How the Coleman RoadTrip 285 Changed My Backyard Cookouts

Two Octobers ago I hauled my 22-inch kettle out to a tailgate lot before a playoff game, and by the time I got the charcoal chimney lit in a stiff crosswind, half our group had already set up chairs with nothing to eat and nowhere to put their drinks down. I stood there fanning a half-lit pile of briquettes with a paper plate while somebody's kid asked if the burgers were ready yet. They were not. That afternoon is the whole reason I started looking seriously at a portable propane grill, and it is why a Coleman RoadTrip 285 has ridden in the back of my SUV to more places than I can count since.

Eleven seasons of backyard cooking had made me stubborn about charcoal. I like the flavor, I like the ritual, and on my own deck I still reach for the kettle most weekends. But a parking lot is not a deck. There is no table to set a chimney starter on, no shelter from wind gusting between parked trucks, and no forty-five minutes to spare before kickoff. I needed something that could go from folded-flat to cooking in under ten minutes, and the Coleman RoadTrip 285 kept coming up whenever I asked people who actually tailgate every week what they used.

I tested it at home first, on my 12 by 14 back deck, before I trusted it anywhere public. Unfolding the legs and locking the side table into place took about two minutes the first time and closer to ninety seconds by the third. The Instastart ignition caught on the first turn of the knob, which surprised me a little, since I have owned enough cheap ignition systems over the years to expect at least one dead click before flame. Not this time. All three burners lit clean, and the grate was hot enough for a real sear in about eight minutes.

What sold me wasn't the ignition, though. It was the three separately adjustable burners spread across 20,000 BTUs. On my kettle I manage heat zones by moving coals around and cracking the vents. On the Coleman I just turn a knob. I ran one side low for a batch of sausages that needed a slower finish and the other side high for burgers, and neither one touched the other's heat. For someone used to babysitting a fire, having that kind of direct control felt almost like cheating.

I went from unloading a grill to flipping the first burger in about six minutes, standing at a folding table instead of hunched over a dying chimney starter.

The real test came a few weeks later at an actual tailgate, and then again that November at a family gathering at a state park pavilion where six of us needed food before the wind and the light both went. No outlets, no charcoal disposal bin nearby, just a Coleman grill wheeled off a tailgate and set up on gravel. It handled both the same way it had on my deck: quick to light, steady across all three burners, and done cooking well before anyone got impatient. I wrote up a fuller side-by-side against the Weber Q Series after that trip, which you can read here if you want the specifics.

I have since taken the Coleman RoadTrip 285 to a lake house rental where the only cooking option was an ancient built-in gas ring nobody trusted, and to a Pop Warner football fundraiser where six volunteers fed a parking lot full of families off one folded-down grill and two propane tanks. Neither trip would have worked with my kettle. Charcoal needs time and a place to cool and dump, and a lot of the venues I actually cook at away from home don't give you either.

It is not perfect, and I want to say that plainly instead of glossing over it. The porcelain grates take some scrubbing if you let grease build up over a few trips, the side table wobbles slightly once the legs have been folded and unfolded fifty or sixty times, and it is heavier to carry fully loaded than the marketing photos make it look, closer to a two-hand lift than a one-hand grab once the propane tank is attached. None of that has stopped me from bringing it along. It just means I pack it the way I'd pack anything else that has to survive being loaded into a trunk in the dark before a 6 a.m. drive to a game.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If we were sitting at my kitchen table and you asked me straight whether the Coleman RoadTrip 285 is worth it, I'd tell you it depends on how often you cook somewhere that isn't your own backyard. If every meal you grill happens on your own patio, save the money and stick with what you've got, because a stand-up propane grill isn't going to out-flavor a kettle you already know how to run. But if you tailgate, if you cook at a rented place a few times a year, if you've ever stood in a parking lot like I did that October fighting a chimney starter while your group waited, this is the piece of gear that fixes that exact problem. I don't say that about much outdoor equipment, and I've bought plenty of it over eleven seasons that never earned a second trip out of the garage. This one has. For more on the case for owning one at all, I laid out ten specific reasons in this piece, and the full honest review with pros and cons is right here.