 Like a lot of RV people, I've headed west for the winter. If you are too, or you're ever planning to, I'm gonna give you my tips for how to survive real desert camping and what to expect. Hey everybody, it's Robin with Creativity RV. As you can see, I'm already out boondocking in the desert, which I love. Every year around the fall-winter, I head out to the California or Nevada, Arizona area, so that I can boondock, and I love it out here. If you've never camped in the desert before, it's amazing. It's peaceful and quiet. The weather gets really great, and the stargazing is amazing. But there are some things that you have to do to be able to survive camping out here, and I'm gonna give you my best tips to do that until you what you can expect. Of course, the biggest thing if you come out before the end of November or you stay past the spring is that it gets hot out here, but I have several hacks that you can use to keep the heat down. The very first thing is when you pull into your campsite, point west. If you're like me, your rig has most of its windows on the north-hand side. So what happens when you point west is that you get this natural area of shade on the patio side of your rig, so you don't need to put out an awning or anything. You just get this big area of shade. Right now it's about 88 degrees out here, but in the shade it's 73. The second tip for surviving the heat and the desert is to take care of your refrigerator. Now, most RVs have the fridge on the opposite side from their patio, like mine is. So when I choose to point west and all of my windows are facing north, that means my refrigerator is pointing south, and so it bakes, and just heads up. If you're new to the desert, everything on the southern side of your rig is going to get warm. So don't store anything in those cabinets like chocolate chips or oil or something that can actually go bad in there. Because of this, you actually want to protect the heat that's getting to your refrigerator. When you don't do this, you can actually hear your fridge laboring, and what happens is during the day, everything will melt. If you have a freezer coming down from the freezer, it will pool, and then at night it freezes, and you cannot keep anything stored in your refrigerator for more than a few days because it just goes bad. Having to go from hot to cold all day and night, several days in a row, will just kill everything in there. What I do is when my refrigerator is pointing south in a hot climate, I cover up the outside wall with reflectix. It makes a huge difference. You can see here that I put up the reflectix with just some clips and some duct tape. If you want to go the extra step, you can actually cover that whole side with a tarp. Just make sure that you're not blocking the vents on your refrigerator because that's dangerous. The third tip for surviving the heat is that you have to put up reflectix on the entire southern side of your rig during the day or a blackout curtain. If you're in a class C or B, like I used to be, you want to separate the cab of your vehicle from the living area in your rig with like hanging blackout curtains. You can go back in my playlist and see how I did that with some command hooks. In this rig, of course, I don't have to do that, but I had a lot of windows to cover on the southern side. Putting reflectix up makes a huge difference in the heat. If you don't have that, you can also use some cardboard or even some fabric. If you tape it up there, it'll make a little bit of a difference, but reflectix is absolutely the best thing to use. My next tip is to beat the heat. You have to get ahead of the heat. Now, if you think you're going to come camp in the desert and a tank top and some flip flops, that would be wrong because you have to have good warm clothes at night and in the morning, especially if you're going to do this trick. What you want to do is open up every window, take out the reflectix and just put small fans in front of your windows so that you're blowing the cold air from outside your rig inside your rig. If you have a fantastic fan in your ceiling or something like that, that is drawing the air up through your rig and outside. So if you open the windows and use the fan, what's going to happen is that this cool air is going to rush through the entire rig and cool it off. You want to have this going all night long until you see the sun come up in the morning. Now it might be 56 degrees inside your rig, 60 degrees. A lot of people think that's too cold. Not me. All I do is put on sweats and a hoodie and I ride that out because if you do that and then when the sun comes up, you put the reflectix back in and shut those windows, it will stay cool in your rig until about one o'clock. So you are getting ahead of the heat that's going to come later on in the afternoon. The next tip for beating the heat is to have a good area outside your rig. So like I said in the beginning, when you point west, you're going to have this big automatic shadow. It is so much cooler in that shade than it is on the sunny side of your rig or even inside by the time you hit the heat in the afternoon. So my clam is automatically in the shade and inside I have a little work area, a little lounge area and a portable battery that can power a fan. And in there it is super nice and cool until the sunset. This next tip is one I never considered when I was new. If you go out to camp in the desert, you have some options. You can go out into a non-rocky area that looks nice and smooth to camp on, but those areas are going to be dustier. If you camp on an area that's rocky, it's better for the dust, but you actually have to look out for a good area to camp. You might find a good flat spot and think you're all set up and then realize that your patio and everything around you is covered in these big jagged rocks. So what I look for now is smaller, rocky areas where I can actually walk around outside without falling down or I can walk around in flip flops or like some slip on shoes without hurting my feet. Even if you have a rug out on some of these jagged, rocky areas, you're going to hurt your feet. When you camp in the desert, something insidious will creep into your RV every single day, no matter what you do. And that's dust. Look, if you live in an RV, you already know this dust will get in everywhere because we have the fans on the ceiling that suck in the air from the outside, which means dust and it comes in and settles on everything. But camping in the desert takes the dust to a whole new level. When I got here the other day, there were some windstorms. My doors were shut. My windows were shut. I checked the slide seals and everything looked great. And still I got this much dust in here. One thing I learned is that you just can dust with like a cloth that doesn't pick it up because then it just hangs out in the air. So personally, what I use, trusty handbag. And if you guys haven't used this gel stuff, I have it on my gear page. This is a goo that will pick up anything. I use that in the inside of my windows. The other thing is that if you're going to camp out in the desert and boondock, make sure that you have access to everything you need before you go out to camp. So a place to get water, dump your tanks, get groceries, propane, anything else you might need, which brings me to next week's video. If you haven't subscribed yet, please do and hit that little bell for notifications because I'm going to tell you how I prep to stay out in the desert for months without having to go back to town. And finally, if you're going to be boondocking out in the desert, make sure that you have a first aid kit and a good amount of over the counter medicine. Because if you're 30 or 45 minutes away from a town and you tear off your thumbnail, putting away a camp chair like I did one year, you want to make sure that you have the bandages to take care of that. And if you get a cold or something like that, you want to have the medicine you need on hand so you don't have to drive half an hour into town and half an hour back while you're sick. I'll tell you guys, I've been wanting to come out to the desert for months and I'm psyched to finally be here. I hope you get to experience it someday too. The stars and the sunsets and the peace and quiet are just amazing. I hope you guys are out on the road or doing something you love and I hope to see you soon. Until then, everybody have happy travels and be free.