we also have speakers outside as well i have speakers outside two of them so yeah pretty cool and here is where the front leveling jacks are and sorry for the mess you know they're all the way here and you have to make sure that you keep this place clean and easy to reach because it can happen that you need to lift your jacks very fast and go at times you'll see what i mean at some point yeah and there are a lot of other things here that he'll show you better because he he knows better how they are called and what they do we have been organizing inside but we haven't really gotten out here yet um anyhow this is a pass-through goes the entire width and there's another door in the other side so it's very very convenient you can store a lot of stuff in here which is lovely and then let me show you over here this stuff is all related to the solar and the batteries these here are switches for all the lights uh some are inside and then these two switches are for outside lights.
Some motor homes uh really fancy ones will have power steps ours are manual but at least we do have the steps but they're very easy to store and they just stay right there and these are all aluminum they're very sturdy yeah now we bought our trailer equipped with a solar panel up top top they're actually they come solar ready but we actually bought the solar panel as well but if you want you also can connect the solar right here you can connect uh solar panels because we have the solar we opted to have a second battery you can certainly travel with just one but we wanted to have a little bit more storage so we have two batteries here that will store our excess energy our specific model of Kodiak hub is a 177 rb which has a little bit higher lift and it has these um all-terrain tires with premium wheels and i think you forgot to tell them its name or his name because we refer to him as a he not an eat his name is Denny and it comes from cub it's a Kodiak Cub, a Kodiak is a bear a cub so we consider it our small den we are the two little bears living in this little den so we we call him Denny so it was a cute idea this is Denny yeah yeah. So these are all pretty much standard connections out here you've got your city water this is actually really nice i don't know that all travel trailers have this but this is a flush system so you can flush your black tanks speaking of tanks one of the other things i really appreciate and was a factor in considering this travel trailer was the storage capacities uh one thing i cannot figure out is why black tanks are the same as your water in your gray makes no sense to me at all so this has a much smaller black tank and i think i'll write the numbers down in the video but i believe the water is around 65 gallons and the gray i think is around 65 where the black is maybe 35 i think but i'll write the specifics down we also have a connection here for the cable uh this is where you hook up your power and then this is where you would put fresh water if you're going to be boon-docking you want to store water otherwise you can just hook up to city water at a campground back here i mentioned the design profile you can see here this is not it's not all bland and flat and everything it's really got some nice curvatures in it it's also got these really cool lights so we really like the front of this i think it really looks sharp in this canister here we store two 5 gallon propane tanks which will last you a really long time that will power the stove the refrigerator when you're not hooked to electricity uh the hot water um and what else i think that's about it yeah so one of the things that was a huge consideration was a queen-size bed and also the other thing that i really wanted was something vertical like this because most travel trailers the bed goes like this and you have to crawl over your partner so this was huge we are both really happy with it we can get out of bed whatever we want without too much issue trouble with the other partner yeah and and you see all the uh cabinets around the bed i think there's plenty of storage really for both of us these ones here maybe are a little bit too short you know if you have everybody has longer clothes even for the shirts but otherwise as the quantity or volume there's plenty really for both of us we have here there it goes all the way on top here yeah there is no shortage of storage but the downside to this we've discovered is that there's only uh three windows um and only two of them open so it's really hard to kind of air out the rv that's kind of the downside it's like give and take you know the balance what you want more so and i think the design of a couple of these things could have been maybe different like for example these are really nice and all but it's really hard to get your clothes out when you are holding this up so I'm surprised there's not a magnet built in here so one day he came up with this ingenious idea and he was like me help me out look because i was keeping this with my head while i was searching for for my clothes there and then he came up with this I'm like oh my god and look tada yeah yeah perfect you just have to remember not to pull down on it that's the downside there and don't leave it up too much because it doesn't hold so much weight yeah yeah i guess the other thing too i think could have been better is instead of having doors that open up is maybe sliders because it's very difficult to get to the clothes that aren't on each side of the door so that's a little bit of a yeah but there you put clothes where you that you don't really see very often yeah exactly so it depends how how long you are um living in here and there is some storage here which initially we thought oh okay it's nice that it's by the bed you know where you have your lights and so on in a usual home uh and there are two levels of storage so it's actually pretty neat we we can store a lot like our hats there because it's a little bit difficult uh difficult to reach but you know the phone and everything that that you want in the yeah because there's outlets there so you can charge your phone or your iPad yeah and on one side you have also uh usb yeah yeah yeah oh and there is no shortage of lights they are everywhere yeah my only i i wish you could dim these lights because they are very bright yeah me too especially these ones here by the bed maybe not all of them but if you have a few of them and what's very cool about them is that they're all individual yeah you can you can light up any of them or all of them so yeah you can have plenty of light or very very little but it's always one of these uh fell off once i had to put it back on and i think there's like quite a few little leds so i wish they could have just maybe put a third of the as many and that would have been cool but anyway and we have a little bit more storage here as well where i put a lot of stuff so this is the stuff you might need for me day to day yeah yeah this is very useful for me because it goes quite deep here so yeah that's very nice all right so let's move on to the kitchen so as far as the kitchen we have a huge sink i mean this thing is massive and i guess this we've been doubling this as a cutting board yeah uh which i think that's what it is but the nice thing is it's recessed so it doesn't fly around you've got a nice little stainless steel uh faucet and he wanted uh how do you call it this thing that under-mount underneath yeah yeah I'm very so adamant about it you just wanted an under mount sink yeah for me that that's just really the best way to go unfortunately the bathroom is not under mount but um anyhow then we've got a two burner stove why don't you show that yeah so they are with gas they are not electrical which is common every trailer would be gas yeah yeah but there is no automatic ignition so you have to light it with a lighter okay and then there's a vent a stainless steel vent with a light we've got a microwave another thing that we kind of wish i really wish because i do most of the cooking is that it was a convection but it's just a microwave so i don't know it's a small space i don't know if we could even get a convection then we've got this area here and it looks a little messy we we want to kind of build places for things so to kind of customize the the cabinetry at some point but right now we're just keeping most of our kitchen things in here the pots and glasses where we want to customize even more but i'm really sorry because this is really messy i just put everything in here for filming um is this place because there is so much storage and you cannot use it because it's too tall so we want to put some shelves in here so so we can put a few levels of stuff but storage wise it's really there's plenty and we have these two drawers where we keep our cutlery and other stuff and here we keep our plates and mugs and yeah things that we are using really every day yeah something else that really went into our decision is a large enough fridge uh this is a 21 foot trailer about 17 and a half feet inside the tongue to bumper i think is 21 feet but a lot of them this size don't have very much storage for a refrigerator this is now i can't remember it's either six or seven cubic feet and we have a really nice size um freezer really good size refrigerator plenty of room for two people for you know we store a lot of stuff in there yeah i mean for a couple weeks easily yeah and we're we never like ran out of space we never over uh crowded it or we never really ran out of space yeah but this does run off of propane sometimes if you're if you're hooked up to shore power you you would be running off electricity but these run these operate differently than your home refrigerator so you need to be very careful on how you uh pack everything and actually i think i saw a video Dutchmen actually has a really good video on how to properly store your um your fridge items so we'll link it there if we can find it but in addition you want to put stuff in here cold already it's it's not a good idea to put warm things in if you can help it and obviously don't keep the door open all right good point yeah like some people yeah you know you want to open the door and look and see what you want to cook tonight and think oh what do i want from the fridge let me think let me think no you have to know what you want from the fridge before you open the fridge here we have a bracket for TV which i told you earlier we are not using because we are not using a tv and here we have the stereo that is working for inside and outside we show you already the the speaker so it has a USB as well and and plenty of channels we are not using it very much because we are using our own music yeah and underneath oh yeah underneath we have all the the outlets like we we have plenty of outlets i have to say within the trailer right oh and here you can put the the cable for for the tv and one thing that we forgot to mention about the the fridge is you have to be very careful careful when you are driving you have to hear that click because things are falling out there that's the key that the fridge is closed another thing that really factored into our decision was the bathroom uh we'll show you that in just a moment but you want to talk about the mirrors oh yeah i want to uh we have very small mirror in the bathroom so we just wanted a full-size mirror and initially we were thinking to to get one that is hanging off the door because we saw plenty of those and then we came across this one made of four pieces that are actually uh stuck to the door and it's just perfect we think it looks really good yeah we actually separated them just to give it a little design texture there so that that worked out really we needed it it's so nice yeah and it's lightweight too yeah yeah very very lightweight yeah and this is the bathroom so this is a really big bathroom for this size of trailer I'm so excited about it in case you cannot see it um so we have a very spacious cabinet right here but look at the sink look at the space we have here we can put so many things so it's so comfortable to do all our morning routine evening routine and everything plenty of space underneath we store so much the other thing that's nice is that this is a glass door kind of accordions and then when you are traveling there's this latch here so you can hold these really nicely in place but yeah it's really a good size shower for a trailer this small it's it's quite cozy oh and these are a motion uh lights so you can switch them here and when you walk in they'll turn on automatically if you so choose yeah welcome to our living room now our dining area it kind of has to substitute us both yeah yeah but this table here you can actually collapse it and use it outside if you wish we haven't done that we actually bought a little table and we used that but i actually think I'm going to reconfigure this because the the leg is a little bit cumbersome I'm thinking about putting a solid pole there and make it a little bit more room for the feet underneath and that's because we don't need to use this as a bed which you can do right so that's actually additional if you have guests or traveling with somebody else these two sofas you you lift the table that's why that's why you can take it out you leave the table and uh put the two sofas together and here you have another bed here yeah and we have these other cabinets here as well similar with with the ones that we had in the in the bedroom um so it's plenty of storage here it's again a little bit difficult to reach this area because they are not sliding but you know you have to make do we put on kind of boxes and stuff you adjust with everything you know it's not home it's not a full home so you you have to to adjust uh these are very very comfortable really this sofas we spent a lot of time on them and we have additional storage even here here and there we have two more drawers so really we are really really happy with with the storage and we bought a little carpet because you know we wanted to make it uh even cozier and yeah more homey and i think we got this at Costco no oh yeah i think yeah it was really affordable and uh goes really well in here with the color scheme um yeah so we have i guess you maybe want to talk about the air conditioning and yeah yeah as well yeah i think the air conditioning is 13 500 btu which for this size is absolutely plenty this thing will get this super cold we actually have to keep turning it on and off you can adjust the temperature but the other thing that's kind of a downside is you can hardly hear it outside but my gosh it is loud inside unfortunately but it works very well so that's very good the heat also works incredibly well you control it right here it comes out right over here and here you can you can actually check your fresh water your black tank and your gray water and see where you are so what the levels are yeah what are the levels how full the tanks are yeah and as i said there's plenty of storage here and what we showed you so far is not all there's more under the bed there's plenty look at this granted it's a little bit difficult to lift this one we are missing a piece currently uh but nevertheless we can still use the storage and we store so much there we have this awesome awning sometimes things will stick i don't know if it's going to help now with the sun oh it's a little bit it's very cool for the inside as well even if we are not outside we sometimes stretch it inside so we get shade when it's too hot yeah and also we haven't done it yet but my understanding is you can adjust this to tilt yeah the awning but we haven't played around with that yet but as you can see it goes out quite a ways and then we could just sit back under our awning and yeah relax where's the cocktail it's coming right up beer assistant somebody should bring it to us a piece of advice you probably don't want to leave this extended when you're not around or maybe even at night when you're not using it because you don't want the wind to be blowing this around so something to consider well that's a look at our brand new 2021 Dutchmen Kodiak cub model number 177rb we hope you found this video helpful and if you have any questions or comments please leave them below and would be very happy to answer them all yeah absolutely and full disclosure we have not been paid by Dutchmen but we did get a discount as content creators when we purchased our travel trailer hey thanks so much for watching and until next time we'll see you on the road you
2021-06-23 17:43
