We had never heard of boondocking until we got into the camper world, and we had never done it ourselves until July. The way we typically have our camper set up is the extreme opposite of boondocking. It has full “hook-ups.” We have unlimited amounts of water, we have electricity and can use any amount of it at a time, and we can flush our toilet without wondering if the black tank is at capacity. Not to mention WiFi and cable all included in our stay.
Boondocking is when a camper has no hook ups…no electricity, no water or sewer. Typically you go find a random spot, park it and your done. It’s simple, it’s easy. No campsites, no reservations, typically free. It is also a super flexible way to travel, just pull over when you’re tired and go to sleep.
When we were in Montana we told ourselves we were going to practice this sort of thing. We did have a site that we had reserved and it did have a water hose we could fill our fresh water tank with before getting to our spot…but that was it. So we had fresh water, we knew we didn’t need full hook ups because we weren’t truly going to be in the camper much. Just to sleep and it was going to get down into 50-60s at night so we’d be fine without electricity and air conditioning. Our fridge can keep cool via propane so we’d be just fine.
Well all of those preconceived notions were true except the fridge part…our camper battery actually has to be used to keep the propane going to the fridge… our battery lasted about 6 hours and then went dead and the fridge stopped cooling. With no way to keep the battery charged (via solar or a generator) we just put everything in the cooler and skipped the fridge.
This was a great learning moment. So we know we can handle one night of boondocking not a full week of it.
We did do real boondocking for one night on the east side of the Tetons. We have friends that are pros at this they held our hands and showed us how to do it. Chase and the husband went and scouted out a spot right by a river. Just our two families right there. It was a pretty neat experience. They do have a generator and did let us charge our battery so we could have some lights on for awhile. We still have a lot learn but we did survive and actually enjoyed it!
After leaving the Tetons, we had a camp ground we wanted to stay at with full hookups (water, electric, and sewer) in south east Wyoming. After talking on the way there about going through Denver traffic in the morning we decided to keep trekking and get to the east side of Denver that night. Once there, we decided we were still awake enough to make it all the way to Limon, Colorado. Once there, we circled through 3 different gas stations to boondock for the night, the first two being completely full of other campers doing the same thing! We found our spot at the third gas station. We stopped pulled out the slides and rested for the night. (Fun fact….the boys LOVE “cleaning” the windows and are always excited when there is a long handled squeegee…it’s the little things in life!)
I honestly don’t know how much boondocking there will be in our future but we are so happy to know how to do it and what our camper is capable of, two things we knew zero about before trying it out ourselves!