When I met up for dinner with my good friend Caroline the other night, we met up at one of the San Diego area Costco Membership Warehouse locations to do a little shopping before dinner. One of the products we encountered in the Costco that just made us laugh was from Jimmy Buffet’s line of merchandise branded as the Margaritaville Tailgate Grill. Now it’s not unusual to see a small portable barbecue grill being sold for the purposes of tailgating, but what makes this one unique is that you can actually mount this one your vehicle if it has a standard trailer hitch connector.

Now you can actually always have your portable grill attached to your vehicle and take it wherever you go. It seems like an incredibly funny concept to me that anyone would want to mount a portable grill to their vehicle but if you do a lot of tailgating or camping out with your truck or SUV, then it may be the perfect item for you. I can see it being handy when you’re actually using it, but I would be concerned with nosy people seeing the grill on the back end of the vehicle while you’re shopping somewhere and just having to touch and look at it. I would not be a big fan of that if I were to have such a grill attached to my vehicle.

According to the product specs, the grill is a fairly good size and also from the actual unit on display in the Costco. It apparently has 352 square inches of cooking space, which they say is enough room to accommodate 20 hamburgers at once. The grill is 20,000 BTU propane fueled grill (you need to add on a one pound propane tank which is not included). It also apparently comes with fold down trays to hold condiments and things while your grilling, hooks to hold grilling tools, and legs so that the unit can be used as a tabletop grill as well. That must be how you can circumvent people from checking out the grill while you’re shopping and not grilling, by detaching it from the swing arm mount that is included.

And to top it all off, Costco also had a portable Margaritaville Frozen Drink maker, or in other words a fancy battery powered blender too. The blender is powered by an 18 volt rechargeable Ni-Cad battery which resembles the kind of batteries used to supply power to industrial power tools. So you can bring the bar with you when you grilling out in the parking lot of some sporting event stadium or the woods, or even the beach. Maybe it’s the ultimate tailgating experience, or hell it’s just an expensive way to show off. The grill will set you back about $400 and add another $300 for the battery powered blender. Not exactly a small amount of chump change to say you’ve got a barbecue grill attached to your vehicle and the world’s fanciest battery powered blender to make Margaritas anywhere power cords can’t reach.

Since Costco’s website doesn’t feature the products, I’ve found them on Amazon instead if you’d like to check out both the tailgate grill (click here) and/or the battery powered blender (click here). If anything, it makes for amusing reading to see the product specs on both “toys.”

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