Time to Roam Magazine Issue 4 - August/September 2013 | Page 32

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tried + tested camper review

Project of Passion
Tested Vista RV Crossover camper Report and Photos by David Cook

The Vista RV Crossover has rapidly gained a reputation as a luxury
Outback touring camper that can and will go just about anywhere

Louie and Lorraine Cretella.

The world of camper trailers,
probably more than any other
sector of the recreational vehicle
industry, has become an arms
race in recent years. In most
cases this arises from the camper
trailer being a relatively recent
phenomenon and starting from
a fairly fundamental base, but
it’s also come from a handful of
entrepreneurial manufacturers
who have looked at what
was being served up for the
marketplace and saying, “Surely
we can do better than this.”
One such manufacturer is Louie Cretella
and wife Lorraine, who five years ago
decided their very successful company
manufacturing electrical switchboards
and similar items could branch out into an
area in which they had a greater personal

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interest: camper trailers.
Louie started tinkering with a hard floor
camper design, adapting the paradigm that
he saw all about him, but then he came
across some interesting data.
“It was a sort of diary kept by a man
who manufactured flip-over campers,
and he recorded the wish list – or whinge
list as I call it – of his customers,” Lou
told us. “I went through Mr X’s diary
and what kept coming up was that you
tend to get sick of the canvas after a
while, especially when it’s wet.
“Our prototype that we were working on
was a big, king-sized flip-over hard floor
camper trailer and I asked myself what are
we doing here? We’d just be head butting all
the kings that have been at it for years and
giving the customers more canvas. The way
I read it, when you’ve got rid of the kids and
it’s just mum and dad going touring, where
they’re not staying put too long and are often
setting up and packing up every day, it’s the
canvas that’s the killer.