 I live full-time in an RV and I have for six years and I almost always a boondock and today I wanted to tell you guys about it because it literally changed my life for the better. Happy Sunday birdwatchers! It's Robin with Creativity RV. I hope you're all doing well out there. As you can see I'm out in the middle of nowhere boondocking. Now that means I am staying on public land in my RV usually for free. Now a lot of people don't know about this so if this is a new concept for you you're not alone. I didn't know about it until I stumbled across it on YouTube one day and saw this solo female RVer driving her RV out into the desert and I was thinking what is she doing? Where is she going? And then when she set up camp I thought is that legal? There are a million of us out here and if you haven't heard about this life it might be because most of us keep to ourselves and we go into a town and we get supplies, we do what we need to do like everybody else and then we go home. But home for us is usually down a dirt road in the National Forest or in the desert or in Army Corps of Engineer land all kinds of places and we set up camp and we can usually stay up to two weeks there for free. Now boondogging sounds great and it may sound great that it's free but there are things that go into it. So today I'm going to break it all down for you and tell you why, how and where I boondog. Let's start with a couple of definitions because I think some of them can be a little bit confusing. So what I'm doing right now in my air stream on Bureau of Land Management land is boondogging. Boondogging means that you're going out and camping usually in public areas without an RV park kind of a hookup. So you don't have a water connection, you don't have an electrical connection, you don't have a sewer connection, there are no trash cans, you have to be completely self-sufficient. So there is some work that goes into it. So when I say boondogging on public lands is free, it is free to camp here but most of us have to make an investment into an RV that we can live in full-time that supplies us with all the power that we need, the water that we need and the ability to pack out all of our trash until we get back to civilization. You may also have heard the term primitive camping. Primitive camping is just like boondogging except that when you go into the Bureau of Land Management website BLM.gov and you read about areas where you can go recreate for free which means camp, they call it primitive camping. To them primitive camping again means camping with no hookup and what they're basically telling you is that you have to be self-sufficient. The next term you might see is something called dispersed camping. Dispersed camping is the same thing except that it's basically boondogging on national forest land. So if you go to the National Forest website where you can see all the places that you can camp totally legal for free usually up to about 14 days you're going to see that they call this dispersed camping not to make it more confusing. So boondogging, primitive camping, dispersed camping all the same thing then you're going to see a term called dry camping. Now a lot of people as you can imagine start to use these terms interchangeably but dry camping is a little bit different. You're not necessarily out in the middle of nowhere maybe you're at a national forest campground where you have a reservation and you pull into a spot and you're there dry camping without an electrical hookup without water at your site without sewer at your site. You might have access to a water spigot or a trash can or a dump site every campground is different but most people consider that dry camping. Now these probably shouldn't be confused with stealth camping which a lot of people do. People are living in their RVs or vans in cities a lot of times because they can't afford the rent or because they're just traveling through and they want to stay in their house they don't want to stay in a hotel. Now this is frowned upon in some jurisdictions so they call it stealth camping because you usually want to be a little bit quiet inside so people don't call and say there's some vagrant sleeping on the street in front of their house and then you're going to hear people talk about overnight camping and overnight parking. That's like what you do at a harvest host. When you go to visit one of the great hosts have an experience and stay the night in your own rig usually without a hookup. That's the same thing as if you went to a Walmart or a truck stop or a rest area. These are all places where you can overnight camp or overnight park. They really are the same thing except that. People used to say overnight camping a lot and then the word camping got kind of a stigma because of people that were like living in encampments on city blocks or in Walmart parking lots and so a lot of these entities want you to know that you're not supposed to camp. Like if you go to a rest area for example you may see something that says no camping. Well what that means is they don't want you putting out your camp chairs and putting out your grill and setting up for days at a time but if you go to the state websites then it will tell you that they want you to be safe that you need to pull over and you can stay to get rest so you're safe to get back on the road so overnight parking is just fine and by the way if you haven't subscribed to my blog yet creativity RV.com I do have a blog post that has leaks to every single United States rules for rest areas and where they are. Now that seems like a lot of definitions right well maybe it's because there's so much camping opportunity in the United States. Did you know that over 50% of this country is public land and if you go into any of those government websites they're going to say that one of the purposes of public land is recreation and that's us. Now let me tell you how boondocking literally changed my life. I was living in the corporate world and was trying to find a way out so that I could be a writer and a painter which is what I was meant to do but I couldn't figure out a way to do that and pay the bills and then I stumbled across boondocking RV life and I crunched the numbers and I realized that if I boondocked I could make a living as a writer. Now it took a couple of years of planning it's not like I fell over into an RV and was able to do this I wasn't. I quit that corporate job took a part-time job and then worked the other part of the time creating some kind of a mobile income for myself paid off all my debt and saved up for a rig that I could buy so I wouldn't have a payment that's me everybody's different but once I did that I discovered that my expenses were really low so the why for me is that boondocking allowed me to live the life that I wanted to live without having to be tethered to a job in one location. There are so many opportunities out there for people to work from the road now it's crazy so 10 years ago this wasn't possible for a lot of us but now it is. Now let me tell you how I do it. First of all I have a great boondocking power system I just had one installed inside of the airstream from battle born and dragonflight energy and so when I'm out here in the middle of nowhere like I am today and you can see it's cloudy outside and raining it's okay. I have enough power stored in here that I can work on my big computer and I can do everything that I need to do including running my starlink which is right there and work remotely just like anybody else. It is an investment to have that kind of a system put in but for me I'm saving so much on rent that it's worth it. The other big three things you have to worry about are water trash and sewer and it takes some time to get into the groove. I know now after a few years exactly how much water it takes me to shower and do dishes and how long I can camp out in the wilderness without having to go get more water and dump my takes but the big problem a lot of the time is trash because there aren't trash cans just sitting around here so if you're going to accumulate a lot of trash over the two weeks your house and your car are going to be full of stinky bags so you have to learn some strategies to not have that much trash. I'm in a wilderness area in Colorado and if I walk outside it looks like I'm in the Alps. This is an absolutely beautiful area but right down the hill is a town and so I have a signal and I'm really only about 15 minutes from a store. Now the first time I camped here I found this spot on the Bureau of Land Management website or BLM.gov where if you go in then you can drill down by state and by area and see all of the places. You can also do that with the National Forest website but there are a lot of apps and programs now that will help you find places just like this. I like RV Trip Wizard if I'm trying to stay in a campground or an RV park I'll put the link for that below. I like Harvest Hosts because I take advantage of other host locations while I'm driving from one place to another all year long it's my favorite thing in the whole world and then to find boondocking places I usually use Campendian and I Overlander. And where can you boondock? Well some places are better than others like I said more than half of the country is available for recreation but most of it is on the west coast. In fact Nevada has more public land than any other state but if you get over to like Maine or Pennsylvania it does get a little bit harder to find big areas of public land where you can boondock. I'm actually headed there for the first time this year and so I'll let you guys know how it goes for me but I know I'm going to have to stay probably at a few more campgrounds or RV parks when I head east. Luckily though there are Harvest House all over the place I'm going to maple tree farms and wineries and go-kart places and car museums. Can't wait it makes my travel so much more fun and I know some of you are wondering what it's like to be out here by myself in the wilderness. Well you know what I really love it. It's not a lot different than being solo in real life. My life looks just like it did then. I wake up I take a shower I make breakfast I go to work and then I get to go sit outside but my backyard is just fabulous and if I want to see other people it's really no big deal. I camp with other people in groups of people all the time but then when I want to split off and be by myself I can and unlike in an RV park I don't feel like I'm in a fishbowl. I'm literally surrounded by trees and mountains right here. I don't see another person and that's the way I personally like it. And one of the most common questions I get is do you feel safe or are you safe out there? Aren't you scared? I feel safe and I am not usually scared. Now I try and be really aware of my surroundings but that's the same for me here as it would be if I still lived in a city and I share my location all the time with about four people that can always see where I am and they check in on me and I'm ready to defend myself in here if I need to just like I would if I were walking down a city street or if I were in an apartment. And look I didn't grow up doing this I had never been in an RV until I bought one flew out to pick it up and started living in it full-time and I figured it all out and again that was six years ago and I absolutely love it. I don't see myself going off the road anytime soon. I mean my feeling is life is short and there's so much to do and so much to go see and for me there's no better way to do that than boondocking across the country and an RV. And seriously I pinch myself every time I go outside in the morning and the birds are singing and I've got this view. I am so lucky that I stumbled onto this life. If I weren't here I'd probably still be in some corporate grind you know just trying to pay the mortgage. Feeling like I was dying just a little bit more each night sitting on the couch waiting to go back to work the next day. This is a completely different life and it's available for you just like it was available for me. I hope you guys found this video helpful. If you did please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing. I'll see you guys all next week with an all new video. Until then everybody out there have happy travels and be free.