How I've lived on the road for more than 1.5 years and never camped at a Walmart.
written by: Genevieve Jahn
In September of 2015, with no road life experience other than weekend camping trips, I packed up my newly purchased 1985 Toyota Bandit Camper and left my native born home state of Florida for a cross country road trip with no end date in the foreseeable future. My first night on the road, I camped at a Savannah area RV park, to get my road feet dirty, and since that night, the Willie Rose, save for the occasional RV park day use for shower and/or wifi, has not parked at an RV park or even a Walmart in over one and a half years on the road.
That's not to say there hasn't been some really crappy (both figuratively & literally) camp spots & urban camping in parking lots in my life but there never being a night spent in a Walmart parking lot is one of my minuscule claims to even more minuscule fame and I'm keeping it!
Never settle...
If the idea of parking your happy little home and resting your road weary head under the harshly cool street lamps of one of the monstrous paved public parking lots plopped in front of a monolithic symbol of corporate America doesn't sound appealing to you, then don't do it! Just don't. This is a PSA for the vanners against Walmart camping support group: You're not alone and you don't have to give in to doing what you don't want to do. Knowing is half the battle. So take a stand, make your pledge and repeat after me...
"I will not camp in Walmart parking lots if I don't want to!"
Okay, don't you feel better? Now that that's over with, you know that whole freedom thing about road life that everyone is drawn to? Well the very definition of freedom is the power to act as one wants. My friends, freedom also means you have the power to figure out how not to do the things you don't want to do, namely sleeping in Walmart parking lots!
Finding really beautiful places to camp all the time takes time, effort and quite honestly, a good amount of hard work & dedication. Sure, every once in a blue moon, you'll stumble on a hidden gem of a boondock spot and post that gypsy heart stopping "look where I parked" geotag-less epic photo on instagram to make everyone think you effortlessly woke up like that er'day of that #vanlife but like 99.69% of the time you gots to work hard for that money shot view, whether it be finding it, getting to it or both. I honestly can't really think of a single part of life on the road that is effortless or easy. It's all hard work and to the right people, it's all so worth it. There's a reason that best things in life aren't easy and clearly Beyoncé never lived in a van, cause I feel that the look of a dirtbag vanner at sundown gives a whole new meaning to "I woke up like this”.
Plan ahead...
So by now I'm sure you're all like "thanks for the vague motivational pep talk, Genevieve, but how the hell do I do all this hard work to find camp spots that aren't Walmart?" Well, this is the meat & potatoes of it... you gotta plan ahead. However it's kinda more like that meat flavored tempeh instead of beef, in the way that there's looseness to plans in road life so planning is loose. What I learned from my event planning days that I've carried over to road life is to make plans that aren't concrete by researching your options so that when the time comes, you have the freedom to go with the flow and be all wild, free & loosey goosey without a worry in the world because your back up plan to your back up plan has a back up plan. I know, we wanderers don't really take too kindly to makin' plans but we sure do love our maps.
To be more specific, before I get on the road on a long drive stretch or once I get to a place that I'm going to be spending more than one night in, there's some planning steps I take to find the spots I'd enjoy parking overnight at and they pretty much all involve maps:
Because the prettiest spots often are remote and without cell phone service, downloading an offline Google map of an area is great if you're going to be spending a few days or more in a national public land that has no cellphone service. This allows you to search and route yourself to campgrounds, hiking trails, points of interest and businesses within the saved offline map area, even when you don't have service. I use the Google Maps iPhone app as my go-to for everything mapping & navigating and I'll speak more to the magic of Google Maps throughout this blog entry but, yeah, the app pretty much walks you through the process of downloading offline maps. Just click the three lines at the upper left corner of your Google Maps app and you'll see the "Offline areas" option on the slide out menu.
Turn your Google Maps to "Satellite" view and look for places that look cool to park. I search for dirt roads and/or ohv trails to park off of roadways that I'm traveling on during long driving stretches, especially when I'm getting too tired to drive. You may have to settle for a pullout but more often then not you can follow waterways to really sweet waterfront camping spots or even river access points and roadways to off-road & forest access roads.
Freecampsites.net is a great way to find free campsites and some that aren't free but still great, if you're in the right areas (it's not so great in socal & on the east coast). Freecampsites.net has also found me and some girlfriends at a dilapidated old casino/flea market with a muddy dirt lot and a bunch of garbage cans with human feces in them off a mountain highway in Wyoming. You can't win em all with the quick and easy database search but you can read the comments from others who have been there before, which I highly suggest if you don't have a 4wd vehicle because many of the better free campsites involve navigating some gnarly roads and you'll want to know what road conditions to expect when pulling in after dark. I'll often give myself a few freecampsites.net options along my route (and save the gps coordinates in my Google Maps app) so I have more options down the road if I feel like getting more miles under my belt before hitting the hay or the first spot isn't safe or accessible.
Y'all know that BLM & National Forests are pretty much open dispersed free camping areas, right? If you didn't know that, I have no words for you. If you did know that, please also know that you can download most public lands maps in PDF to your iBooks app on your iPhone. Then you save trees and have digital maps to view on your phone when you are a dummy and didn't do that whole downloading the offline Google Map thing.
Have a photographic memory...
Just kidding. No, but really, remember all those spots you see photos of. Sounds hard, huh? Well, with a little bit of organizational effort you can rely on the photographic memory of the electronic devices you pretty much have on you all the time. Yay technology! So, here's how my short-term memory deficient brain remembers photographically:
Screenshot & organize by geographic albums. I have photo albums in my iPhone for each state I have or hope to travel to. Every time I see an instagram post, read a blog, look through a magazine or online periodical or just happen upon a dope looking spot to park it and camp, I take a picture or screenshot of the location and save the photo to its respective state album on my phone. So when I go to Utah, I can pull up the Utah photo album and “voila!” there's a whole bunch of rad, hand selected Utah locations I can visit and add to my Google Maps, either on the fly with my iPhone or by saving it to my road trip map while using my laptop, during times when I have wifi access.
Speaking of my road trip map, I created a private Google map years ago, since living on the road was always a dream for me. I started by adding all the US National Parks and over the years, I’ve added more and more locations to my user created map. The cool thing about this map, I worked on for so long, is that I can access it from my phone with the Google Maps app and have all those locations pop up on my gps navigational map while I’m out traveling. I don’t even have to look for places because they are all right there in the map on my phone!
The only other campsite (and other points of interest) finding app that I occasionally use is Roadtrippers, along with their facebook and website/blog. The app itself allows you to search for campgrounds near you and has visually stunning and well-documented reviews & photos of the location, along with a ton of other info you would nee to camp there. The roadblock for Roadtrippers, for me, is that the campsites & campgrounds in their database are more often than not pretty popular and well-known spots that one could easily find by googling the name of the area and “camping”. However, if you’re the kind of van-lifer that splurges on a hotel, inn, Airbnb or hostel night, when the weather conditions are less than optimal or you’re just feelin’ fancy like that, Roadtrippers has some detailed options for sleeping accommodation searches, including “Unique Stays”, which is how I came across La Loma Del Chivo, the hostel & experimental community that became the first place to capture my heart & soul on the road. Roadtrippers is also great for finding bazaar roadside attractions, abandoned properties, instagram drool worthy photo opps that everyone gets right from their car, hiking trails, natural points of interest and so much more. If you use the Roadtrippers app, I highly suggest following the Roadtrippers facebook page. They keep the feed stocked with enticing click throughs to their blog, where they will post actual road trip writing entries, with detailed notes, striking photos and quick clicks to save any or all of the road trip destinations to your personal Roadtrippers map. This was really helpful and inspiring while I was still working long hours at a computer, trying to amp up for an epic road trip, in that it tossed a few epic locations on my radar initially.
Make friends...
You don’t have to be super social or the life of the party but if you live on the road for any extended period of time, you better be friendly. Being friendly helps you make friends, and when you are solo, especially if you are a lady, making friends will most often lead to you getting something in return for your general friendliness and kindness. In regards to finding camp spots:
Make nice with the locals. This is real easy and very pleasant to do in small towns, which is where I prefer to spend most of my time on the road, and quite often don’t even have Walmarts. Please buy local as you travel; co-ops, markets, coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, local businesses and galleries, these are all places you will be going as you travel through small towns & cities. Locals working in these businesses will often be intrigued by your travels and start asking questions. This gives you an easy in to ask questions about camping spots in the area. If you are real friendly and really get chatting, it might even lead to you getting to park on someone’s private property, having a free shower and/or a warm home-cooked meal. One thing is for sure, you’ll have at least one new friend by the end of the interaction and that’s the best thing to get for free.
Use & build your social networks. Instagram is surely the way most van lifers connect or stay connected while traveling. I’ve followed geotags of locations that I am traveling through to meet other vanners that posted photos in that location. Leave comments & send a DM without sounding like a stalker. Quite often, all it takes is saying that you also live in a van and are in the same area. Facebook is something I personally prefer to keep personal and private to family, friends and people that I have met on the road & want to keep in touch with, so I feel very comfortable posting my location and asking friends for suggestions of camp spots. Hell, I’m usually hoping that someone else is nearby to road fam it with. Tinder, yes I am on Tinder, is most often a last resort for making friends the electronic way. It’s like finding a really dirty needle in a haystack to find other dirtbag vanners on Tinder but way more of us use it than you’d expect and I’ve met some really magical, talented and free spirited humans through Tinder. Even if you don’t want to do the Tinder meetup, you can surely ask for suggestions of that traveler’s or local cutie’s favorite local camp spots.
Studies in cultural immersion. Some people dip their feet into the van life culture when, for me, its been highly enriching to my lifestyle to go balls deep into the road life culture itself, primarily the dirtbag climbing culture. The first group of solo travelers I met were rock climbing dirtbags, and ever since that first magical winter in Joshua Tree, I’ve had a network of solid homies floating around the country, with a wealth of knowledge on where to camp in climbing destinations and their home states. I’ve also kept involved in the van life culture within the Instagram content provider segment, these are also friendships I cherish and have utilized in word of mouth camping location acquiring.
Ask for forgiveness, not permission...
Making friends on the road also lends to adapting your practices through seeing how others operate while living on the road. I spent this last summer traveling with a bad-ass solo vanner lady that practiced the “ask for forgiveness, not permission” principal which I quickly adopted.
There's a lot of irony to the ebb & flow of life on the road. Like, how writing this blog was unplanned and being inspired to fit in writing, late on a town day of maximizing the only decent wifi access, so half of it has been written in a McDonald’s parking lot (the best 24 hour free wifi in Moab). Don’t be disheartened van life romanticizers, I decided to go offline and off the grid to finish up this blog writing endeavor in a much more inspiring scenic remote desert area off a 4wd road near Canyonlands National Park, surrounded by majestic red rock towers and the Colorado River. Any who, sometimes all the planning and research in the world will still leave you flying by the seat of your pants in finding a nightly camp spot for your mobile home. My suggestion? Park now and ask for forgiveness later.
Use common sense and a decent sense of respect when applying this principal to your last minute boon docking:
Don’t trespass onto posted private property.
Leave no trace when you camp anywhere, all of the time, but keep your van home spreading to a minimum when stealth camping.
Keep it stealthy! Be as quiet as possible. This means both sound & light pollution.
Only start a fire if there is a previously used fire circle at the location and if doing so wouldn’t draw any attention or break any area fire restrictions.
If urban boondocking, do everything you can to make your van appear as if it is parked without anyone inside of it. Many cities have laws against sleeping in your vehicle. If you can’t avoid breaking this law…
Avoid making yourself a law enforcement issue and should you have an interaction with law enforcement, don’t be a dick and don’t be doing anything else illegal. You don’t want to get a heavy fine or a night in jail slapped on your ass all because you needed to park in three hour parking for three days during a pagan fertility festival to use the only good wifi in a small Colorado mountain town (that actually happened, sans law enforcement interaction) and didn’t be friendly in asking for forgiveness.
Ultimately, if you decide to live in your vehicle for an extended period of time, the places you go are up to you. If you have a self-entitled attitude and expect everything to fall in your lap then you won’t reap the nightly camping reward of not settling, planning ahead, research, friendliness and good intentions that it takes to wake up in beautiful places rather than a Walmart parking lot.
It’s a big beautiful world out there that is accessible by our roadways, go forth van friends and see something other than the parking lots of Walmarts!