Filed under: Humor, Uncategorized

There’s Nothing Dry About Dry Camping

August 7, 2012 by Dalin Brinkman · Leave a Comment

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Trying to find the perfect campground is often a challenge. Finding ones with good ratings, open spots and the amenities you want (must have pool or playground) is often challenging. Many campgrounds often tell me that they’re full, but that they offer overflow camping or “dry camping spots.”

It’s this “dry camping” that threw me off as a newbie. My first thought was that it was like what us former tent people call a dry spot. You know, finding a dry spot to put your tent so it doesn’t get wet. Everyone who’s ever camped in a tent knows that if it rains, you don’t want to be near a hole or in a ravine. So I figured that “dry camping” meant a spot that was pleasantly located for my RV.

So it really started to make me wonder when the first dry camping spot offered to me by a campground wasn’t really dry at all. In fact, it was bumpy, dirty and subject to water runoff. They even told us if it rains, we need to get out that area pretty fast. We weren’t worried, though. After all, this is California. It never rains. But now we were wondering what dry camping really was.

It thus required me to break down and look it up online. I quickly figured out that dry camping isn’t dry at all. In fact, it’s where you have to keep all your, um…wets. You know, that black and grey stuff. It’s awfully kind of the resort. You pay money and park in a place where you get to deposit all that is wet nowhere. I get to “hold” it in my “holding” tanks. Not that I really want to hold it, but they said that one of the benefits of an RV is that you can hold that stuff. Which really made me wonder, why is the resort charging me the same rate then?

I figured it was a lesson learned the hard way, except I didn’t realize that it’s more complex than that. The next weekend I went to a resort that promised me that it wasn’t dry camping. But when I pulled up to my spot, there were 30- and 50-amp plugs, but no sewer hole. They had a dump station hidden somewhere, but at my spot, it was just power. Is that considered dry camping? I still have a lot of wets.

So I’m still clueless on what dry camping is. One thing I’ve figured out: It’s the RV owners’ version of roughing it. Whenever I told people that I’ve dry camped, they looked at me impressively. It’s like litmus test for a true RVer. If that’s the case, I can certainly understand why. I can also understand why the Walmart parking lot looks so great to people. It’s free. It has a massive convenience store nearby. It also usually has a lot of restaurants within walking distance. Now I completely understand the parking lot. It’s a dry spot to put your RV!