how to find a place to sleep

in

Let me tell you what sucks: Hearing a knock on the window after midnight and some uniformed stooge telling you to leave. Sometimes they’re nice and tell you where you can find parking a few miles down the road; other times (as in with the sheriff at Cougar Mountain outside Bellevue, Washington), they’ll just tell you, “I dunno.” Like, dude, you just woke me up out of a dead sleep and now you expect me to drive a 7,500-lb. vehicle? Isn’t that more dangerous than whatever threat I posed as an unconscious person in your parking lot?

Ugh. Don’t get me up on my soapbox about wasted parking spots and unwarranted discrimination against travelers. Instead, here’s a concise list of places you can reliably stay for free:

  • iOverlander is essential.

  • Any Bureau of Land Management land, like National Forests, is fair game

  • City parks and churches — but usually only in small towns

  • Kind of uncomfortable but gets the job done: rest areas, casinos, truck stops, big box stores (Wal-Mart in particular), malls

  • Kind of a gamble, but if you find a good one, you’re golden: trailheads, park and rides, and quiet side streets. Google Maps satellite view is a godsend.

And here are a few golden nuggets of wisdom:

  • Pay attention to signs. If they say no overnight parking, they mean it.

  • Look for other vans/RVers.

  • You’re gonna want a flat spot. This tends to be an issue with on-street parking, since roads are usually crowned.

  • Heat can be a problem, even with fans and mosquito netting… hence why we’re posting up in Seattle for the next few weeks.

A note about state and national parks: Sometimes you get lucky, but usually it’s not worth the gamble. State parks have been pretty much a no-go in our experience. With national parks, on the other hand, there’s been some flexibility. We had no problems at all parking overnight in day-use areas in the Great Smoky Mountains, but we were also there during quarantine. At Yellowstone, we stealth-camped in the parking lot for a hotel. The thing about stealth camping is that you gotta get in late and get out early.

I think when we got started, we thought all our spots were gonna be like these:

But in reality, sometimes you just gotta park and sleep. It’s just like anything else — you have to be grateful when it goes well and optimistic when it doesn’t.