![]() ![]() ![]() There are some who get furious every time I write about this. Now before I end this post let me say that I am not against campgrounds. When Marianne and her husband are not on the road themselves, they personally offer overnight parking for RVers (members as well as non-members) passing through their hometown of Elora, Ontario, Canada. It’s a great site, run by folks who understand RVers and boondockers. “Only thing you can`t do without a membership is contact fellow members, write recommendations for each other, or participate in the forums.” “Anyone can go onto the website and see all the details of every listing before joining – so you know exactly what you`re going to get,” she says. You can check out a lot before signing up for a membership Single women have told us they feel much more secure parked with our hosts than they do in a retail parking lot.” They can provide advice about their area, lend a tool if you need one, suggest the best local places to shop, eat, buy fuel, and offer sage advice to new RVers. “Many of our hosts offer electric, water, and occasionally even an RV dump as well. “Many of our members have reported that the social element of meeting fellow members is as important as the free parking,” says three time Roadtrek-owner Marianne Edwards, who co-founded the site with her husband. For full access to that site, they charge $20 a year if you will offer free boondocking on your property, $25 a year if you don’t. The view may be of amber waves of grain or of the McDonald’s parking lot… but it will be a free place to park where you don’t have to worry about idling truck engines, security, or that dreaded knock on the window at 2 AM. ![]() Through the website, you can connect with other RVers who have a location for you to dry camp for the night it might be in their driveway or a field on their farm. The very excellent Boondockers Welcome website is devoted to just that. We’ve written before about the Free Overnight Parking wesbite.īut here, I think, is an even cooler resourse – a network of RV owners who welcome boondockers to spend the night on their property. And, of course, there are places like Cabellas, Cracker Barrel, Wal-Mart and other businesses that welcome boondockers like casinos and truck stops. In the morning, there is the cafeteria to stay in. Others have shared with us how hospitals are also good places to boondock. They directed us to the parking lot of the town park and baseball diamond. In a small town in central Nebraska, we asked the local police where we could overnight. We asked and received permission for both. A week or so before that, we overnighted in a parking lot of a ski resort in Minnesota. A couple of weeks ago in Ludington, MI, we slept in the parking lot of a car ferry that we had booked passage on the next day to cross Lake Michigan. We have stayed before in parking lots like this. I doubt whether anyone would have noticed. The hotel manager gave us permission.Ĭould we have done so without permission? Probably. We boondocked in the parking lot because we arrived a day early and our room was not ready. The whole team is staying at a hotel in Germantown outside of Memphis and we, too, have a room booked for most of the week. ![]() Our eight-year-old grandson, Jacob, is on the team and we will be cheering him on. In this case, we are down in Memphs with our son and his family to watch the Dizzy Dean Little League team he coaches play in the World Series. Jennifer and I always get permission first. It doesn’t draw attention to itself and it fits right in with the mother vehicles in a parking lot. A Class B like our Roadtrek is basically a very stylish van. Or even those boxy, bloated Class Cs and B-plusses. It is not like those Class A skyscraper-on-wheels accompanied by a towed vehicle. Let me say right now that such boondocking is controversial.S ome RVers do this regularly, albeit clandestinely. We also used a small oscillating fan we plugged into an AC outlet. Then we opened the widows, opened the roof vent and turned on the Fantastic Fan. It got so cold we turned it off a little after midnight. We fired up the Etrek air conditioner and let it run a couple of hours. The outside temperature barely dipped below 80. It was typically hot, as it always is in late July in the south. We parked in an out-of -the-way spot in our Roadtrek Etrek. Indeed, for Jennifer and I, that is our favorite place to be.Īs I write this, we just spend a night boondocking in the parking lot of a hotel near Memphis, TN. When we talk about boondocking in an RV, we usually mean dry camping, off the grid camping in out of the way, wilderness areas, far from civilization and deep in the boonies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |