Our Travel Style: Remote & Quiet
I don’t care for the idea of RV parks. I’ve lived in mobile home parks before, and it’s not too fun having your house squeezed into a tiny space between two others. I’m not a fan of apartment living either, and mobile home parks are a bit too much like apartments for my taste. Unfortunately I get the same impression from RV parks too.
Our Dog Onyx
We’re not overly social people. William needs a bit more social buzz around him than I do but it’s more of a desire for the buzz of civilization than it is any real desire to flitter around making small talk with one or more people. And we have a dog. Our dog has apparently decided to be completely anti-social, and that makes things a little more challenging for us when we’re traveling.
Onyx adopted us when he was roughly 3 months old. It was a cold night in November, a day or two before Thanksgiving, when he showed up on our front porch and tried to find warmth in the porch rug. I couldn’t leave him out in the cold so I brought him in and put him in the bathroom for the night. William said “we are absolutely NOT keeping it!” He didn’t want me to touch this adorable little puppy who was so happy to be inside. He didn’t want me to look at it, talk to it or anything else that might get me attached 
Needless to say, my efforts to find out who he belonged to got me nowhere, and Onyx has been with us ever since. That was about 6 or 7 years ago.
Somehow in those early days, Onyx decided he didn’t want anyone else coming near this wonderful new family he had found. So he barks at people… all people… and he goes ballistic when he sees other animals. Since he’s never been exposed to children under the age of 10 for more than a brief few minutes, he can’t seem to figure out what they are. And the smaller a child is, the more he seems to think it’s a little furry animal.
This is definitely a challenge for us. Not only does it wear on our patience at times, but we have to be extra diligent where ever we go. I often say having him is a lot like having a wayward two year old child. You can never take your eye off him for a second. He is very smart, very loving and loyal, but also very territorial.
In time the plan is to occasionally put him in a doggy daycare for a few hours so we can have time just for us. For the time being though, we don’t go out to eat at sit down restaurants, we don’t visit fairs and festivals, and we don’t just wander around town exploring.
We also don’t do RV parks.
Remote camping in Lousiana
Now even if we didn’t have Onyx I suspect we still wouldn’t use an RV park much. I don’t relish the idea of hearing other people’s kids, dogs, music or generators. I also can’t comprehend paying $20-$30+ per night for little more than a parking space. I like the peace and quiet of a remote camping spot, and I like having a beautiful view. I also love being immersed in nature.
What we do is generally called boondocking, drydocking, primitive or dispersed camping. We pick a National Forest area, find a passable primitive forest road and follow it till we find a break in the trees that looks like it might be a quiet and private dispersed campsite.
Now the fact that we have a fairly primitive camping setup so far lends to this travel style too. Even though we now have our cargo trailer camper, it’s still little more than a hard tent for the most part. This means the bulk of our activities are done outside. We can cook inside the trailer – and we have during bad weather – but the door is left open for safety reasons.
Our chairs and table get setup outside. Most of our cooking and even working is done outside too. Our bathroom is a bucket toilet that we use like a composting toilet, and at the moment it is outside as well, and if we’re not in a private enough location we hang a tarp for privacy. All of these things just wouldn’t feel overly comfortable in a public campground or RV park.
I don’t mind state parks campgrounds once in awhile, because out west these tend to run $5-$10 per night, have more space between campsites, and we can refill our water jugs plus take showers in most cases, so they end up filling multiple needs for one low cost.
Usually however, we simply fill our water jugs when we go into town for a resupply run, and use a solar water bag for our showers. In this part of the country there are self serve water machines in most towns. You can buy water at $0.25 per gallon or 5 gallons for $1.
Up until a couple of weeks ago we had 31 gallons of water carrying capacity, and we’re now upgraded to a full 50 gallons. This is enough for 10 days of dry camping when we’re being careful with our water usage.
Maybe if we ever get around to upgrading to a fancier camper or RV we’ll start using the parks and public campgrounds a bit more but I have my doubts. Onyx likes the quiet and I love having the doors thrown wide open to the forest. 
