johnny November 9th, 2008
I 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 campground overnight and some sort of discount card sure would be nice.
Recently, we stopped over in a national forest and it was getting too late to be out looking for a campsite in the dark. The fees posted for this campsite 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, forestry service, bureau of land management, bureau of reclamation and fish and wildlife sites as well as federal recreation lands.
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bureau of land management,
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forestry service,
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johnny June 25th, 2008
Today we had some visitors. Wayne went and broke the Hummer good, so he had a full tour group walking down the mountain. Apparently, he lost a retaining bolt that had one wheel of the Hummer sticking out at a decidedly incorrect angle.
Being the friendly hippie forest dwellers that we are, Jenn put out a plate of cookies and chips and a pitcher of water since we were roughly the halfway point of the tour. Half of the group seemed suspicious of ‘hippie cookies’, while the other half grabbed for them and then seemed disappointed that they were only cookies.
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cat,
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Pisgah
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jenn June 22nd, 2008
Well, its a another rainy day; which is good, because the streams are pretty low here. But today, I’d planned to finally finish up that hide that I have been carrying around with me. A year ago, I fleshed it out and mostly worked it soft while I was at Rivercane Rendezvous.
I didn’t mess with it again until we were out of our stick and brick home. At that time, I pulled it out of the freezer and finished the softening stage. I couldn’t make a fire to smoke it at that campsite. So, I put the hide back in a bag and stuffed it into outside storage.
Since we are talking about staying in this great campsite until my family gathering at the beginning of the month, I thought it would be a great time to finish the hide. So, yesterday, I gathered up some rotten wood to smoke with, some nice (fallen) trees to make a tripod, and started sewing up the hide. Johnny was so excited about the prospect of not having to smell my brain tanned hide when he opened that compartment anymore that he offered to erect the tripod. Such a nice guy. Thanks hun! Nice work.
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national forest,
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johnny June 20th, 2008
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 campsite, 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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johnny June 17th, 2008
It turns out that our new campsite wasn’t quite as deserted as we had hoped. Every couple of hours this Hummer drives by with a tour group. Since they never come back down past us, I assume they’re just driving a loop through the national forest. A few other folks drive by on occasion, but for the most part, they don’t slow down and point.
As we hadn’t been out for a hike in a while, we decided to hike up one of the less improved roads to the top of the mountain. We were keeping an eye out for a new campsite, hazards we might have trouble crossing with the camper and halfway hoping we were on the right road to reach the lookout tower.
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evdo,
hummer,
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