Epsilon is a 2022 Airstream Globetrotter 23FB Twin. Twenty-four feet of trailer, forty-six feet of rig once Smaug is hooked to the front of her. She is where we live when we are not at home, and after Alaska and a good deal of North America since, she has earned a page of her own.
People ask two questions about a trailer this size. Isn’t it small? And how long can you stay out in it? The answers turn out to be connected.
The trailer
Twenty-three feet nine inches on the outside, eight feet wide, and a shade under ten feet tall with the air conditioner and the lift. Seven feet seven of interior width and six feet seven and a half of headroom — which is to say you stand up straight in it.
The layout runs front to back: twin beds up front, the galley and dinette through the middle, and a full-width bathroom across the entire rear — toilet and shower both. That rear bath is the whole argument for the 23FB. In a trailer this size most floorplans give you a wet closet you back into sideways; this one gives you a room. The beds stay beds, too — no nightly conversion, no wrestling cushions at eleven o’clock because you lingered over the fire. Those two decisions buy back more comfort than another three feet of length would.
Barcelona Blue
Airstream offered the 2022 Globetrotter in four interior décors. Ours is Barcelona Blue, paired with the light Natural Elm cabinetry. The others were Natural Elm with London Grey, and Dark Walnut with either Copenhagen Cream or Dublin Slate.
The blue is deeper than a photograph suggests — it reads almost navy in the morning and warms toward the evening. The seating and the upholstered bedroom accent wall are done in HITCH fabric, a finely woven material with a metallic tip print that Airstream uses only on the Globetrotter. The galley counter is white Corian, which bounces light around a narrow space in a way a dark counter never would. The floor is seamless woven vinyl, soft underfoot and forgiving of wet boots.
It has held up. Four years in, through Alaskan dust and Canadian rain and more nights than we have counted, the blue still looks like the day we brought her home.
Living off the grid
Four days comfortably. Five if we are careful. And the thing that stops us is not what most people guess.
It is not power. Two hundred amp-hours of lithium, two hundred seventy watts of solar on the roof, and an Onan propane generator on the tongue mean that electricity is effectively a solved problem. On a sunny day the batteries are full by early afternoon and we have not touched the generator.
It is not fresh water either. Thirty-nine gallons goes further than you would think when you are paying attention to it.
It is the grey tank. Thirty gallons, and every shower and every sink of dishes goes into it. The black tank holds eighteen and lasts considerably longer, which surprises everybody. Grey fills at roughly twice the rate, and when it is full you are done — you can ration drinking water, you can run the generator, but you cannot make thirty gallons of dishwater disappear.
So the boondocking limit is a plumbing question, not a power question. Knowing that changes how you plan. We arrive at a dry campground with the fresh tank full and both waste tanks empty, and we leave when the grey says so.
What she carries
| Fresh water | 39 gallons |
| Grey water | 30 gallons — the real limit |
| Black water | 18 gallons |
| Propane | 2 × 30 lb cylinders |
| Battery | 200 Ah lithium |
| Solar | 270 W rooftop |
What makes it possible
Epsilon left the factory as a well-built trailer. What lets her stay out is an electrical system installed by Airstream Nuts and Bolts in Dadeville, Alabama — a Victron inverter and charger, lithium batteries, a system monitor we can read from an iPad, and a DC-to-DC charger that tops the batteries off from the truck while we drive. There is a surge protector between the trailer and every campground pedestal, which is not glamorous but has almost certainly saved us an expensive repair at some point we will never know about.
The propane generator lives on the tongue and runs quietly enough to be neighborly within posted hours. A soft-start on the air conditioner lets it come up on the inverter or the generator rather than demanding shore power. The factory water heater was replaced with a Truma AquaGo, which gives endless hot water on demand instead of six gallons and a wait.
Starlink handles the internet, which is how these pages get written from places that have no cell signal at all.
The modifications
Most of what we have changed came from AirKrafters, who make beautifully engineered things for Airstreams and charge accordingly.
- jenRAK generator rack — mounted up front, in the spot where the spare tire originally rode.
- tyRAK spare tire carrier — the spare moved back, behind the rear axle. The two racks trading places is what made room for the generator without turning the tongue into a scrapyard.
- Six erPOD ceiling vents — spun aluminum nozzles that replace the flat factory air conditioning registers. Each one aims a full three hundred sixty degrees and closes independently. The difference in air actually reaching the bed is not subtle.
- dorMAT storage door protectors — foam liners on the inside of the exterior compartment doors, so that loading gear stops leaving marks on the aluminum.
- Three-inch axle lift — fitted as part of the generator installation. It raises her about three inches, which matters for ground clearance on rough campground roads and matters just as much for remembering that the low bridge you cleared last year is now closer than it was.
What comes next
Two things are on the list. Interior-switched clearance and marker lights, so that Epsilon can join Airstreams Aglow at a rally without being hitched to the truck. And eventually a front lounge rebuilt in the style of the 2027 International — the one change we keep coming back to.
Neither is urgent. She does what we ask of her.
Every campground judgment on Epsilon Stays is made against this rig — twenty-four feet of trailer, forty-six feet combined. If a site fits us, we say so. If it doesn’t, we say that too.
Epsilon Adventures 