Unwritten Rules of RV Life | Campground Etiquette | Fulltime RV Living

do you know the unwritten rules of camping stay tuned and we will tell you welcome to the channel i'm liz and i'm paul and these are exciting times to push past fear build confidence and live amazing and you definitely need to build confidence if you're going to go out there and live the rv life especially if you've never done it before and in today's video we're going to talk about the unwritten rules of campground life yeah the etiquette of of living in a campground there there is an etiquette out here and and people get annoyed if you break certain rules and like liz said they're they're not written down anywhere so you just have to learn them um sometimes the hard way the way i learned some of them right so when you check into a campground they're gonna give you a list of rules drive five miles an hour pick up your dog poop this is not what we're talking about we have a list of i don't know like five or six and i think we're going to go from bad to worse but i actually want to start with one that's pretty bad because most people don't know this one right yeah how did you learn the rules because you know i've been camping since the 90s and i've been camping all over the midwest and the southeast and the west coast so i've been out there a while but you've been new you're not yeah i'm fairly new to this i've only been out a little under two years now and when i started out i really didn't know a lot of these etiquette rules and the way the one that you're talking about the way i learned that one is somebody was kind enough to tell me that that you know this is sort of verboten out here you don't do this you just don't do that so rule number one is you don't knock on somebody's door right this is an unwritten rule and you may learn it the hard way but the reason why is this is not like knocking on the front door of a house or an apartment or when they open it up you see their living room or an entrance hall when they open the door in the campground you see their whole life you definitely see their kitchen the living area sometimes the bathroom and the bedroom so it feels like an intrusion of privacy so basically if you want to talk to somebody you what you wait until they're outside hello yeah because most people in campgrounds are in and out but there may be an emergency where you really have to knock on their door we were at a campground once and i noticed that a neighbor had a water leak and i realized i needed to knock on their door so the way to knock on someone's door if you absolutely have to is to go up knock on the door and then step back except so far away that there's no way you can see inside their rig unwritten rule number two is about your black tank the black tank is always on the side facing your neighbor um it's not on your door side yeah it's on their door side so if they're out there if they're out there eating your shirt you certainly don't want to pull the black tank i mean there's just you're dumping your sewer and and there's just no escaping the smell that's going to come out of that right there's often a smell when you pull your black tank and here's the thing many campgrounds you're close enough to your neighbors that they can smell when you pull the tank in the campground we're in right now for instance the the spaces are very close together our neighbor's awning is almost touching the side of our trailer touching the slide that's behind us here and then so you want to dump it when your neighbors aren't around you want to do it early in the morning or late at night or just when no one's around because there could definitely be a smell one other quick comment about black tanks for for people that are new to this never leave your black tank open let it fill up and then dump it and the reason for the never leave it open is you end up with i don't know how to say this quite politely but you end up with a poop pyramid at the bottom of the tank and and over time it will get big enough that it will clog your tank and also you're letting sewer gas in by keeping your black tank open unwritten rule number three is stay within your site boundaries that means make sure that your slide doesn't overhang to your neighbors that if you have an easy up or a dining tent make sure that all that is within your boundaries and this segues into the next unwritten rule and that is don't walk across your neighbor's site sometimes the way these sites are laid out is you're leaving and you're wanting to just run up to you you know the laundry or whatever and you see a shortcut well just don't walk across their site and that also means when you're trying to access part of your your own site right yeah yeah if you're for instance if you wanted to get if i wanted to get to the wet bay um from around the back of our unit i would have to walk through the neighbor's site to do that if i go around the front i have easier access and i don't encroach on on the neighbor's site the next unwritten rule and actually this one's written in a lot of park rules but there's also an unwritten part of this but noise try to keep it down after a certain hour and before a certain hour in the morning so even if there is a quiet time of let's say you know 10 pm to 7 a.m right at 7 00 a.m you don't want to be banging around because a lot of people are on vacation they're sleeping in so if you are packing up and you know that you're going to pull out of there at 7 or 7 30 the courtesy thing to do is to pre-pack the night before i was in el centro when the broken hand situation happened and when i found out that i was gonna drive um from el centro to yeah six and a half hours uh from el centro to santa barbara i was set up the night before i was in a site where i could hook up my my truck to the trailer and i got out of there before 6am without making any more noise and starting my truck up and pulling out this next unwritten rule is the most serious because of the potential for safety issues or all kinds of things could go wrong if you violate this rule and it has two parts the first part is don't talk to people while they're backing into a campsite or while they're hitching or unhitching you don't want to distract people during this this part which is about safety right particularly if they're hitching up and leaving or if they're trying to get into the site so what happened when we were in vegas oh my gosh yeah we were trying to back into into the uh park in vegas and it was really tight i mean the the front of my truck and the swing when i was backing in was i mean you could have put a matchbook barely between the front bumper and the car car that i was trying to avoid in front of us so so yeah it was very stressful and a i'm sure well-meaning neighbor came out to introduce herself and just she's singing so what had happened was this woman apparently had not talked to anybody in days or weeks and she had a lot to say and she started telling us her life story and there was lots of conversation well if you are new to this rv life let me tell you that the most stressful part of the life is backing in and setting up you really need to be focused and maybe you've been driving all day so you're a little tired maybe you're you know just you just had a long day so it's important not to be distracted by neighbors and then we had that happen in reverse when we were leaving florence and we were hitching up and there are certain things you have to do like make sure that the the ball is is is closed locked closed and locked yeah right and which in this case didn't happen because we were what yeah we were talking to a neighbor and and you know it was just it was so nice to talk to them and socialize and hope we'd see them again but the timing was bad yeah it was and and we got down the road and and looked at each other and said oh my god did we lock the ball and we and we were on a stretch of road where we couldn't pull off it was a narrow windy mountain road with guard rails there was no shoulder and uh and i was sweating bullets wondering and and then to make it worse not only did we not lock the ball but we forgot to put the safety chain it would have been catastrophic had that had we hit a big enough bump where the trailer would have you know oh i don't even like to think about the potential damage that could have happened so learn from us i mean it's it's really scary to to admit the mistakes that we made even though we use a checklist we just got distracted anyone who's been camping for a long time probably has a story like we have but if you're new to this just know that this is something that you want to look out for and then there's a part b to this unwritten rule and that is if you see people backing in you don't just run over and go hey oh yeah you've got it talk about that woody allen movie oh yeah there's a movie where he's directing somebody to park and the guy hits a hits the car behind him and and woody allen said you got it and walks away yeah yeah so they may be well-meaning people you you don't want to take that responsibility so don't run out there and and offer help yeah they ask you for help and you feel confident off doing it then by all means but just be mindful that if something happens um you know there may be some liability there on on your part so right it's not just looking at the back of the ring but the height you've got if yeah there are trees you want to watch tree limbs i mean yeah yeah you may not know how they're how their rig turns and swings or the delayed reaction i have enough stress backing in my trailer without having somebody else that i don't know telling me what to do well there's some at campground etiquette even for boondocking actually sure well the knocking on the door applies the yeah right not and actually not boondocking right next to them right oh yeah yeah yeah if you're out in the desert and you see one camper you don't pull right up next yeah yes that's right yeah yeah and there's and that's a tough one because i've asked people that that do a lot of boondocking you know what is that distance and nobody really has a number but but uh i think it depends on the density of the area of how many camp campers are already there you just want to match the density yeah so let us know what unwritten rules we may have missed it may be different in your part of the country so absolutely share with us your unwritten rules and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Liz Amazing

Views: 765,664

Keywords: Rv life, Rv living, campground etiquette, unwritten rules of RV living, campground rules

Id: A7iZyf9jqhk

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020