Don't want to lose your boondocking spot? Try this

Roses are red, violets are blue, if you click the pics, the size of the pics will increase substantially.... Avant-garde poetry.

A nighttime snapshot of the Elephant Butte Marina closest to me.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, marking my boondocking spot when my house comes to the grocery store with me. If I'm going to travel in a smaller.... much smaller RV, and it's going to follow me to the store, I'll have even less room to carry things that I don't absolutely need. So I will have to to mark my empty boondocking site with something that I already have available. But being extra careful when it comes to crime, I don't want to leave anything behind at my campsite, that has much of any value to me or is attractive to criminals.

Apparently, not everybody feels that way because I've seen people leave generators, motorcycles, solar panels, and other things of value, marking their temporarily empty boondocking spot as if there's no evil in this world whatsoever. To me, leaving things like that laying around might be too much temptation for even an honest person.

So there shouldn't be any need to leave anything valuable sitting around your empty boondocking site. It just needs to be something that indicates you're still living there while your house is gone. So based on things I've done in the past and something I've seen recently, here's what I think I'll do.

I've still got my "site taken" sign; it's in the little Bronco right now. But in less, there's a picnic table at my boondocking site; it's hard to find a place to put the sign, but I can always hang it on a nearby Cactus if need be.

Something that I almost always see marking a temporarily vacated campsite is a folding lawn chair and a gallon jug of water. I'm not sure why, but it just looks like somebody's home whenever I see those two things together.

As some of you may recall, I'm the only RVer in the world that doesn't own a lawn chair. So while at Walmart the other day, I bought a six-dollar folding lawn chair; I think they're called umbrella chairs because they collapse really small. And speaking of collapse, whenever I look at this chair, collapse is the first thing that comes to mind. But since I might be living in a tiny space, I may actually need the chair to spend more time sitting outside, and if I did then I would buy a nicer chair. But it's cheap enough that nobody would want to steal it, and if they did, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. And as for the gallon jug of water, I live in the desert; I've got gallon jugs of water everywhere.

A new way of marking an empty campsite that I'd never noticed before is leaving a couple of those ubiquitous yellow plastic leveling blocks on the ground where you parked. I, of course, have a set of those blocks, which I need to level up my pickup truck when the little Bronco camper is in the bed. So leaving a couple of them lying on the ground when I'm away is a good indication somebody's living there and is expected to return. Their also cheap enough that nobody would want to take them.

So my plan is if I do use the little Bronco slide-my camper this fall, and I leave a boondocking site that I don't want to lose while I'm at the grocery store, I will hang my "site taken" sign on something, my folding chair with a gallon jug of water sitting on it, so it doesn't blow away, and a couple of leveling blocks laying on the ground where I park.... And if my boondocking spot is particularly sketchy, I'll scatter a few empty .44 Magnum cases on the picnic table.


P.S. Linda's recent comment just recommended collapsible orange traffic cones, which sounds like a great idea to me. And if I see a couple of them for sale in my travels I'll pick them up.

                                               Theboondork

The ubiquitous creosote bush. They appear to be the predominant plant in this area.

Distant mountains.