When You Don't Live on a Schedule... You Lose Track of the Calendar.

One of the potholes you learn to skirt around is... losing track of those days. ;) NOT realizing the upcoming weekend is Memorial day, we'd intended to leave this camp today... uh ... that would be something along the lines of ... DOH!

We'll hang here for another few days stretching the time limit they allow :) and pull out Monday or Tuesday.

But that's OK... 'cause down in Bishop, this is the week of Mule Days. It would be a foolish thing to be right here and not go see a bunch of people who have a questionable love affair with Mules...

Now... here's the deal. I'm one of those one time busters that just don't get along well with mules... Best I can tell, I believe it's an ego thing...

When I'm dealing, up close and personal with a critter... I like for the smarter one to be... ME! When you're dealing with Mules... it's just too often that they've got the advantage, and that's just "something my vanity won't abide!" :)

I learned a long while back to just keep to horses and... a few dogs.

Come next week we'll be entering into a short period that likely will require more frequent moving of our camp. I've been wanting to go back up the coast a ways. The problem is, for the most part it's a costly enterprise.

The consequence is, though un-willing to NOT travel the coast, we have to do it fairly quickly and then duck back out to affordable Camp Lodging further inland.

Boondocking is mostly non-existent along the coast. If you're bold, and Lucky, you can "stealth" it here and there but relaxed and accessible boondock camps ON the coast are few and far between, if they even exist any more. We've not been successful in locating them... at least not for our med. sized rig.

Bold or not... pushing a rig that's nearly 50' long with a big red Motorcycle strapped to the truck... it's kinda hard for us to go un-noticed trying to overnight in some parking lot. ;)

There's no shortage of campgrounds all along the coast. That's not our difficulty. The thing is, those camps are pretty much for folks that have no problem paying near a motel bill for a parking place. They are pricey...

Prohibitively so in California where dry camping in the State Parks System often exceeds the already high price of a full hookup, belly to butt in a private RV campground... So for us those are out.

A thousand bucks a month or so to RV Park it up the coast is NOT gonna happen!

Once into Oregon the costs decline, as much as 30%... but they still remain high enough that we can usually only afford to remain along the coast for a couple of weeks. Then we retreat inland where we can find a wider selection of either non-inflated FS camps or straight up RV Boondock/Dispersed campsites.

The difference 'tween $24 a night and up along the coast (almost no fed camps)... and the Free to $2.50 we've been paying :) for most of the past nearly three months or is a non-affordable difference.

For now I'm hunting county park locations for overnights and maybe a touch longer... as near to the coast as possible... but even those often exceed our budget lately...I think I'm getting squeaky cheap in my old age ;)

Among the many sites we use when we have a need to find an organized campground are these two;
   *Oregon Coastal Campgrounds
   *Free Campgrounds

If we can't locate any new, affordable camps along Hwy 101... the option of pulling inland a ways and then day tripping on the Yamaha is always available to us. That's a hateful situation ain't it? Being Forced to ride my Motorcycle! ... yeahhhhh, riiiiiight. :)

Thing is... To be able to step out of your rig just around sunrise... and walk along the deserted beach before all your neighbors are awake; Walking the beach past all the tidal pools in the quiet of a pacific coast sunrise is awesome. It makes for a remembered time.

If you're cross-eyed from making your own camp search along the Boondockers road you can take a minutes respite and check out the newest RV Cartoon I published yesterday afternoon. If you subscribe to the "RSS" feed of the main RV Boondocking site, you'll get a notification any time I've uploaded a fresh cartoon... or any other page for that matter.

Working to find camps to stretch our coming stay along the Pacific Coast
Brian