The Treehouse Idea Gets Wheels

It was the end of summer and I took my girls (4 and 6 years-old) to the Evergreen State Fair as we do every year when my wife is prepping her classroom for the start of the school year. Typically we seek out the bunnies, chickens, Ferris wheel, and an extra large corn dog, but this year something else caught our attention. We stumbled across the 5th wheels, RV's, and pop-up camping trailers. The girls were on cloud nine to say the least and even made me collect brochures from the reps on-site.
The spaces of course were intriguing and it was fun to explore more than a dozen different sizes and styles. Many were obscene in my mind, but a few offered very innovative use of space and just the right amount of space for our family of four and all of the gear we might want to take on a climbing or camping trip. Besides the price, most smaller styles that slept 4 comfortably ranged from $12,000 - $20,000, I quickly realized that none of them could be towed by our current vehicle and would require an upgrade...which was out of the question for many reasons.
My girls loved the idea of a camping trailer as much as they did the idea of a tree house, especially since we could take it with us anywhere we went!
So, explorations began to see if a camping trailer existed that met all of my criteria...
- made from local, healthy, sustainably produced products
- capable of being towed by a four or six cylinder vehicle that gets better than average gas mileage
- compact enough to fit in our tandem garage along with all of our gear and another vehicle
- room for our family of four and capable of allowing us to camp without access to water, power, or a toilet!
The research begins...