How do we... find a place to park?

I think I have implicitly mentioned before that we do not live in an R.V. park or have hooks ups. We do something that fellow R.V.er's call "boondocking." This means that we do not hook up to any water or electricity sources, which are usually found in R.V. parks and various camping spots.

In other words, we park on streets. We find spots that are not in front of people's houses and where we would not be disrupting anyone's life. Usually, we look for places where our door faces a dirt lot, a business, a brick wall, or a church, etc. Keep in mind that this is mostly at night time, as we have a state beach pass and spend most day times at the beach, in the parking lot.

The first week that we lived in the R.V. (September 1, 2013), we did stay at a state beach R.V. park for three nights, as we were still adjusting, I had just started student teaching, and we were still organizing the place, seeing how everything fit... including us.

While it is legal to store an R.V. up to 20 feet long on a street for up to 72 hours, fortunately and unfortunately, it is illegal to inhabit a vehicle. Soooooooo, technically we break the law every single night. (Other than this, we are law-abiding citizens!) Technically, we could have the police banging on our door at any time during the night telling us, "Ya can't stay here, gotta move on." So far (cross fingers) this has not happened. Sometimes I feel like people can hear me moving around inside at night, but so far no complaints. I think it helps that we are respectful as possible when we are parked on streets: we don't have friends over, we are not loud, we are not obvious, we do not disturb anyone.

As nice as it would be to stay and live in an R.V. park with full hook-ups, for us it would defeat the purpose as most parks around here are $1000+ per month, and we wouldn't be able to save money. For that price, we could get a nice apartment with utilities and more than 13 feet of actual living space ;)

We find places that are a little more inland (2-3 miles haha) and we find places that we can hear the waves crashing as we fall asleep. In the beginning, we would stay parked around the same place (not in the exact same spot) for weeks at a time. Now, since we are more comfortable, we move around a lot more and find more places to stay.

(Notice the brick wall next to us.)

So there you have it, the first "How" of "How do we ______________? Wednesdays."

Hope you had a better day than I did today :S