I would love to hear the trailer story if you are ever interested in telling it. As a start, insurance would obviously hate me if I rented out a motor vehicle but do they care about a trailer being rented (or was it "borrowed")?
It was rented via one of the legit peer to peer rental platforms online, and the trailers "personal" insurance company was aware of such, so it was all above board. Even though the platforms insurance comes into play when out on a rental and your personal insurance has nothing to do with it, our regular insurer wouldn't underwrite it, so the trailer alone was with a separate company, but that's yet another story. You pay a hefy portion of your rental fees for all this insurance and protection, but in this case, it paid off...that's where the long story begins lol.
It was out on a 1 month rental with a wonderful couple that were headed all the way to Vancouver Island and back. Given my condition and not really feeling up to travelling back in April/May, I figured it might as well go for a month as we weren't likely to use it much anyways at that point in my recovery (driving long distances wasn't in the cards at that point for me, and my wife won't tow it), so off it went.
I'll spare the exact details about what happened except to say it wasn't their fault, nor really anyone elses - it was a freak situation that resulted in the trailer ending up on it's side in the ditch in a rural area of Alberta. Nobody at all hurt, and I have to say the renters themselves were the most amazing people I could possibly have asked for through the whole situation - they pivoted their plans, and were not only insanely understanding, but recovered 95% of our belongings from the trailer and brought them home for us, including a few high ticket items like my large lithium battery I'd just installed, the inverter, and a bunch of other stuff.
The insurance situation through the rental platform got off to a very rough start - our trailer was a very niche model, and worse yet, back in the model year of our particular trailer the manufacturer only made something like 10-20 a year, so needless to say "exact replacements" were not plentiful (literally zero could be found anywhere), and the companies they hired to do the value assesments therefore decided to just compare it against a traditional "Built with twigs, bubble gum, and staples" mainstream trailer of the same year, which would be like comparing a 2009 Chevy Cavalier against a 2009 Honda S2000, to use one example - yeah, they're both cars, but they're very different cars. They were doing the RV equivalent of that, comparing our limited run quality built fibreflass clamshell camper against old mainstream junk RV's - the two things do not depreciate the same, suffice to say.
Through much debate, almost 2 months of storage they paid for at a tow truck yard, and two deeply flawed value assesments they wasted their money on, we finally came to a mostly amicable settlement - they were up against their worst enemy - an educated consumer who had a LOT of spare time on his hands lol. It took me 10 times as long as it should have to write many of the emails I sent, but I sure as heck stood my ground and justified my stance on values, which ended up with them paying more than 200% vs their initial offer when it was said and done.
Around the same time we found an insane deal on an exact replacement unit from the same manufacturer, albeit 11 years newer, and we snapped it up.
It's what we're camping in right now as I type this message, in the middle of a forest a few KM from anyone, or anything. I returned to work in September to unexpectly find all my unused vacation in "use it or loose it" status, so I snapped it up for the first 3 weeks of October, and am trying to squeeze in as much as I can in that time window lol. Honestly, it's probably a good thing, as the docs were worried I was overdoing it with the return to work as I was showing some regresssion, but living on <50% of my regular paycheque couldn't go on forever.
