A welcome, and a few cautions

Welcome! If you’ve stumbled onto this website because you’re interested in RVs or campgrounds—not because you want to rent a dirt bike—you’re in the right place.

Perhaps you’re in one of the 84 million households that went camping in 2023, whether in the backcountry after an eight-hour hike or in a half-million-dollar Class A motorhome parked at an upscale RV resort. Or maybe you’re thinking about buying a campground to operate as a family-run business, or you already own an RV park and are trying to figure out a few things. Or it’s possible that you’re contemplating selling your bricks-and-sticks home to become a full-timer, either in retirement or as a “digital nomad” working on the road. Or . . . .

Whatever your situation, it’s possible you’ll find this site informative and enlightening. But before plunging in, it might help you to know what it does—and does not—purport to do, thereby saving us both some grief.

I started writing this blog in late 2021, some six months after I sold our campground and shortly before I published a slim book on the subject, Renting Dirt, with the idea that a blog might help book sales. A second book followed, and all along I kept cranking out blog posts—six to nine a month, now totaling more than 172,000 words—and in the process, the whole enterprise took on a life of its own. You can learn a bit more about me and about both of my books from the links at the top of this page. My purpose here, however, is to give you an idea of what to expect from the posts themselves.

For starters, I’m not given to boosterism. The campground/RV industry has exploded in popularity since the pandemic started, attracting large inflows of investor money and uncritical rhapsodizing about The Great Outdoors, the huge buckets of cash to be made and the allegedly recession-resistant nature of the business. If you want someone who will sing the praises of campgrounds and RV lifestyles, you won’t have any problem finding ’em—but not here. I’m not that guy.

Rather, I’m the guy with an acute B.S. detector who delights in calling out snake-oil salesmen and bureaucratic obfuscators, and there’s a surprising number of both. If you think of me as comparable to a stock market short-seller, a contrarian whose value to the system is to keep it honest—or at least a little less dishonest—we’ll get along fine. Otherwise, you’ll just get frustrated with what you might perceive as unrelenting negativity, which generally is how stockbrokers view short-sellers.

I also view my role as one of discussing the less utopian aspects of RVing, of which there are many but which the rah-rah claque prefers to leave unmentioned. That’s why many of my posts on a site ostensibly devoted to camping and RVs are about nontraditional RVing topics, such as the deteriorating environment, homelessness and the rise of RVs as housing of last resort, the socially distorting repercussions of outsized RV parks being shoehorned into rural communities—issues that in my opinion any socially conscious member of the RV community should keep in mind.

Finally, I’ll claim to try (and sometimes fail) not to pontificate, and to adopt an approach that is more cerebral than emotional: I make every effort to present reasoned and dispassionate arguments on behalf of my views, so that even if we don’t agree you’ll know how I reached my conclusions. I’ll further claim to be honest and forthright, and not to have any financial interest in any of the matters I write about; nor do I accept any advertising, or charge a subscription, or in any way profit from my writing—unless, of course, you buy one of my books. But I assume you already understood that.

That’s basically it. If you’re new to this site, I’ll suggest a good place to start is on the link for Directory of 2024 posts at the top of this page, which is arranged in reverse chronological order. That’s where you’ll find the most recent post, but also a brief description of each post for the year to date. Or if you have a particular subject in mind, try the search bar—it really works pretty well.

Happy hunting—and again, welcome!