Home Sweet Home Where are You?

When we began this trip we vowed to begin the search for a camp site around 4 pm. But somewhere en route to the west we forgot that and each night the search has begun later and later. Two nights ago our search began at 7 pm and landed us at the blackberry patch. Last night we didn't pull away from Eugene's Barnes and Noble book store until close to 9:30. Just before leaving we browsed their Oregon topo atlas and county maps section for the infamous teepee signs and came up empty. Sometimes city limits aren't the best places to find campgrounds.

Outside of the cities, camp sites are fairly plentiful. Most trailheads are set up with fire rings and picnic tables. Public forestry sites are everywhere if you know how to find them. State campgrounds too are well advertised on the roads and in a pinch a logging road can generally serve as a pullover point provided you don't run into a logger barreling down the dirt road at 90 mph with his load over full and held up with little more than four hockey posts - trust me on this one. But city limits don't seem to afford much to the Vanagon camper.

So we were at a loss. We looked in the AAA camping guide. Kamping World RV park, 15 miles outside of town offered a treeless square patch of cement with zero lot line to your neighbor for $15 a night, the lulling sound of highway 5 only meters away. But we figured we could achieve the same ambience for free at the rest area between exits 199 and 209. And we did. We backed in between the Minnie Winnie and the Air Streamer, pulled the curtains and were asleep within half an hour.