This past fall, I had full intentions of building a small
log cabin up on Flattop, right at the edge of Chugach State Park. The property was a total steal and the view
was worth a million bucks, but after surveying the land, shooting grades
and elevations with my old man, and meeting up several times with the
excavator, I realized the land was just too steep to be accessible by vehicles
in the winter, which is a no go for me.
So… here’s to a 5th winter
living full-time in the little Toyota motorhome in Alaska!
I have been lucky over the years to have an exorbitant amount of friends offer couches to sleep on or driveways to park in. However, I think one of the most rewarding parts to full-timing without a dedicated parking space is the creativity and
technique involved with finding places to spend the night without using
friend’s resources. It’s a cool feeling
to survive without depending on the use of anyone’s offered space… doing so truly makes
me feel like I have a “home everywhere” despite others’ perception that perhaps
I’m lost on wheels with no place to stay.
However, I’d like to thank everyone (you know who you are) in the past that have offered/shared their space with me. In 5 years I have
not paid for parking or “camping” a single night. I feel like I will do nearly anything to not
pay a dime to sleep on this earth. It
astonishes me how many people pay 40+ dollars to park their motorhome somewhere for a
night. There are so many places to not
spend a cent if you just do some research.
Here are some of my personal tips to successfully
full-timing without a dedicated parking space:
1) NEVER
sleep in the same spot 2 nights in a row.
I always move on early the next morning.
2) DON’T ARRIVE at your “spot” until late in the evening/night. If you get there at 4:00pm in the afternoon
and sit around all day, everyone will see your camper sitting there all day and
you have a much higher chance of getting “called-in.” Go watch some live music, have some coffee/tea in a coffee shop, read in the book store, dinner with friends, just don't park too early in your "spot."
3) When
you move in the morning… STAY in your camper when you leave. Don’t open the door and walk around to your
driver’s side door to drive away… this increases the odds that you will run
into conflict since there are no longer walls between you and the outside
world.
4) Sit
down, pull out a map of your city, and make a LIST of the places you can stay
and ROTATE these places. When I open my
closet door, I have a list of 70+ places I can stay written down on a paper
taped up to the inside of the door. This
means I don’t have to think about where to stay. I simply check out my list and find the
closest “spot” to where I’m currently located and there you have it, good to
go! Also, make sure to adhere to rule #1 and never stay in the same spot 2
nights in a row… in fact, I never stay in the same spot within a 2 week period
as a rule of thumb, it’s worked really well.
5) Get
a porta-potty! You can go to Cabelas, Sportsman’s Warehouse, and several other
places and buy yourself a sweet, flushing, mini-portapotty for $80. Then you literally have a bathroom in the
winter that doesn’t need plumbing and there are free places to legally and
sanitarily “dump” all around town.
There’s nothing that will get overnight camping spots shut down quicker
than someone using the parking lot or camping spot as a bathroom and leaving it
there.
6) Keep
your camper looking good! If you have
black garbage bags and foil all over your windows, NEWS-FLASH… you probably look
sketchy to most people, so clean that stuff up and make your camper look
respectable, you won’t have half the issues.
7) Go
do things OUT-OF-TOWN on the weekends. If
you’re moving around to other towns on the weekends or recreating in the woods,
that’s a few days a week where no one in the city is seeing your RV.
8) DON’T use a generator. If you have a generator running, EVERYONE
knows you are home.
Speaking of generators, one bit of advice for other
full-timers out there… trade in your generator for some solar panels and a wood
stove. Generators are annoying and they
aren’t necessary. I have one, single
deep cycle battery that powers all of my lights, TV, fridge, and can charge
appliances. This single deep cycle
battery is charged by only 60 watts of solar panels (two 30 watt panels) and
the engine’s alternator since I drive around every day. The primary battery draining feature in any
RV is the propane furnace, so if you can eliminate using the propane furnace,
you can eliminate your overall need for on-grid electricity.
That's about it folks, see you on the road!
-Timmy
