The Origami Bicycle Trailer

The rider of the recumbent trike pulls up at the secluded beach, the site looks promising, the dunes encroach on the park lawns in overlapping zig-zags, there's also a treated pine kiddy fortress, but the ground level is eroded and very uneven. OK for a bivi, but not the bike caravan. A patch of the park lawn, tucked deep between two dune intrusions provides the perfect spot. The rider pedals their Greenspeed in towards the campsite.

Behind the trike is a boxy looking trailer, a small cube, about 600mm on every side. The rider finds the flattest piece of lawn, is satisfied he's hidden from the road, so he unhitches the strange trailer, removes its wheels and drawbar, then removes the olive green wrap-around tonneaux cover to reveal a stange "layer-cake" of folded framework and foamboard. He lifts the stack of foamboards from the trailer and places them on the ground.

Then, in a blink, he unfolds first the top layer of the trailer, then the bottom layer, to reveal a low-slung bed, three squares long and one wide, on short, stumpy legs. Then he grabs the first block of foam board from the top of the pile, unfolds four hinged segments and clips what are now obviously walls onto one side and end. Then he does the same with the next block off the pile, this one having a door in its end piece, and fastens it to the opposite side and end to the previous wall structure. Finally, unfolding what is now, clearly, the roof panel, the low, box-like, hut is complete.

One side wall has a window, the entry door is at the opposite end to this. The finish on the ultralight structure is a partly Japanese, partly Expressionist style, painting of grasses and shrubs in muted greens and greys. The hut's outline is hard to see in the now fading light. The rider rolls the orange Greenspeed behind the hut, removes two pannier bags from its rack at the rear, locks the trailer wheels to the rear wheel of the trike, lacing the cable lock through all three, the luggage rack and the seat frame. Then he covers the trike with an olive green tarp and pegs it to the ground with tent screws, before making dinner on a small stove before retiring to the Origami Hut with his bags and sleeping bag.

He'll be up before 6, dawn is 5:30am at this time of year, packed up, parked outside the local cafe having coffee and breakfast and nobody will be any the wiser about his camp in the grassy dunes nearby. This is how tiny a tiny home can be. A 2 feet, by 2 feet, by 2 feet bicycle trailer and a tricycle or bicycle with a bit of lightweight camping gear.

Clever hinges make it possible to fold 2 level surfaces one over the other.

Tiny homes, especially for touring and camping, fascinate me. The camper unfolding in the "Origami Bicycle Trailer" story, above, is a life goal for me. I'm too tied to medications and a collection of medics to run away on a world randonee, but I can get away for a weekend... a week... maybe even a few weeks. I'm also over tents. The last decade, I've used a camoflage bivi with my sleeping bag inside, but it's really damned obvious what it's for, when strapped to the back of the bike. I'm kind of hoping an enclosed trailer, that doesn't look big enough to sleep in might say, "stops at hotels and caravan parks," rather than "sly camping freeloader."

Australia doesn't have a right-to-roam, unlike places like northern Europe, Scotland or Mongolia. Australia, as a bit-of-a-racist English colony has a history of seeing itinerance as poverty or criminality, rather than what it is for a middle class guy of working class origins, like me, to get back in touch with basic living - eat, sleep, cycle, repeat.

Shearers, first on foot or horseback, later on bicycles, gave Australia the best routes for what later became our roads. Not horse-drawn carts, not motor vehicles, walking, and riding working classes. It's good to do ths kind of travel as pilgramage, homage to and solidarity with hard working history. The official line is, "WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO HIDE, CRIMINAL?! YOU CAN'T CAMP, IT'S UNPRODUCTIVE!!! AND INDIGENOUS!!!"

And that's the other problem with making outlaws of those who roam, racism, especially in Australia. "Keeping it legal will make walkabout legal," says the police commissioner to the Police Minister and Parliament sweeps away everybody's freedom to travel light. Shearers, already barely paid enough for food and petrol, let alone the family they're trying to remotely support, can't legally sleep in their car on the long drive between the contracts. We're invoked by road safety adverts to "Have a driver reviver nap," but don't do it at night when you need it most, because Mr Plod will have you. And the only understanding Mr Plod has of equality is, if you're middle class, seeing your country. Working class tring to feed fam or indigenous connecting with culture and country, you probably poor and fit for a good, hard kicking and a night in a cell.

Australia has this idea of the open road, the grey nomad, but even if you have a fancy campervan, you can't stay anywhere but a expensive caravan park or an even more expensive AirBnB. Burn petrol, drive motel to motel but don't experience the land according to the legends we're taught in school or practice culture if you're indigenous. As a student of America, Australia looks well on the way to surpassing their teacher in the next decades.

Anyway, political theory aside... I have a whim to build a steath camper. A disguised, camoflaged box, the story I related above describes it. The GIF between the yarn and the rant is the main structure, a foamboard insulated, coroplast clad, aluminium frame in three, equal parts, offset-hinged so that one floor member folds flat over the other floor member, that also folds flat over the middle floor member where the wheels attach. The walls are four, zig-zag-hinged panels, one set for left and rear, the other set for right and front, both in thinner coroplast-clad foamboard, are folded and place on top or the 3 panel, coroplast and foamboard roof set, again hinged to fold in a z-shape. Paint it in a way that's part camoflage, part art, it'll blend into the bushes at dusk, onwards. While folded, clad in a zippered tarpaulin, with solar panels on top, as well as on a roof over the trike's rider, it'll look like a long range battery infrastructure. If you choose to stop at a caravan park, it won't look out of place among vans and Winnebagoes, either.

The only problem I have, if I build this rig, is that my GT20 is bright orange. In a fit of "mug lair" "thinking," I didn't choose green. No regrets FML, lol.