After a year of living full time in our Apex 215RBK travel trailer we have formed opinions about the things that we love and some things we think could’ve been done better. We decided to make this list to help you in your shopping quest to find your perfect travel trailer and maybe help Apex to build a better product. In our opinion, this travel trailer is the perfect size for two adults and either a small dog or two or a cat or one medium-sized dog; anything more than that and it is going to get real small real fast. The dinette can sleep up to two small children or one adult but being able to move around that many bodies is going to feel super tight for any extended length of time.
The first thing that we love about our Apex is the layout. This floor plan is very well thought out and useful. The bedroom in the front feels very cozy with side closets, overhead storage and rotating entertainment center.
We added an electric heater over our first winter since it was pretty chilly with the big window above our heads. We also velcro-ed a blanket over the window to help hold in more heat. We were able to stay toasty warm, hooked up to shore power for the heater.
The downside to this cozy room is that making the bed, specifically putting on the fitted sheet, requires a fair amount of manual labor. You must be able to fold/pick up half your mattress to get the sheet on at the window side. Maybe if we had a regular mattress instead of a memory foam, this would not be as difficult.
The second thing we love about our 215RBK is the amount of room in the living area. With the slide out we have a decent amount of room to walk around and we aren’t constantly bumping into each other. One of us can be cooking and the other still has room to walk by and access the rest of the trailer. There is also plenty of room for the adventure pups to play fetch and get a little exercise on a rainy day. The downside to the kitchen layout is the skewd sink placement. We got a larger counter area due to the sink being placed cockeyed but, we feel that a better solution would be to place the sink in-line with the wall and make the counter rectangular and not stick out so that when the slide is in we could more easily access the bathroom. One of the things that we looked for in a trailer was the ability to use it, somewhat, with the slide in for travel days and if we needed to stop for a brief overnight and be slightly steathy by not extending the slide. We can sort of do this but it requires us to slide over the table. We wish that with the slide in, the trailer would operate more like a van with a tiny asle to walk down to be able to access the trailer for a bathroom or lunch break on travel days.
Our third loved item of this rig is the huge pantry and the largest fridge we’ve found in a trailer this size. The fridge in the kitchen is 7 cu. ft. and holds enough food for us to go a full week in between grocery trips, which was a lifesaver since we started this journey a week before the first Covid shut down. We love that the main kitchen fridge is a 3-way which operates on shore power, battery, or propane to keep our food cold in all situations and the doors lock tight for travel. To the left of the slide is a floor to ceiling pantry that holds an amazing amount of food however, the shelves are widely spaced top to bottom which required us to use extra shelving. The wood used for the shelves is flimsy and thin. The supports were not holding some of them after a few trips either. These need to be made with a thicker wood and better supports since many dry foods tend to be on the heavy side. We don’t have a lot of cans but things like pickles and peanut butter are pretty heavy and driving down the road causes them to jump around and put extra strain on the shelves.
Number four on our list is the spacious storage in the bathroom. There is a massive storage area which holds our paper towels, toilet paper, towels, games, all the extras and backups that we have like extra toothpaste or the big bottle of shampoo that we use to fill the small bottle that goes in the shower. We like that they left it open so that you can configure the space how you want to. We use the 12"x12” fabric bins to hold everything as they make it easy to just pull a whole bin out to access what’s inside and put the whole bin back in but, we would like to add some shelves to make use of the height of this space. Our dislike in this area has to be the plumbing. The bathroom sink has the hot water pipe pressing against the drain pipe so hard that it leaks if we use it, so no hot water in the sink.
We also swaped out the faucet as it was so shallow to the back of the sink that it was completely unless. The shower pan is not properly supported and flexed so much when we stepped in that the drain pipe broke. This caused a leak into the floor that we didn’t notice until a maintenance man at the park in Port Aransas during Christmas of 2020 knocked on our door to tell us that water was pouring out of our trailer. The water was running from under the shower, into the floor, along the sandwiched layers of flooring and out to the edge of the camper by the tires.
The fifth thing we love about this trailer is the outdoor kitchen. It has a small fridge, sink, cabinet, and grill. We did switch out the grill with a better one that has a side burner but it is really nice how it tucks away under the counter. We've seen some people modify the drawer space to fit a Blackstone grill. The sink is great for washing your hands outside and preparing food. It was a bonus feature for us as it was not even on our list of wants or needs while shopping for a trailer.
There are more things we like and more we'd like to change about this rig but, I think this post is long enough. If you'd like to see our walkthrough video, you can find it here. Thank you for your support. Let us know in the comments if you have this camper and what you love or would like to change about it.
