The recreational vehicle is a great way to see America without leaving your entire life behind – or forgoing luxury accommodations, even. Some of these rigs get so ridiculous that they make a hotel seem too plebeian and may even make your own apartment seem as dumpy as a broom closet. The 2025 Forest River Wildwood Grand Lodge 42 Veranda is one of those trailers. This beast has two decks, residential appliances, and a rear patio so huge it houses its own kitchen, a slide system, and a water mister. Why even go home at this point?
We were tipped off to the existence of this trailer by our old friends at Jalopnik. Forest River, one of the largest RV conglomerates in America, is currently showing off this trailer to RV influencers, which apparently doesn’t include me. The RV Hunter was the first to get a video on this trailer but the most entertaining tour comes from RV influencer SavvyAboutCampers. The host of this social media account is known for her sassy and unhinged camper reviews. I’ve been finding myself sucked in, watching reviews for campers I would normally find boring.
Normally, I don’t cover destination trailers like these, but the 2025 Forest River Wildwood Grand Lodge 42 Veranda is almost shocking how silly it is in the context of camping. For once, its $108,497 price doesn’t seem as bad as it could be.
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A What?
Right, so this is a destination trailer. It’s still an RV, but it’s built to fulfill a specific role.
For decades camper trailers were largely split into two main categories. You had your travel trailers, and this encompasses everything from baby teardrops to hefty fifth-wheels. For the past 70 or so years, most of these have been self-contained, meaning they have equipment onboard like batteries or holding tanks so that they do not need to be lashed up to an improved campsite.
On the other end of the spectrum is the park model above. Park trailers do not exceed 400 square feet and are generally designed to be towed to one place and left there. Park models are not built to RV code because they aren’t expected to be used as campers or go down the road for very long. When you find a place to set your park model down, you’re expected to remove its tongue, remove its wheels, and install skirts for a permanent setup. A park model is more or less a mobile home, not an RV.
So, these units will have residential appliances, carports, permanent patios, and they’re sometimes over eight and a half feet wide. They also won’t have holding tanks or other RV equipment. Some park models are so wide that you’ll need special permits just to haul them down the road, not unlike a mobile home. Likewise, you can move a park model again after it’s been set down, but it’s a convoluted process since it technically wasn’t built for that.
Lots of vintage RVs could be considered park models today because a lot of them – like the trailers built by Spartan Aircraft – were mobile, but were actually meant to stay in one place for a long time.
That brings us to the destination trailer. This is an invention that has officially been around for well over a decade. The destination trailer is meant to be the best of both worlds. These trailers are self-contained and built to RV code like travel trailers, yet they’re seriously large and feature home appliances and equipment like a park model.
While you can take your destination trailer around as a mega-travel trailer, you really aren’t supposed to. Instead, a destination trailer is meant to sit in one place for several months or a whole season before you haul it off somewhere else. The destination trailer is for the kind of person who would otherwise buy a park model, but doesn’t like the idea of having their RV stuck wherever the park model is set up.
The result is what you see here. Destination trailers are oversized and have wild features, but they’re still bumper-pull units like most typical travel trailers.
The Grand Lodge 42 Veranda
People are going nuts about Forest River’s latest destination trailer offerings. This latest trailer falls under Forest River’s Wildwood brand and its Salem brand. The Wildwood brand was founded in 1997 and it’s supposed to be an upscale brand giving you more bang for your buck. Salem is another Forest River brand that was founded in 1997 and it’s supposed to be budget-oriented.
Some advertisement pages say this trailer is a “Wildwood & Salem 42Veranda” but that is unnecessarily confusing. This trailer is sold as the Salem Grand Villa 42 Veranda and as the Wildwood Grand Lodge 42 Veranda. Both trailers are actually the same despite being under different brand lines, but they have slightly different motifs. The Salem goes for brightness while the Wildwood seems to try to replicate the feel of a high-end cabin in the woods. Think of these trailers as the difference between a Pontiac G3 and a Chevrolet Aveo. It’s all superficial. Even the pricing is the same between the two.
Forest River has been giving influencers access to the Wildwood version of the trailer, so that’s the one we’re looking at, too. Again, they’re the same aside from color palettes, so we’re not missing anything.
Let’s start with the stats because they will point out why this is unlike a normal travel trailer. The living space of the trailer is 42 feet long. Yep, that’s where the “42” comes from and yes, the RV manufacturers aren’t super creative with naming. Forest River has not published full specs, but says the total trailer length (that’s tongue to rear bumper) is 45 feet. The trailer sits 13 feet, 3 inches tall, and you get all three holding tanks, each with a capacity of 40 gallons.
I really want to tell you about the weight, but Forest River hasn’t published that yet. A similar trailer without the rear deck, the Wildwood Grand Lodge 42 View, weighs 13,749 pounds unloaded and its hitch weighs 1,745 pounds when the trailer is empty. That trailer is otherwise similar, down to the holding tanks. Basically, Forest River chopped the rear bathroom off of the normal 42-foot Grand Lodge and Salem Villa and just put a deck in its place. So, I’d expect the final trailer to also have a cargo-carrying capacity of just under 2,000 pounds.
In other words, this thing should be closer in specifications to that crazy Living Vehicle trailer, but costs a fraction of the price. Obviously, you’re going to want something more beefy than your pedestrian Ram 1500 to tow this.
Forest River’s bad photography doesn’t make this obvious, but these guys are sitting on the floor of the upper deck, not in chairs:
Like many destination trailers, some of that height is going into giving the trailer a second deck, sort of. You get a main floor with 8 feet, 6 inches of headroom, or 7 feet of headroom in the slide. Then, you can climb a staircase to access the trailer’s second bedroom, which features a queen bed, lots of cabinet storage, a large television, and even a table for card games, meals, or work. It’s a bit silly to think you’ll spend nearly $110k on a trailer, but someone in your party is going to have a bedroom they have to crawl around. Second decks are actually pretty common in destination trailers, but they’re usually afterthoughts reserved for tiny kids, not adults.
Most of the rest of the trailer isn’t too amazing, just comically large. There’s a bathroom under the second deck and it features a step-in shower that’s large enough for plus-size people to get comfortably clean in. I like that. The primary bedroom up front also has enough space for a king bed plus a cool panoramic window setup. Also cool!
Then you move back into the kitchen and living room area, which features an open concept plus residential appliances. It really looks like an apartment down there. Again, this is pretty common in destination trailers, but still cool to look at.
Things get weird again when you open the door to the patio. The patio is so large that it has its own hibachi-style grille and sink. It’s so large it has a second that extends out using motors. But then it goes even further. This is not a trailer for camping, as evidenced by the fact that this patio has both a large ceiling fan and a misting system to keep you damp.
All of this adds together with JBL speakers inside and outside, all kinds of LED lighting effects, a 26-foot awning, an on-demand water heater, and more. The options list is short, but does come with cool stuff like an all-weather package, additional jacks, gel coat on the trailer’s exterior fiberglass skin, washer and dryer prep, and countertops of a solid surface. Forest River also has the park model people covered, too. You can option your Wildwood or Salem to have a removable tongue and no tanks.
How Bad Could It Be?
We’ve written about a number of the crazy high-end stuff before, but this unit seems to give you a lot for the $108,497 Forest River wants you to pay. Shoot, this thing makes most apartments in my area seem like broom closets!
Unfortunately, if you want better pictures than the ones shown here you’ll have to watch those influencer videos. RV manufacturers are routinely the worst at taking pictures of their own products.
All of that being said, it should be noted that Forest River, much like Thor Industries, doesn’t have a good reputation for quality or longevity. So, I can’t tell you how long this will last. From my eyes on the ground at this year’s RV shows and my experience with my family’s brand-new trailer, it looks like quality is still a struggle.
That said, I could see a lot of people lining up to buy something like this, even if it’s about as far from camping as you could get without buying something with Prevost on the front. I mean, it gives you a porch, but then loads it up with a ceiling fan and a misting system so you don’t actually have to experience the outdoors. Forget a rolling hotel room, this is like bringing a summer cottage with you somewhere. But I guess that’s the point of a destination trailer. It basically is a summer cottage with wheels.
If you’re interested, Forest River will be shipping the 2025 Wildwood Grand Lodge 42 Veranda and the 2025 Salem Grand Villa 42 Veranda out to dealers soon.
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