A new RVer comments on his free camping experiences He left this message on a bulletin board about boondocking. (Oct., 2000) I just finished skimming through the first 1000 posts, just joined the club and wanted to get a feel for the trends. I noted several comments on Wall Mart, Flying J and others who allow RV`s to spend the night and related those to a number of articles in newspapers and magazines reporting how campground operators were lobying their municipal authorities to put a stop to the practice. We started camping in the summer of '99 and spent our first winter in Florida, Texas, Arizona and California. Having spent a tidy sum to join three different affiliate clubs we certainly do not object to renting space from campgrounds. But when the sun starts to set and we are simply going from point A to point B, it sure is nice not to have to go 20, 30, 40 or 50 miles off the Interstate to get to a campground. We used Wall Marts, Flying J`s, Cracker Barrels and K Marts in all of the above states and were quite comfortable and secure in all of our stays but one, in Houston Tex., the only one where we were the only unit on the lot. But the security golf cart took a shine to us so it worked out fine. Most nights, we would be amongst three to ten RVs in the lot. We always checked in with Security or the store to make sure they had no objections. In short, we did not stay in these lots to save the six or ten dollars a campground would have charged us, we just did not need all their amenities and facilities and all of our parking lots were seconds off our highway. Never once did we see any sort of litter left behind by campers in fact we saw several campers pick up thrash and take it to the bins on their nightly walk arounds. So park operators, get real and stop belly aching about your lost revenue. Perhaps if operators that are in close proximity to Interstates and not affiliated with any of the clubs charged a reasonable five or six dollars for a dry campground lot they would indeed stamp out parking lot camping. At twenty five or thirty dollars a pop they are dreaming.
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