Archive for the 'campground' Category

Merry Christmas

jenn December 25th, 2008

I hope that everyone has a Merry Christmas.

Here is my present to all!

FreeCampsites.net

A database of free and inexpensive RV compatible campsites and boondocking locations. It is completely user driven. RVers like you and I input the location and the data. I know its a bit sparse at the moment… so you should get busy :).

I know, there are a few of these out there already. But, many of the ones that I saw are missing some basic features that I have included, and their interfaces are a bit difficult to with. I am sure there are some things that I need to on too. I am open to suggestions.

Many thanks to The Dead One and Cyberhobo for their plugins and patience.

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America the Beautiful

johnny November 9th, 2008

America the Beautiful Annual PassI know a lot of fulltimers swear by various camping club memberships to keep their camping costs down throughout the year, but at Hitek Homeless, our focus is on avoiding camping fees altogether. That being said, sometimes it is just more practical to stay in an established overnight and some sort of discount card sure would be nice.

Recently, we stopped over in a and it was getting too late to be out looking for a in the dark. The fees posted for this were $5/day. You can’t beat that with a stick, right? Wrong! For the first time, I noticed that our America the Beautiful pass would allow us to camp for HALF PRICE somewhere.

Now, I happen to think this interagency pass is an excellent deal for folks that want to check out the national parks as they travel, so we picked one up while visiting the Wright Brothers memorial in Kitty Hawk, NC. At the time, we joked about buying an $80 pass to avoid paying an $8 entrance fee. But, you’ve got to remember that the interagency pass takes an all you can eat approach to entrance fees. It will get you and up to three other people into just about every federal area where they charge an entrance fee for free. This includes national parks, monuments and historic sites, , bureau of land management, bureau of reclamation and fish and wildlife sites as well as federal recreation lands.

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Building a bat gate

johnny September 24th, 2008

Well, we’ve got more than a bar of Internet tonight, so I figure it’s time we got caught up on some blogging.

Horn Hollow Cave

After we spent a couple of weekends at the Great Saltpetre Preserve with some great people from the area, we headed towards Boone, NC to start our next stint as carnies. However, we got sidetracked leaving as Jenn noticed Carter Caves State Park was just a few miles out of the way. As this is where Crawl-a-thon is held in January, we decided it would be worth a quick stop over and looksee.

We got up bright and early and explored Laurel and Horn Hollow caves. Both are rather short trips, that have been ‘prepared’ for tourists, but they are still unlit, self-led trips. Horn Hollow has a beautiful entrance, but is otherwise not much to look at from inside. Laurel was quite a pretty little cave and we were able to get off-trail and explore the upper passage as well as climb a small waterfall that most non-cavers would have never seen.

Roy and Jerry. The gate is now complete.

Once we got to the camper, covered in cave mud, and I got stripped down to my high performance underwear, a couple of guys walked up, and rather than running away, they wanted to chat, which marked them as cavers and not afraid of dirty, half-dressed hippies in a parking lot. This was our introduction to Roy and Jerry. They were in the area building a bat gate, which is designed to let bats in, but keep people out during bat hibernation season. Since we were the only muddy folks around with a bat sticker on our vehicle, they assumed we’d be good suckers, err… candidates, to volunteer to help out.

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On the nature of campgrounds

johnny July 7th, 2008

We just finished up a week long stay at a commercial with Jenn’s . The entire week was a blast. There was good food, good company and plenty of kids to keep things interesting. However, after spending the prior month in the middle of the national forests, we had a bit of culture shock coming back into ‘the city’.

It started as we came into Pigeon Forge, which is about as big a tourist trap as Myrtle Beach. Six lanes of traffic, giant signs on both sides of the street and lots of useless shops and attractions. Thankfully, we got out of the Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg areas and back into the National Park lands for the last few miles.

However, as soon as we arrived at the , we ran into the owner who quizzed us about pets and whether or not we were planning to ride our moped in the . She then pointed us at the site we were to occupy; it was, in fact, next to the creek, but the creek was very low. It was also thirty feet from the entrance to the and as close as you can get to the road. At least, we had three sites together, so that we only backed the truck camper in halfway, turned around the pop-up camper on one side with the class A on the other and had the creek to form the fourth ‘wall’ of the compound.

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Are ya’ll the Pirate Campers?

johnny June 20th, 2008

campsite2

Yup. That’s how the locals know us. ‘Those nutty pirates up on the ridge.’ The day after a camera shy black bear strolled through our , we decided to pull out and refill on water, dump our tanks and go grocery shopping.

We stopped to orient ourselves and ran into a fella that’s full-timing in an even smaller rig than ours. He’s riding a mountain bike and pulling a small trailer behind him. After chatting with him for an hour or so and giving iffy directions to two other people that stopped by, we hit the road.

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