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Some Camping Stats

As someone who thinks highly of statistics, I thought I’d throw some numbers out there for where we’ve been over our journey so far.

As of today, we’ve spent 81 nights on the road in our Tiffin. (I had meant to write this at an even 80 but then we went out to dinner and I completely forgot. However, I had a great burger so that’s the real important takeaway.)

81 nights since we left our brick and mortar home in Hillsboro, Oregon.

5 States: Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas

Types of Campsites we have stayed in:

Type of CampsitesTotal PlacesTotal Nights Stayed
State Parks36
City or County Parks417
BLM Land, etc618
Private Parks (the typical RV Park)731
Parking Lots34
Core of Engineer Parks15
Yucaipa, a City/County Park
Salton Sea: A State Park
Boondocking on BLM land

Midway Park in Waco: A Core of Engineers Park

Longest and Shortest Stays

Our longest stay in one spot: 8 nights in Houston, Texas… but not on purpose. Jeremiah had a flight for work out of Houston, so I had planned to stay at Brazos Bend Park, but it was flooded so I ended up staying put in an RV park in Houston. If it were up to us, we would have changed the weather in South Padre Island so we could have stayed 2 weeks, but didn’t want to risk our 42″ Class A getting stuck in the sand with thunderstorms in the forecast.

Our shortest stay in one spot: We stayed about 15 hours at one place, the Holiday palms in quartzsite, but then we actually stayed on BLM land in Quartsize another 5 days. We had a ton of laundry to do because Bernadette got ringworm so we had to wash all our laundry and needed hookups. We also stayed at a truck lot in Dallas for about the same period of time.

The average nightly cost of camping

Average nightly cost in camping fees: $21.03

If it were totally up to just what we wanted, we’d stay on BLM land the majority of the time, heading to parks for the occasional night when we wanted to use a lot of water for laundry. Having said that, we also aren’t interested in staying in sketchy Wal-Mart parking lots, etc. We don’t need to stay inside every big city we pass, but the reality is a lot of historical and delicious things are usually inside cities, so we aim for less than a 40 minute drive to “cool stuff” from where we’re staying. That often means staying inside a city at an RV park, and we’re okay with that.

Having lived in Oregon the majority of our lives, we’re pretty spoiled; we could probably boondock on BLM land 95% of the time if we just wanted to travel there! That just isn’t the case across all of the US.


One of my goals for 2019 is to reduce the overall number of nights we stay in RV parks. We’re always searching for inexpensive but COOL places to stay, so if you know of inventive ways to save and still have a great place to stay, let us know! With one of our goals being to travel to Florida soon, we know it’s going to be spendy, so we’re starting our search on where to park our home now.

Other money savers…

Along our way we’ve also used some various passes that help with costs. Let us know if you’d like us to answer any questions about those, or do a write up of the ones we’ve found to be useful! I’m also incredibly curious how effective Harvest Hosts has been for real RVers – so if you have that pass, let me know if you use it!

Tips: We’ve stayed one night in a secure truck lot – we were the only other RV and it was so quiet. If you’re trying to stay inside a big city (especially for just one night, like we did) this is a great plan. This is not the same as a truck stop; they checked us in and out with our ID each time we left and came in. We only pulled one of our 4 slides out, but slept like babies. (Just be respectful of the truckers! This is their livelihood so don’t be the person that gives RVers a bad name.)

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