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Frugal Boondocking - Marianne

Marianne: My first website, I began it in 2007. It sprang forth out of questions that family and friends were asking after we had fairly early in our life, we weren’t really retired, but we had managed to somehow figure out that we could get away the first time for a year and then a couple of years later for five months and a couple of years later another five months for that many months at a time by RV and travel around.

We did come back to a job in between and sort of saved money each time to go on the next trip but people were saying how do you do that. I mean I was working, I worked in food and beverage my whole life and at that point I was waitressing. Randy, my husband is a house painter and at that point was doing that, just general repairs and maintenance job, so how can someone who does that, earning a pretty modest income afford to do this lifestyle.

We started and figured it out from trip one, well one of the biggest things that we figured out right away, was that an RV has everything you need with you. You don’t really, really need the services of of a camp ground, at least not very often and definitely not every night. We discovered boondocking. We didn’t even know what the word was when we figured it out, legal safe places that we could figure out where to a park overnight.

We ended up in southwest that trip and we returned there several times because that’s where we found the best preponderance of boondocking locations, easiest to find in public lands. I started writing. The first guide was really not written with the intent of having any guide for the general public. My sister and her husband also bought a road truck, same kind of RV that we drove at that point.

She asked us about where we were going, so I wrote out this document for her more as a guide for them to follow, for when they went down. They wanted to go down to Texas which was one of our destinations that we went to regularly and then it came to be that we were talking to a friend of Randy, and it was really actually he wanted to visit his first girlfriend in his life. She lives in Australia. I had met her since, but she had a few websites.

She said oh Marianne you could sell this. This is an EBook. Gradually that became the reason that I started. I was not web savvy at all, not computer savvy even but started, she got me on the road to starting a website. Having these guys

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available, so I started writing, and I really had always loved to write so it was a natural transition that way. The website was born in 2007. The one guide became an EBook. I knew that I had material for Arizona, New Mexico, those came along quickly after that, California, Utah, yeah.

Stephen: Your website Marianne is a treasure trove. It is just chock-full of information for the people listening in today as part of the series. There are links beneath this audio interview and you can go, just fabulous from two points of view, practical amazing advice and then for us day jammers that are still in that same year time and are planning to escape mode all sorts of inspiration and very well done. Thank you for doing that.

You are really a pioneer when it comes to a documenting or talking about this small motorhome lifestyle, this RV frugal mentality. I have a few questions here. You have a great line. It is something along the lines of a two week holiday is a vacation whereas a five of six month trips more of a life style. Explore that a little bit with us.

Marianne: Well, when you go on a vacation you think of it as a real treat and you are going to go off for dinner every night. You don’t want to skimp when you take a vacation because the whole idea is to go out and splurge. You worked hard all year to get that. Now when you go on a six month trip or two or three months even or a year as we did the one time you still got to pay bills. You got to buy groceries. You got to do laundry. You got to figure out your itinerary as you go, because it is not all predetermined, and if you start eating in restaurants all the time, well you better have a big deep pocket for that.

That is the place where I think I draw this distinction as soon as you are on a trip that is a lot longer than a normal two week, three week vacation, as soon as you get to the point where you have to think about whether or not you are going to make this purchase or not then it becomes a lifestyle. It’s being on the road is a lifestyle if you are going to not just take a brief vacation, does that make sense.

Stephen: Absolutely, and I think I have noticed that there are even millennials that are embracing this lifestyle, and there are a lot of people coming to retirement or semi-retirement really trying to investigate it. Money is definitely one of the mental obstacles that some people come up against. Again there is, I am going to




use a line here, “show me the money”, you have a great post with actual tour pricing examples.

By the way I love how you named your tours. Just looking at the sweet surrender tour here and it looks like it was back in the June 2000 to 2001, it was 12 months, and I am shocked at, I am looking at this and going my goodness this is doable. Explain maybe that tour or any other tours you would like to talk about may be for some of the people that aren’t aware that what can be done.

Marianne: Well, on that particular, that was our first trip. We definitely were just discovering it ourselves. We bought a Camper. I used class B like a road truck, a small van size camper thinking okay if we are going to try and spend a year travelling what the best and easiest way to do this. I was not willing to sleep in tents and camps. We knew we didn’t really have the budget to do it by staying in hotels. The camper seemed like a good solution. We started out really not knowing what it was going to cost us.

We said, you know what, we are freeing ourselves up for a year, we put things in storage, quit our jobs knowing that we had the option to come back to them, not that we had actual jobs at that point, and so we started on the trip thinking well maybe it will last six months, let’s try and see if we can make it last a year. There are costs we didn’t do.

We had to of course put fuel and we still have to eat, but we didn’t eat at restaurants. We didn’t eat at restaurants at all the beginning until we saw how things are going. We kept our food expenses quite reasonable. We made, we have always done this with our type of travel. We have always enjoyed nature and hiking. We had bicycles with us on that trip and we made our main destination scenic locations.

We started in Canada but soon crossed over into the States, and we visited all the national parks we could over the course of the year and in between any natural attraction we saw that interested us with a natural park’s pass, I think in those days it was only 50 dollars, now it has gone up to 80 for an annual pass. You have got free entry to all these parks.

Now the biggest expense besides fuel for most RVers are campground fees, and I think about a month or maybe a little more than a month, two months into our trip we ran across somebody who pointed us in a direction of camping for free on public lands. We had no idea that existed. Being Canadian we certainly had




never heard of what federally owned public lands are in the States, natural forest bureau of land management.

We gradually explored that and realized, oh, here we are trying to figure out we hadn’t been paying for camping but we felt pretty stealthy about it maybe small towns finding where you could park on the overnight, shutting all light out and hoping nobody came to knock on our door. No one ever did but we hadn’t figured out that we could actually find these lovely places and natural surroundings with beautiful views and that changed the whole flavor.

Stephen: That’s exciting Marianne and what really strikes me is I am contrasting, let’s see we have this sweet surrender tour which was one of your first tours and then a more recent one the mission review and renew. I think it was-

Marianne: That was, yeah, that was our last trip January to May of 2013 and like I said we have been trying to do these long trips only over a couple of years. One of our early realizations is that the big expenses in getting there and getting home when we were going to the southwest. Rather than go every year for two or three months were have been going every two years for five or six months.

When we go to California or Arizona, all the expense of the gas to get there and come back isn’t quite as bad when we stay home plus when we stay home for the winter, we really appreciate going away the next month.

Stephen: Absolutely, we love where we live and family and friends, but it is nice to be snowbird. I am contrasting you are actually camping even though the duration is different but they are not that far apart. I think your camping fees which for some people will be phenomenal was a 150 dollars and 50 cents and your most recent trip, it was about a 158 dollars and 60 cents.

It is not necessarily about not spending money on camps, I am sure you will tell us there are times we want to be in a campground or you would like to be more of a just a change of scenery or for some facilities. It just strikes me that that is just phenomenal. Your cost really, they hover around the 10,000 or less, 5000-6000 dollars for the average trip which again is very doable.

I mean you could spend that on a one week or two week cruise, so to free yourself up is just phenomenal so you were mentioning about your guides. I wanted to highlight that for people. Do you explain for people that are new to




this the pros and cons and I know there are some books you would recommend your books or guide specifically about this style of frugal RV travelling.

Marianne: Well, I got links on the site to books by other people. Every one of them are, I don’t link to anything I haven’t read myself. There are books that we followed ourselves, have found to be useful, books, CDs in some cases. One or two of the authors are Canadians and so people that are, there is one really interesting author Rae Crothers. She has teamed up with Will Imanse. They are both Canadians. This is one of the very few books geared to Canadians, but it is full time RVing in Canada. I think they did a great job on that book.

I think that’s beyond where you are trying to reach right now maybe give people a bit of an idea of how to just travel inexpensively or travel in the first place in an RV but a lot of people do dream of the full time RVing lifestyle and Canadians don’t have that option as easily available to them as Americans because there are just different rules to being a Canadian. How to deal with residency? How to deal with your tax situation etc. when you are living in an RV in Canada? There has been a lot more research in the States on that than in Canada, so that would be one book I would certainly recommend.

Stephen: A lot of our series has been talking about taking some anxiety away in getting people to mentally jump over these hurdles, but there is a repeating theme Marianne and I am sure you can echo that back to us is that once you take that first step and it could be a baby step. It could be renting an RV and maybe going for three week and just seeing how it goes.

Once you start embracing this lifestyle and you have been immersed in it, it becomes very addictive and a lot of those fears melt away as you start to figure it out. Tell us emotionally yourself that first year or when you had a conversation with Randy and you went my goodness we can do this. This is fabulous. What did that mean to you?

Marianne: When it really hit me that we are doing this, not only we can do but we are doing this. I would think maybe it took a couple of months - a couple of months I think of wondering if this was really working out. We were, actually, our relationship, Randy and I are together 18 years now. At that point, our relationship was only about three years old. Until we started that one year trip the first one we hadn’t even lived together.




Now we are moving into this small space of a camper van if you can imagine that so emotionally there was probably more fear of how the relationship is going to survive this than of the trip not working out. On the other hand I would say that every experience of that year on trip actually ended up bonding us even the ones where we had disagreements and the things that can happen in just getting to know each other better on a living together basis. They actually ended up to be things that we laugh about now.

Stephen: I think as you discover this and again I would like to talk to people that have done what I want to do and ask for their wisdom and their advice, and I think through this wisdom you could pass back down. I am assuming that once you figure it out and once you have your finances and your budget in the RV style that works for you, it almost become addicting and you can’t wait to go back, refill the piggy bank and get back on the road. Tell us a little bit about that excitement.

Marianne: Yeah, that’s definitely the case with us. That I think came really out of doing it once. Go for broke and just get on the road and try it. You can always turn around and come home. There is nothing like experience to see if you like it or not. For us that definitely grew. Since we knew our plan was to be out for a year we could afford to not get too concerned if things weren’t going well for a day or two or even a week on ends where we maybe had a repair or something that was not working to the benefit of making it all seem like fun the whole time. Being out there and doing it and gradually building up the memories of positive events, there is nothing like to make you go wow.

Stephen: I love your tour names. I mean, the idea of just tour planning and planning it I think there s a quote somewhere and I am probably getting it wrong, the anticipation of something, an event in the future, creates joy in itself and creates happiness in looking forward to that. Tell me a little story about how you thought about your tour names. I think they are fabulous.

Marianne: I think, the first one was what we call the sweet surrender tour because we named our camper that. We are now on sweet surrender number three. We have always had to buy a used RV because that’s the only way we seem to afford




them. They are pretty expensive when they are new. We called the camper sweet surrender after, are you familiar with the John Denver song sweet surrender.

Stephen: Yes.

Marianne: It is song about being on a highway and a lost and forgotten highway. That was the name that we called that first tour not knowing that we are going on a second trip. I mean the whole idea was that the sweet surrender was going to take us on this one trip of a lifetime and then we would sell it when we go back, but we didn’t because we kept thinking can we do this again. After the first trip we realized that we really could if we saved that bit of money we could get away again and we now knew the roads.

The next one eternally optimistic well I don’t know how I came up with that. I think on the drive on that next trip we were just discussing I guess our outlook on how this second trip would turn out. We at this point weren’t thinking that this is a once in a lifetime thing we were going with optimism that we could maybe do this a few times in our live so that’s where that name came up. Sometimes the names only come to us as we started the trip. Frugal Shunpikers tour was the third one and that’s when I discovered the word Shunpikers in a crossword puzzle.

Stephen: Explain, that because that I know that comes up a lot on your blog. Tell us what a shunpiker is, what’s that?

Marianne: Well, a Shunpiker is someone who shuns the turnpikes. It actually originates in the New England states in the early 1900’s I believe when the first introduced toll bridges on certain roads and to avoid paying the toll the local people and people driving through that area would take another route shunning the turnpike to avoid paying the toll. It became gradually a term that was used more commonplace or just taking the scenic back route.

I found that, it was in a crossword puzzle. I found it sitting on the beach where we were camping in the beach on the Gulf of Mexico in Texas, and I thought hey that describes us. Well, the shunpiker, we take the scenic back route we definitely try and stay off the interstates as much as we can, and the fact that it




was something that people did to save money attaching the word frugal to it only made sense and by then I realized that that was really how we managed to travel by doing it frugally and frugal is different than cheap.

Stephen: That’s a great segway and thank you for sharing that story Marianne and for people listening you have to go and see the blog and our link to this article which is actually called travelling frugally. That was a five month trip, the Frugal Shunpiker’s Tour again I am amazed that your total camping fees were 81 dollars and 20 cents. It is just phenomenal and smiley. Now I would like to transition a little bit Marianne and you have another project, a business website. It is to do with boondocking and we will talk about that in a minute, but I just want to stay on this how are you achieving these camping fees.

I am new and in my limited knowledge as a new person to this lifestyle, the things that I am aware of for free camping are like roadside pull offs and maybe I have heard something about Wal-Mart parking lots, but I think you are going to tell us and may be hopefully you will explain there is a bigger world out there for free parking. I think this is a good segway into talking about something that you, the idea came from. I think the quote was wouldn’t it be great to know fellow RVers in every part of the country. If we could transition that a little bit, could you tell us about Boondockers Welcome?

Marianne: Sure, yes, well, so to backtrack just a little bit first finding free overnight parking for an RV whether you call it camping or just parking is much easier in some places than others. The scenic locations I was mentioning earlier are not easy to find but also much more prevalent if you look for them in the south western states and areas where there are lots of public lands, whether they are desert or mountain terrain, forested areas, free legal overnight parking is encouraged and totally available.

You can stop at ranger stations and ask for suggestions. We drive down a lot of the back roads to find those locations. That’s what’s in my guide, The Frugal Shunpiker’s Guide that I sell on the website. They are basically destination guides with information on what to see in the area, and if you are in a certain park or attraction why pay for camping when just outside the gates you can usually camp and lovely spots where there are other RVers as well and totally free.




Stephen: That’s amazing and so people can find, you have guides specifically for this on the website and are linked to those stuff. It is great.

Marianne: Yeah. I have got six different areas, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Utah and two of them for California. The transition for us came when we realized that we would like to travel and have still an inexpensive way of travelling by RV but not just to those areas. We want to go explore some other areas, parts of the country. This is a big continent. How do to do that? Well we have travelled through a lot of Ontario by RV, a few other states, the east coast but it is never as easy.

We end up spending an awful lot more time at the, what people called blacktop boondocking, and boondocking just means camping without resources, without facilities for free outside of a camp ground. Well, it is just so much harder to find, so that’s where a lot of people end up at Walmart or lots of other retail operations now welcome RVers to park there at night as well, truck stops etc.

Increasingly towns have ordinances, and there are more and more of those traditional spots that are no longer available because I don’t know if it is, well actually in some cases it is definitely, it is the campgrounds that are lobbying against allowing it because they feel that they are losing business.

Well at some point I was on a trip in 2010, here in Ontario by myself. Randy couldn’t come with me, and I decided to take the RV and drive around, and I was just doing parts of Ontario. I thought that I would go see the beautiful cottage country area, headed east and up into northern Ontario. At one point I was at a location that is fairly tourist oriented, and it was a Friday night of a long weekend, and I really hadn’t planned ahead. I have been looking and finding places that I could get away with parking overnight, a trail head, maybe a boat launch area at a small lake and a place where there wasn’t signage forbidding it. Sometimes I would ask for permission.

On this particular time I had no idea where I was going to go. I wasn’t too worried about it but after I checked a couple of campgrounds and all of them were full I ended up driving down the country road and realizing there are RVs parked in people’s yards, and I knew from our previous years of meeting several RVers that they are always quick to, when you meet them anywhere they are quick to invite you over. They say if you are ever passing through our parts, the States or our part of Canada come by and visit us. We have got plenty of room for you to park in our yard.




We have had people come and stay with us who we met on the road, fellow RVers. I actually rolled into a driveway, and I saw some people that were standing there and this middle aged couple and explained to them that I just wanted a place for park for the night, well the next thing you know we are becoming friends and I am there for a whole weekend. That opened the door to thinking okay, why aren’t we doing this amongst us as RVers creating places for each other. That’s where the the seed of the idea for a website, Boondockers Welcome, sprang from.

Stephen: What a great story and it just reinforces that camaraderie and that friendship and willingness to help which is in all of us but it seems like when we have this common bond of this lifestyle or this choice of travel that people really shine and they are willing to help. That must have felt fabulous. So from that first nucleus, what idea came to you on your trip back? When did you actually have the thought, “my goodness this is something people need to know about”?

Marianne: Well, you know what, I think was just enjoying the experience of that moment but I also was aware because my niece at that point had been in Europe doing the couchsurfing thing on a trip around a Europe, and I have heard about couchsurfing and at some point it just clicked like this would fit in perfectly. If you don’t know the website couchsurfing that’s where people open the doors and invite people who belong to this website to come and spend the night sleeping on their couch, on the floor, it is just they open the door to each other so that they can avoid having to paying for a hotel.

It is a big expense when you are wanting to travel around - the accommodations - to sleep in a bed at night. It costs a lot of money. An exchange of a couch and a lot of young people are using it, but a lot of people of my age I find out are using it maybe more and more these days too, couchsurfing. RV is the driveway searching equivalent with Boondockers Welcome.

Stephen: I think you are ahead of the curve and I am not sure, how long is the history of this site, has it been around since?

Marianne: Boondockers Welcome.




Stephen: Um Hmm (affirmative).

Marianne: It was 2010 when the seeds of the idea were planted in my head. I think I talked about it with a couple of different people including my daughter. I knew that I already had one website and I thought, how difficult could this be. I could just start something like this. Well, the more I thought about it, and I looked at couch surfing example and the concept I realized that that was a whole different ballgame of a website than an information-based one like my frugalrvtravel.com website.

I wanted it to be a site where people could connect, they could post their own profile, post their pictures, connect with each other, send messages back and forth. Our membership website is a whole different ball game which I didn’t realize right away so I almost shelved the idea when I started looking into it and realized that it was going to cost a fortune because you can’t even buy a membership software that would do it.

Even if the membership software is available for membership sites it wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. It was going to have to be done on a contract basis, hire somebody to just do it for me, and I really had no ends or knowledge of where to start with that except for that I got I think one quote that was way out there 10,000 dollars in that neighborhood. Then it would still be maintenance after that so I thought no I think I might shelve that idea.

Then, my oldest daughter happens to be a computer engineer, now mind you she has never done website, but she is well versed in a lot of things, computer and she was pregnant and on maternity leave followed closely by another and she said, mom why don’t I tackle that. She said, why don’t you come over and, after she had the baby she said, you come and hang with the baby, and I will spend a day or two a week and I thought isn’t this perfect.

I do want spend more time with my grandchild. The thing came together. It took her about two years of on and off of me spending time with at this time two grandchildren and learning the ins and outs of setting up a website, and she is now the person that has created the website really. My part was looking after the children.

Stephen: Well, thank you so much and thanks to your daughter. I am so glad you didn’t shelve the idea and you have now brought this into the world. I am looking at a




map. For people listening you can go to boonddockerswelcome.com and those links are here to get to Marianne’s site, and Marianne I am very excited. I am looking at the map of the whole continent, and I am excited just in my own backyard I am based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and I am seeing lots and lots of availability.

I actually just clicked on a listing and I won’t mention the name, but it is on Vancouver Island and there is a beautiful picture of the host, husband and wife what it looks like. There is even a map. It tells you is allows pets and barbeques, and all these different things, and I am thinking how fabulous is that. My good goodness you get a sense for the people, the area and the length of the stay so I want to get people excited to explore this, but I actually want to dive into how does Boondockers Welcome, how does it work and explain that to us a little bit.

Marianne: Well, we have two types of memberships. We realized early on that not everyone can reciprocate by offering a location but our members are all RVers. Some of them have property. Some of them only have a driveway but all of them who can offer overnight parking wherever they live, on their own private property. Ones that cannot for some reason and we know some RVers they don’t have sticks and bricks home.

They are out there full time or at least temporarily full time for a few years. Some live in a condo. Some have an RV that they have to store themselves off their property so everyone is not in the position to offer. However we had already known for years that RVers are really friendly when you meet them in person and like I mentioned earlier they are quick. Sometimes we meet people at an RV dump station or in a Wal-Mart parking lot. We have talked to for 10 minutes, and they are handing us their cards and saying, that’s why people carry a card because it has got their name, phone, number, email address, and they say, if you even come out this way be sure to look us up.

They are inviting you right then and there to come and park in their driveway overnight and with an RV it is so easy to invite people to come and spend the night because you don’t have to clean the bathroom or make up a guest bed or cook a meal. They are on their own. They are self sufficient so we knew that that was the concept, and that is the concept of the site.

There is an annual membership fee. However, we realized that the site will be nothing if it wasn’t for the well over 800 members that we have at this point who offer locations. The hosts on our site are really the backbone of the website.




They are generously extending a welcome to other RVers to connect with them and they aren’t always open for business. They are on the road themselves but whenever they can they are able to view the person who wants to stay with them. The profile of that person, each member creates their own profile.

When an RVer wants to have a place to stay for instance the place you said Vancouver island, they would contact that particular host. They will find them on the website, contact them and say, I am coming through your area on such and such date, any chance that I could spend a night with you. Most hosts are expecting only that. A night or two, three, the host themselves input the details section of their location profile. They can list the maximum length of RVs that they can accommodate.

Some can only accommodate a camper van or a truck with a small parking area. Others have room for any size. Some say well we will play it by ear as far as maximum nights and others say well two nights maximum or something like that. Some have hookups. This is something that you don’t find in many free parking areas, water, electric, some even have a dump station or wifi access that they are willing to share, depending on the location and what the situation is with neighbors they may not mind if you pull out your barbeque and lawn chairs, other locations that won’t work. Every host is invited to create their own rules around that and give an idea of when the site might be available.

Stephen: I have relatives in the San Francisco area and again I am just looking at another location down there. Availability, they say obviously like any good planning and we will touch on that in a bit, make contact first but we are open all year long if available.

Marianne: Yeah, we can expect, these are just regular people like ourselves, RVers, you can’t expect them to be available all the time at all but most of them if they are around, we have hosted I don’t know how many people here now ourselves at our own placed in Elora, Ontario, maybe not as many as a dozen but somewhere between eight and nine I think and it’s really quite easy. We live in a lovely little tourist town and so when people ask to come and stay. Yeah, we greet them.

We get a feel for what they want while they are here. They might just want to know the best restaurant recommendation or how to sneak into the conservation area without having to pay, some of the tourists , the best walk to take.




Stephen: Local knowledge is so key. I think the key with Boondockers Welcome is the spirit of the network of people, the hosts. Again this is a very much, it is like a bonus for people if your travel plans align with the one or two destinations you checked with and one of them and says, no we can do that. It is a stop along the way. I just think it is great. How would you recommend people approach it from a travel perspective?

Obviously the map is a fabulous resource but tell us if let’s say I wanted to go visit my family down in San Francisco but along the way I am not in a rush and it is not, I am really enjoying the journey and I go down. How would you plan something like that with the aid of Boondockers Welcome?

Marianne: Okay, well, first of all, on the website every location and all the details of the location are available to be viewed by your listeners right now. You don’t even have to join the website to see what’s available. Before you even make a decision you could, if you know where you are going to go you have a route in mind you could look through the website.

Now if you are travelling by RV obviously you also know what size of RV. You will have to know, well there are maybe, there are over 800 locations but I am driving in a 32-foot RV. Some of them will be able to handle me. You could do a search by location. There are several ways to search. You can search by state or country, by username which is not much good to you until you start to know some of the members or just look at all the locations or you can search by location.

The by location search is by far the most useful when you are really down in the nitty-gritty of when you know where you are going to go. You could type in a location, city name, and a search radius around that area. If you think you want to stop near I don’t know Denver, Colorado, put in the search area anywhere from a 100 miles to 3 miles to 6 miles, it doesn’t matter, a 1000 miles. It will show you now listing, or sorry to continue on now you got other search options you can search by in this way.

You put in size of your RV. You need a boondocking space that will accommodate your RV of 32 feet while there is a drop down box that will let you choose the category that you would fit into. You might be traveling with pets. There is a checkbox. You could say I only want, show me only the sites that welcome pets. Show me only the sites where I can pull through because I don’t want to have to




back my trailer up, various different things you can use to filter the search results.

Now hit search and it will only bring up. It might have several pages of results showing the people. The first one would be the one closest to the destination that you marked and then various others ones would come up and you could look at each of them at that point and decide okay you haven’t even joined yet but are there people on this list that I would consider contacting. Now if you are interested in being a member there is a very low fee, 19.95 if you can host other members and 24.95 per year if you cannot.

A host member probably if they are actually going to be active and host other people they will probably only pay that fee once. Once you have joined there we have a program whereby if you host three times per year and if you can get three, this is really best on recommendations, should you get three recommendations from guests who have stayed with you, for every three that you get we add a year onto your membership. That means if one year you host four or five times. The next year you are traveling yourself and you only host one well you still have six recommendations so you still have two years added on your membership so the host points don’t expire. Our active members who are hosting they only ever have to pay $19.95 once.

Stephen: I can’t see any obstacles why anyone wouldn’t want to partake because you are really giving back to making this a bigger. Is the ideal use of Boondockers Welcome a transition, if I am going from point A to B and need a few nights? It is not to stay, obviously, for a week or month at someones place, as that would be silly. But it’s really to help you get there in a slow casual manner, in a fun manner. Is that the best use of Boondockers Welcome?

Marianne: I think most people use it that way. Most people use it en route. They have got a plan. They are going to go, well a lot of people from our area go down to Georgia and then through Georgia down to Florida for the winter. A lot of people from your [west] side probably make their way down the coast into Arizona or whatever for the winter. In the summer of course we are crisscrossing the country all over the place probably trying to avoid those hot areas.

Most of the members are using the site en route and that’s exactly when they would normally be either struggling to find a campground that is open at this time of the year in the northern areas or making a reservation at a campground




so that they can pull in in time to eat, go to sleep and wake up in the morning and then leave again and having spent 40 dollars a night just for the privilege of sleeping somewhere legal.

In those situations the Boondockers Welcome locations certainly are a good stop. The other thing is the way that we travel personally is to take our time and take the little back routes and we are never in a big rush. Why not stop and explore a town for a day or two on the way down and we do that anyway but this just makes it that much more appealing where we know okay let’s explore this town and then a day’s drive later we can plan it what would be about five or six hours drive, that’s about all we ever want to do. Where will we stop next?

You can set that all up ahead of time so most of our members like to have a bit of notice. Personally, I don’t like to be asked, I don’t want to actually commit to being home a month from now on a certain date. I would rather, contact me a few days or a week maybe in advance and I can tell you, “ oh yeah, okay that’s no problem. I will be there for you.” Connecting with the members, setting up those locations in advance or even feeling it out, “do you think that would work? I will let you know closer to the date when I am actually going to be coming through.”

That seems to be the way it is working for most people. We have, I should just, going back to your original question, we have had people visit us here who made a two month trip out of staying just with Boondockers. Now they are constantly moving on. They are not overstaying. They are welcomed. I think the longest they stayed anywhere was maybe three or four days, but they made a whole round trip of the United States and the eastern Canadian provinces and came through here and made a whole round trip of going from one Boondockers Welcome location to another. It is pretty cool and you can do that.

Stephen: I see. You touched on a couple of points and there is an etiquette and there is a flow and a rhythm to doing this style of travel, and I think courtesy and common sense prevail obviously. You don’t want to show up at 1 a.m. in the morning, as that will be horrible. I am assuming that common sense prevails, and I think the type of people that will be attracted to this and the type of host are going to be friendly outgoing people anyway so that’s a good start, but just to have some common courtesy and planning ahead. Are there any tips around that etiquette maybe showing up no later than 6 o’clock or something that? What are some of the tips you would give to make a really nice experience for not just you but also your host.




Marianne: Well, time is relative to the time of the year, 6 o’clock will be really dark now but in the summer time it doesn’t get dark till 9 o’clock. Setting a time, I think commonly a traveler, an RV traveler, wouldn’t want to not be trying to park his RV after dark anyway. Certainly touching base with each other early on, the website is set up so that members can exchange messages. The first message has to be through the website and that’s basically so that when you get a message from a fellow member you know that they are actually who they say they are.

The message links to their profile. You know that they are a member and that they are the member that profile belongs to. After that, we certainly encourage people to exchange their phone number and whatever they want to make the exchange easier.

Stephen: I am sure there are lots of instances with people gifting each other and friendships develop and I know I am originally from Ireland so I do like to chat within reason. I know when I have over talked my say but there must be some, just a great camaraderie feeling.

Marianne: Yeah, I think one of the great things about traveling is meeting people. It is not just the places that we go to see but personally if I get the opportunity to get a feel for what it is like to actually live and be in any destination whether I am in Europe or travelling in our own country, isn’t it neat to just actually immerse yourself in the culture. What better way to do that than to actually meet and talk to locals who live in that area.

Stephen: Absolutely.

Marianne: Yeah, when staying with Boondockers Welcome members I think that sometimes we found this ourselves actually on our own travel that we end up leaving but regretting that we had not planned to stay longer than one night because if you are making that plan to stop en route and only spend one night often you will find yourself really want to spend more time with these people.

Stephen: Would it be fair, every situation is different and you need to respect people’s time but is it common to see maybe a one or two or three day friendship evolved




and then it ends up staying one or two days or three days and that’s perfectly fine within the system.

Marianne: Yeah, I think so, and I think people are adjusting their schedules after they meet people as well. On the other hand, I think one of the rules of thumb is definitely you use your common sense and it is also common, really respect for what the other person, feeling it out. Especially, I think as a host when a traveler arrives or even before they arrive sort of getting an idea of are they here to see the area. Are they here just for, do they just want a quick place to spend the night and be gone early in the morning?

If they are here to see the area then maybe we can sit, and we will get you settled tonight but maybe at that point when you first meet each other offer, are you free for coffee in the morning. Do you want to hear about the area, and they can generally get a pretty quick feel from people what they want from you and vice versa too. When you are arriving at a host location and the host has a job to go to in the morning or an appointment to go to you know that you are on your own and really you are getting what you wanted.

You wanted a place to spend the night. That’s the minimum that you wanted to have, right. If they gave you their wifi password and gave you electricity as well then that’s a bonus.

Stephen: Oh my goodness, yes. What a safe environment too. There must have been, I am assuming everyone that has stayed with you, I can only imagine it being a very, very positive, especially if there is lots of good communications and communications everything, with the host. There might be just fabulous feedback. Some of the feedback you get must be great and people just so thankful that you created this service and that other people are willing to participate.

Marianne: Yes. We had right away some of the members that latched on to us have been faithful from the beginning right through doing a lot of talking about us, giving us testimonials. If you go on the site, you will read some of the testimonials we received. They just blew us away. The people that tell us that they spent so many months on the road, and they stayed at a dozen or more places, there were quite a few people from other countries too traveling through, from Switzerland.




It is neat hearing some of the recommendations that people are posting for each other because that’s one thing that we certainly encourage people to do after they have had a successful visit. We have loved, I think there are probably like six or seven hundred recommendations where we know that people have had that many successful and happy experiences that they have recommended each other for. I am sure in that cases people haven’t even done that because they don’t realize how the site works exactly.

Stephen: Again it is in the true spirit of the site. That peer review feedback is just phenomenal. Are there, this industry, this is more a sharing of people’s assets and helping each other. It is a different mind set. It is not a commercial venture per se but are you seeing, are there more areas that are expanding quicker as the word get out about Boondockers Welcome.

Are there any areas that shock, in a good way, you? Are you are going, “oh that’s interesting trend”, like in Vancouver it seems like there are 40 or 50 sites and then there are different areas that, Toronto has a large selection obviously. Are you slowly seeing it expand organically and more and more destinations are coming online every year than now.

Marianne: Yes. Definitely more and more are coming online every year. It has been, I mean it is only common sense as to where most of the locations are. If you look at the map and see the heaviest concentration is where the heaviest population is. I don’t know if we have anybody in North Dakota or some of those Midwestern states. I know that there are RVers there, but there aren’t enough of them maybe that the word has reached them or enough of them that the word has reached them and they are interested.

It only makes sense and which is also though exactly what we want. We want a lot of options and a lot of host members in the urban areas because those are the places it is really hard to just pull into a farmer’s field or off to the side of the road and get away with it. The urban areas are the ones where knowing someone makes all the difference in the world.

Stephen: Yeah, it is really good. I am actually seeing there is definitely some in South Dakota. They have three parking lots.




Marianne: Yeah, but North Dakota I am not-

Stephen: Not yet, a lot of people are trying to decide do I need a 30 foot coach or is class B or smaller truly better. The more people I talk too that have been doing this they are always saying Steven, find the smallest that you are comfortable in and go a little bit smaller. What are your thoughts around that?

Marianne: Well, I guess I have always been a proponent of small because we are trying to do it frugally, and the bigger you get the more you are going to use your money for fuel. On top of that the less places you can get into easily. We like to park it down a small dirt road if we feel like it and not have to worry about whether we can turn around. As long as we can, it might take seven zigs and zags to get turned around but we can always get turned around. Our vehicle is no longer than a normal truck.

Also, are you comfortable with pulling something? We really don’t think we want to start trying to figure out how to pull a trailer and back it up. Are you comfortable with driving a great big A class, people who have driven trucks for their life or maybe if they are very confident drivers that would be great. What about if something happened, like something happened to Randy? He does most of the driving, but as I mentioned to you I don’t think twice about jumping in a small van style like we have and driving it.

A lot of, I shouldn’t say female partners, but I think a lot of times it is the female partner who is the navigator and not the driver, what if something happened to her husband. A lot of people are retired and older people doing this kind of lifestyle. Can she, will she, jump into the driver seat. What happens? Those are things that people have to consider, I think, when they are making that decision.

However, it is also important that you realize that you have to get along and if you don’t get along in a house where you live now then probably not a good idea to go too small. You need to get away from each other once in a while. People who say to us how do you drive. How do you live in that small camper? It has everything we need. Sure it has a fridge with a freezer, a toilet, a shower, bed for two, a stove. It has everything in that small space, but how can you stand it.

Well, our standard answer is we don’t live in it. Yes, we sleep in there. Yes, we will sit and have a meal in there when the weather is not good but our living room, our dining room is the big outdoor. We open up doors and we have got a great big yard no matter where we are parked.




Stephen: Boondockers Welcome to me just a fabulous addition to travel planning and saving money as well as having fun meeting people in beautiful local places, and I think combining this style of travel using the site and some of the common sense things we mentioned. This is just a great way to combine maybe some DLM, these free areas with maybe you schedule in it a nice RV park that you heard reviews about.

Maybe you add on a neighbor or friend’s location at a different province of state, and you combine these together and there is really no excuse to not get out there and there is lots of ways to do that inexpensively. Are there any other things that you would like to impart today or any questions that I didn’t ask you, you would like to tell our listeners about?

Marianne: Not really. I think I was just listening to your little closing segway there and realized that you are completely describing the trip that we have in mind that we are going to embark on in January. A bit of this and a bit of that. We have our favorite RV parks that we are actually going to go and visit and pay for some camping. We are going to spend some time in the wilderness and do a lot of great hiking etc., see some new places, visit some old ones, and we are going to stop at Boondockers Welcome places as well.

Stephen: Fabulous. Well, Marianne, thank you so much for your time today. I know our listeners, we do surveys, and I am sure they are going to have questions and they are going to want to know more. They are also going to want to follow your next tour adventure and so we will make sure they will visit your site. I think we can do a part two of this interview maybe later next year. We can have you back on, this is going to be an annual event so the 2015 will come out in this spring and then we will re do it again in the ‘16. I am excited to hear how your venture has progressed.

Marianne: I love that and that’s great.

Stephen: Well, Marianne thank you so much. That’s, we will conclude there. Thank you for the time. Thank you so much Randy, stay warm, and we will talk again soon. Thank you so much.




Marianne: All right Stephen, thanks.

Stephen: Thank you. Bye, bye, for now.

Marianne: Bye for now.




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