Challenge accepted! 4 weeks of ONLY Harvest Hosts/Boondockers Welcome
We don't know if this is statistically true, but someone on Instagram mentioned that the 3rd year of full-time RVing seems to be the "slump." This is the year many RVers quit and find a place to settle down, or at least start thinking about it. Of course the amount of years spent on the road varies widely – we have seen people get off the road after as little as 3 months, and we've seen people stay on the road for decades. Doesn't matter to us as long as everyone is following their happiness. What's strange though, is that before we saw this Instagram post, we had been noticing a similar trend. Year 3 is make-or-break for a lot of RVers. And here we now are, smack-dab in the middle of our year 3.
Year 1 was a no-brainer. Once we got the courage to hit the road, we committed to trying it out at least until the end of the year. Everything was new to us, which meant we spent most of our time tackling learning curves and basking in the adventurous side of our new lifestyle. We became hooked on nomadism pretty quickly, tracing it back to somewhere around month 4. In year 2, we covered new ground by heading out West. We checked off so many bucket list items, it's hard to keep track – everything from the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Glacier, to Devils Tower and the Black Hills, to our first RV rally, to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. Our cups were full. We knew that our 3rd year on the road would have big shoes to fill.
We didn't set our year up for anything overly exciting. No major bucket list checks (except for this one), but instead, we focused on traveling slower, saving money, and enjoying local culture everywhere we went. There is still a lot of adventure to be had, but we knew we'd want to keep things exciting so we didn't feel too let down that our year might not be as epic as the last two.
If you've been following the blog for a while, you may be aware that we like to challenge ourselves. Not in the "we sold almost everything and hit the road" type of challenge, though that certainly was a big one! We mean little self-imposed challenges to keep us on our toes.
In Season 1, we challenged ourselves to hike the entire length of the Niagara River during our week and a half there.
In Season 2, we aimed to hike 100 miles between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
And that brings us to our annual challenge, that we started doing before we even RVed: Summer to Remember, hosted by RV YouTubers Keep Your Daydream. We make a checklist of 20 items to complete in the summer season. We incorporated our checklist into our travels for 2022 and 2023.
Last year, we also challenged ourselves to boondock across the state of Wyoming.
These challenges, whether we succeed or not, help us grow as RVers, and most of the time, even if they're difficult, we have fun. This got us thinking, what could we challenge ourselves to do this year? As we planned out our trip routes, we noticed a couple of gaps where we had no real preference about where to go or what to do. We said we wanted to immerse ourselves in local culture, and one surefire way to do that is to shop local. Thanks to our Harvest Hosts membership, we can even camp at many of these locations! We have utilized Harvest Hosts sporadically in our travels. In fact, our first one led to this:
You'd think we'd be scared off forever, but we weren't. Since launching full-time, we have stayed at Harvest Hosts in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, Ohio, Illinois, Montana, and Colorado. Not that the ditch picture isn't great, but we prefer ones that look more like this:
We've had experiences from bad, to average, to good at these Harvest Hosts locations. Perhaps the time had come to explore some more!
If you don't know, Harvest Hosts is a membership program that allows RVers to stay overnight at host locations, which are usually businesses. While it began as mostly wineries and farms, the locations now include breweries/restaurants, churches, museums, and so much more. Upgraded members can also stay at golf courses. Harvest Hosts bought out a similar company, Boondockers Welcome, which allows stays on hosts' private properties. So now those options are included in the membership as well.
While most of the locations are dry camping only, many do have hookups. Sometimes you can hook up for a small fee. It's expected that you patronize the business in some way, such as buying something while you're there, or donating. Harvest Hosts suggests an amount of $30 to spend, but this varies depending on what's available.
Harvest Hosts/Boondockers Welcome is quickly inching its way to 10,000 host locations, which means it has been growing like wildfire since its inception. That's because it offers RVers a convenient, often unique, place to stop for the night. We do not need to rely on noisy truck stops or Walmart parking lots, nor do we need to spend a ton of money for an overnight campsite at an RV Park. We get to have an experience, support a local business or family, meet new people, and settle in for a peaceful night's sleep.
In our travels, we've noticed that most RVers choose Harvest Hosts for a convenient place to park after a long drive day. Many part-timers also use them as stops as they make their way from Point A to Point B on their vacation. However you plan your trip, you can utilize the membership. Many locations allow same-day stay requests, and many others allow bookings months in advance. So whether you're a spontaneous traveler or a planner, you can integrate Harvest Hosts.
Alright, this is starting to sound like an ad, which it is not, though we do have an affiliate link posted above because everyone who uses Harvest Hosts gets one so that we can all share the love. That's really why we wanted to outline what this membership is. It's opened up a new world for overnight options for RVers, and if we look at the big picture, this makes RVing safer in many ways. It gets weary travelers off the road. It allows families places for their kids to play. And it helps us sleep easy at night without needing to worry about rest area thefts or any other danger we could experience on the side of the highway. Any program that does that is A-OK in our book.
But we, of course, would not be weary travelers after a long drive day if we were just aimlessly bopping around the Midwest. Nor are we utilizing Harvest Hosts as pit stops on a vacation...though we are using the locations to get from Point A to Point B, technically.
So where is Point A and where is Point B? Point A is Blue Sky RV, where we stayed in Mountain View, AR, outside of Ozark-St. Francis National Forest. Point B is technically our ATC manufacturer in Nappanee, IN, but before we drop the trailer off, we want to have full hookups and all the resources to pack and get ready. So, we will be staying at an RV park near ATC for a couple of nights before dropping off the trailer. That means, for 27 nights, we will try to stay at only Harvest Hosts and Boondockers Welcome sites.
But whyyyyyy?
Oh, we have our reasons. Some of which we've already mentioned. Like how we want to immerse ourselves in local culture. And how we like challenging ourselves because it keeps us on our toes and forces us to learn and have fun. But there are more reasons.
- To show our readers the beauty of Harvest Hosts and its ability to enhance the RVing experience
- To shout out local establishments that, for the ones open to the public, can be visited by non-Harvest Hosts members as well
- To save money on campgrounds
- To change up the way we travel and camp
We also thought it would be cool to showcase the Harvest Hosts experience from the perspective of non-drinkers. We want to see what options we find besides wineries and breweries, and we also want to see how the wineries and breweries cater to non-drinkers.
The "planning"
We'll admit, we were torn between planning our stays ahead of time and flying by the seat of our pants. We typically like to feel secure in knowing where we'll be staying each night for the foreseeable future, and so we initially thought planning would be the way to go. We had a document all set and ready, with a chart to list out the best contenders and all they offered. Only, we stopped filling it out.
With so many locations to choose from, we were overwhelmed. And since we didn't have a specific route we needed to follow, we rested on the notion that something somewhere would have availability for us each night. We were able to be flexible.
Soon we realized, we would need to be even more flexible than we first thought.
Contending with variables
Our RV life has a lot of dynamic variables. First, we have our work schedule. While some aspects are set, both of our jobs are very fluid. We often get calls scheduled at the last minute, or unforeseen tasks get added. This makes planning travel days tricky. We normally only travel on weekends or the occasional Wednesday or Friday. If we want to travel another day, we need to plan ahead to block off time. Most Harvest Hosts stays are only for one night, so we knew we'd be trying to fit drives between work calls. Luckily, we could take shorter drives because we had almost a month to cover only 640 miles. For the more flexible aspects of our jobs, we would be doing a lot of work mornings and evenings. And for those busier times, we would need to try and book somewhere that allows longer stays. Most Boondockers Welcome sites allow 3-5 night stays. Busy days would be those that entail lots of scheduled calls, or the days I'd need to set up my recording studio.
One of the biggest variables would be the weather. We were traveling through the Midwest in springtime, which would inevitably mean getting caught in changing weather systems. This was a big reason for foregoing advanced planning. We would need to constantly check the weather forecast and try to skirt storms. We wouldn't want to be driving during severe weather, nor would we want to be parked anywhere precarious. For instance, many Harvest Host locations have grass parking, but rain can make the ground soft and muddy, and we don't want our heavy rig getting stuck.
While staying at Harvest Hosts means we wouldn't be paying campground fees, we had other financial concerns. We would be driving a lot more, which would increase our gas usage. We would be constantly buying items from our host locations, which can add up over time. We would need to find places to dump and fill our tanks, and often these cost money as well. So while it may look like "free camping" for a month, we had a lot to monitor in our budget.
We mentioned dumping and filling. 99.9% of these locations will not have hookups. This means we needed to think about conservation. Because we'd have tons of drive days, we wouldn't need to conserve as much as, say, the times we're boondocking for a week or two. However, we would like to keep our trips to the dump station minimal when we can. We ultimately decided to implement conservation within normal bounds, without making things more difficult for us.
Conservation and money always go hand-in-hand. We've noticed that sometimes paying for full hookups actually ends up cheaper than if we boondocked. This often happens in summertime when we need to run ACs and need our generator to do so, as to not deplete our batteries too much. The gas from the generator ends up being more expensive than if we had just paid for electric. While we don't foresee too many extremely hot days this month, we always want to consider our month's expected net usage statistics, or MENUS, if you will. Whether it's truck gas, generator gas, or paying to dump and fill, we want to make sure that the money we spend on resources keeps us at or below our average net usage statistic for the year. Bottom line is, we need to keep a close eye on our MENUS so that it doesn't throw our ANUS out of whack.
When we thought up this challenge, we thought we'd have 3 working solar panels to provide us with 1050W of solar. Then a giant tree branch had other plans, killed one panel and maimed another, leaving us with about 1.67 panels. Thankfully, we still have a hefty battery setup, which will be our real key to getting through these 4 weeks. We have 800Ah with some solar charging, and lots of drive days where we aren't using power, giving the batteries extra time to charge. We have our generator if we need it. Plus, we will take advantage of electric hookups at places that offer it, and many do. Water is our lowest concern because we have a 100gal fresh tank. Our gray and black tanks will fill up long before we run out of water.
Overnights and short stays mean that on many days, we won't unhitch or fully unpack. This will make our frequent drive days less intensive. The only caveat to this is making sure we don't forget anything on our setup and breakdown checklists. Whenever things differ from the usual routine, crucial steps can be missed.
Where do we go from here?
We honestly didn't commit to this challenge until a few days before we left Blue Sky RV. We knew it would be a huge undertaking, and while that's exciting, it's also surely going to be exhausting. What decided it for us was knowing that we can always make adjustments if we need to, or we can stop altogether. We've done a lot of challenges in our few years RVing, and lots of them we've failed! Though, we don't like to say "failed" because we always learned a lot and had a good time. We just don't always accomplish what we originally set out to do. So this time, we stayed hopeful but kept our expectations low. We would do the best we could and not give up easily, but we'd make sure we stayed happy and safe at all times. We focused on the excitement of trying something new, and with that, we left Blue Sky and headed to our first location.