Guest Post: The Top 5 Reasons We Love to Boondock by Adventure Endeavors
Meet Melissa and Jesse Azarva, also known as Adventure Endeavor!
Jesse and Melissa are valued members of Team Enduro Power, and have been
living on the road full time in their RV while traveling the US and Mexico for over four years. Read on to learn how this experienced family uses Enduro Power Lithium Batteries to spend time in the most beautiful off-grid locations and the top five reasons why this is their favorite way to camp!
Hi! We are the Azarva family and have been living on the road full time since March 2019! In that time, I would guess we have stayed fewer than 100 nights in RV parks or campgrounds. We have nothing against organized camp sites, and we do find those stays enjoyable to mix things up occasionally, we simply prefer to boondock! But why?
1. The Cost
Campgrounds and RV parks are expensive. Depending on the type of spot we are looking to reserve, the cost can range anywhere from $20-$100 per night. Boondocking is almost always completely free and with a fully self-contained rig like ours, it’s easy. Investing upfront in Enduro Power lithium 300Ah batteries combined with 2190 Watts of solar powers our rig for virtually unlimited nights. If we stayed exclusively in campgrounds with electric hookups, that nightly cost could quickly surpass the investment we have made into our solar setup. Free camping allows us to spend more of our hard-earned money on the fun adventures and activities that excite us and bring joy into our lives.
2. The Freedom
Boondocking equates to freedom. When we boondock, there are no reservations that need to be made months in advance and no specific time window in which we have to arrive or leave. This flexibility is critical for planning around our work schedule. When we boondock, there is never a set time for arrival or departure! We can plan our travel day to best fit our family’s needs
and easily accommodate spontaneous stops, unexpected delays, or inclement weather. If we show up to discover the cell or Starlink reception is poor in any given spot we’re hoping to camp, we can easily decide to move and not have to worry about losing money on a reservation. If we let our travels be dictated by where we can get reservations, we’d be planning our travels far in advance which doesn’t leave much room for the flexibility we have gained by living the RV lifestyle in the first place!
3. The Scenery
The views we can get while boondocking are often much better than you would find in an organized camp spot. Without being limited by a specific direction we’re allowed to park the rig in a defined space, we can face whichever angle is best for maximizing our solar input and has the best view! Who wouldn’t want that? Sure, lots of campgrounds have some spots with great views too, but they usually come with a heftier price tag! When we boondock, we get to enjoy our morning coffee with the best mountain views and don’t have to pay a special premium to get it! As a bonus, boondocking spots are often closer to the places we want to visit since they are already located on public lands!
4. Camping with Friends
Boondocking spots are not confined to a 30x50 foot rectangle like most campgrounds and RV parks. When the spots are free and wide open, it becomes easier to camp with friends and large groups. With unlimited space, no one has to make a reservation and hope to get an available site close enough to their friends. Group travel is a lot of fun, but if you’re staying in reserved spots, it often requires significant coordination and advanced planning effort to get spots next to one another. Not the case with boondocking! We just pick an area and show up!
5. The Peace and Quiet
Busy campgrounds can be noisy. Boondocking brings a sense of remoteness if we want that, or an easy way to create a social environment if we don’t. We can choose how close or far away we’d like to park from our neighbors, so we don’t have to look out our window into the broad side of someone else’s RV! No one will be walking right through our campsite, and we can enjoy the starry night sky without excessive light around!
Common boondocking etiquette means that no one will park too close unless we ask our friends to. We can waver between solitude and social gatherings with ease. Even if we’re boondocking and do happen to get a neighbor being particularly obnoxious, we are free to pack up and move further away on our own volition without consulting the camp office. There’s never a worry of
hoping the reservation system can accommodate our request! If we get stuck next to a discourteous neighbor in a campground, there’s not much we can do about it!
In closing, the most appealing aspect of Boondocking for us comes down to one thing – “freedom”. By not spending extra money to stay in a campground, we have the freedom to come and go as we please, choose our own view, and decide who we want to have around us. Staying out west where public lands are plentiful makes all this feasible. All the time we would spend researching and booking reservations is saved. Choosing to almost exclusively boondock
saves us time, money, and energy so we can dedicate more time to our family and the important things in life.