Site Selection 101

Deciding where to park Moby has turned us into parking connoisseurs.  Doesn’t that sound glamorous?  More than 3 months on the road has honed our site selection capability.  We now have a very specific point of view on all things RV parking related. But first some RV basics.  RV’s need 3 things: power, water and sewer access.  It’s worth a little up-front understanding of how to obtain these necessities before discussing RV real estate.

Power can be acquired via a power cord, your batteries or a generator.  If your power comes from a power cord (plug), you need to know how many amps you are pulling.  Generally, RV sites with power offer either 30 or 50 amps.  30 amp lets you run most things but if you run them all together you will pop a circuit.  50 amp lets you wallow in electrical abundance. If your power comes from the battery you need to be thoughtful about how you use power.  Use it unwisely and you will run out of power, waking up with melted ice cream in the freezer.  And battery doesn’t give you enough juice to run the heavy hitters, namely the microwave and A/C.  The batteries can be charged one of three ways.  Driving, turning on the generator and via solar panel (we had 2 installed during our stop in Salt Lake City). Finally, you can get power by running the on-board generator.  This gives you an all access electric pass – but is noisy and a small environmental disaster (a gas-powered motor).  Following me?  This whole adventure is like Power Plant 101.  Ah, and under almost no circumstance is a hairdryer helpful to our power situation.  So, if you see pictures of me with bad hair, don’t judge.

Water is…. water.  You get it one way, through a hose attached to a spigot.  If we are at an RV site with water, then life is simple.  If our site doesn’t have water, we rely on the water tank – Moby has a 72-gallon capacity tank.   But you can only rely on your tank if you filled it in the first place!  We often camp at places without water access and are getting good at planning water acquisition and consumption down to the last gallon.

Last but not least, sewer.  Let me keep this brief by saying, what comes in, must also go out.  That includes both gray water (sink/shower) and black water (a la toilette – saying it in French makes it sound better, oui?).  This can get stored in onboard tanks (2 for gray, 2 for black) or go into an onsite sewer if our site has one.  As careful as we have gotten metering our fresh water supply – we watch our sewer tank levels like a hawk!  I will go into no further detail here – I think about black water as little as possible. 

Now that we have covered the 3 basic requirements of RV living, let’s move on to site selection.

Site selection starts with location but is influenced by services.  Services for us generally amounts to laundry, grocery and internet.  It turns out I have taken all three for granted my whole life.  Grocery, no problem, the Whole Foods is 2 miles from my house. Internet, huh, you have to think about that?  Isn’t it everywhere?  Laundry, God I love my machines – I just didn’t know how much until now.  These service dependencies mean you really can’t plan a site in isolation.  That pretty state park in Wyoming…it might be pretty but if you haven’t seen a washing machine for a week – you aren’t going to see one at that pretty state park either.  Better to stay in the very unattractive RV park in town near a laundromat.  Starting to sound like work?  Some days….

RV sites generally fall into 3 categories: full service to no service.  But, ironically, we have generally found site desirability to follow the inverse order.  No service = high desirability.  Full service = low desirability.  In order of desirability the options are as follows:

Boondocking

Boondocking is the art of free camping – or in our case, RV parking.  People boondock in all sorts of places – from Walmart parking lots to federal land to random pullouts on the side of the road.  Some of it is legal, some isn’t. None of this style camping provides access to power/water/sewer.  We have boondocked about a dozen times and plan to do it much more in the future.  Our boondock sites have fallen into two categories.  One is on BLM land. The BLM, or Bureau of Land Management, maintains millions of acres of federal property, primarily in the West.  It governs 1/8^th of the country’s landmass.  Most of that land is land the original homesteaders didn’t want – or land repurchased by the government after the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression (of course this was after we snatched it from the original locals).  Today it is managed for public use to include grazing, mineral extraction, conservation and recreation.  It is perfectly legal to camp on most of it.  BLM sites are easy to find with modern GPS.  You just search the internet for recommended “dispersed camping” near you and plug the coordinates into Google (assuming you have access!).  Our favorite site thus far was on a butte at Teddy Roosevelt NP, gorgeous.

The second type of boondocking we like is with Harvest Hosts.  This is a network primarily composed of farms and wineries that allow RV’s to park for a night or two.  You don’t receive services, but you get a free, quiet place to park.  There is a general expectation that you spend some money with the host but that hasn’t been difficult at the farms we have visited – it is wonderful having reasonably priced fresh produce at hand!  That said, the wineries can be a bit more challenging – we aren’t talking about Wine Spectator listings.  If we give you a bottle of wine in the next year, treat that bottle with some amount of suspicion 😉.  A recent favorite Harvest Host was a bison farm/winery in Iowa.  You didn’t know those things went together did you?! The night we camped out back they had a dinner and jazz night in their beautiful old barn.  A bottle of decent wine, 2 sodas, 4 bison burgers and 2 ½ hours of great music for a whopping $50!  And mind you we were in the middle of nowhere!

State/National Parks

State parks tie with boondocking sites for our favorite.  They are typically inexpensive (average $25/night), well maintained and most parks have electric hook ups in each site with a central dump/water station.  State parks are generally plentiful and nearish to many of the sites we want to see.  And many of them are quite beautiful or interesting in their own right.  One site in Nebraska was perched on the edge of the Missouri river, another one in Idaho was near Yellowstone overlooking a pretty fishing spot popular with moose at dawn and dusk (photo below). Imagine, waking up to that for the grand price of $30 a night!

National parks rank slightly below state parks for services but rank high for location.  Many of these sites amount to a partial boondock.  No services on your site, but access to water/a dump station.  If it is sunny and our solar is cranking out power, these sites are a boon!  The scenery is lovely, fellow campers generally in good humor and most of these have an amphitheater on site for nightly ranger talks.  That and if you are an early morning hiker you can get to the trailhead faster than everyone else thereby avoiding humans.  After all we aren’t visiting parks for the humans…!

RV Parks

And now for our least favorite category.  Call this the “necessary evil” category.  RV parks run the gamut from parking lot to kitschy “resort” to nicely maintained, family owned operations.  Most of them come equipped with full hookups in each site.  Most have laundry facilities, and some boast additional amenities like pools or mini golf. I find most RV parks mildly bewildering on several levels. The first head scratcher for me is why anyone would choose to vacation in an RV park.  I don’t mean that as an expression of economic elitism, these places are the most expensive places we park.  I just found one in Massachusetts for $100/night – say what?!  Needless to say, I kept looking.  I can see using them as a base camp for exploring but I can’t see going to one as a destination.  The second head scratcher is sort of the inverse of my first point – and that is why some people write scathing online reviews of RV parks.  These are RV parks – not the Ritz Carleton.  Honestly some of the reviews are too funny.  The best ones are the ones that complain about sites spaced too closely together.  They are ALL spaced too closely, it is an RV park, close parking is part of the definition – expect about as much privacy as the YMCA locker room!  Still they serve a purpose.  We have generally found the staff at RV parks to be friendly and accommodating and having a site with full hookups is nice.  I searched our archives for a “typical” RV park photo, but as you can imagine I don’t generally rush to grab my camera in an RV park. I did take a photo at a recent park in New Hampshire – but mostly because it was a unique park! The RV sites were more akin to those in a state park. Ours was surrounded by trees golden with fall. So pretty!

At the end of the day we have been grateful for almost all of our RV sites. Each one comes with its own charms (or at least a good laugh) and the changing scenery is always interesting.  Nothing like opening your curtains in the morning. Sometimes you see another RV 5 feet away, sometimes you see the sun rising over open prairie.  Either way, the coffee still tastes good and the day’s adventure beckons.