1961 Holiday House Trailer

Not a barn find like most of my other trailers, yet still, an interesting find.
While attending a vintage trailer rally in Lake Tahoe, California, both my wife and I saw our first Holiday House trailer. Wow, the Jetsons have arrived.

Another miracle!!! Jenay said “let’s get one”. I was told “good luck”, there aren’t many of them around.

This thing looked like a chrome plated, pleated, Kleenex box—shaped like a forward leaning space ship. Boxy, ugly, unique, and as we soon found out, very rare.

How is this for specialized manufacturing? They were made by the Harry and David fruit packing company. Yes, the Harry and David that sends you that catalog every fall with pears, apples etc. all packed so neatly in gift boxes. It seems that the owners thought that it would be a good idea to find something for the fruit packers to do during the off season. So low and behold, they designed these trailers and put them into production. They only made these trailers for a few years. There is much more to that story, but let’s go back to the story of mine.

When we returned from the Tahoe rally at about two in the morning, I went on the internet and immediately found this Holiday House. I was shocked after being told they were so rare. I wrote the phone # down and went to bed. The next morning I told Jenay I had a surprise for her. The bad news… it was not on the internet anymore. The listing on Craigs list was pulled. Good thing I saved the phone #. I called the guy and he said it was only listed for a few hours. They mistakenly listed it under vacation homes or something like that, and he wanted it changed to vintage travel trailers. How I found it punching in “Holiday House” is beyond me. He was going to relist it that day, but I told him not to waste his time. He was only 7 hours away, so we jumped in our truck and made the whirlwind round trip and returned with my prize.

This is the only trailer that I did not restore to original specs. It was simply too cool… and I had to take it one more step into the future.

Fasten your seat belt, you are about to go “back to the future”.

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