Blog | Page 6 of 6 | NomadicNeighborhood

Last updated: October 20, 2023 A website was not something I imagined creating. This one is here because one small step led to another... My wife, Heather, and I decided on a quick, short notice camping trip to a county park nearby on a holiday weekend, the 4th of July 2021. We know that people make reservations months in advance with good intentions, but sometimes cancel because their plans don’t work out as expected. So, we were not surprised when we checked with the office and learned that there were a few available sites. Since we were local, they suggested that we drive through the park to find open sites and see if any that looked open would work for us. Heather found several good sites but there was one that stood out to her and by the best luck of all lucks, her first choice was available. Like most of the campgrounds we have visited so far (we are new to RVing), the park was laid out in loops with occasional branch roads leading to other loops. The site we picked was at the intersection of one of those branches and setting up was going to be easy. We entered the loop, drove about two hundred yards, and turned right at the intersection. After straightening the rig, we backed up across the road we just turned from, through the intersection, and into our campsite. It was a convenient place to locate a pad and the intersection seemed to be a convenient place to locate a restroom, too. We got to our site earlier than a lot of folks, so we were able to sit outside of our Airstream and watch the park fill up. Our next-door neighbor arrived alone, set up his 5th wheel, then the rest of his family appeared a couple of hours later. The family pulled a pontoon boat between his 5th wheel and our site, just a few feet from our picnic table. It was a nice-looking pontoon as pontoons go and we still had a view into a very large, green, open area off the back side of our campsite so the slight incursion into our space wasn’t a problem for us. We still had a view and when we needed a break from looking over the large, open green space at the other RVs, we simply looked over at the boat and admire the huge pontoon sitting *right there*. Other neighbors rolled in with a convoy – a truck, an RV, and a few extra cars filled with family and friends to help celebrate the weekend. Throughout the weekend we had car and RV traffic driving past us along the loop. Some drove on while others parked in the restroom’s small parking lot next to our site. We watched cars cruising up the branch road, people walking across the front of our campsite to the restroom facility just yards from our hook-up, and walking across the back of the campsite, too. Heather and I watched the comings and goings, we listened, and it wasn’t long before we noticed the similarities between the park’s transient residents and a normal neighborhood. Some kids in a low rider with blue LED under glow lights and a steady bass-beat blaring from the trunk drove by slowly. A family a few sites down on the other side were whooping it up, laughing, dancing, and having a good time. Grills and campfires around us were fired up. The wind was not blowing much so there was a lingering haze that created a memorable campground aesthetic. Smoke from the fires around us carried the aroma of burning stacks of wood, hamburgers, hotdogs, brats, steaks, and marshmallows. As the sun went down, the party lights came on to give our neighborhood some visual personality. We saw strings of multi-colored bulbs hung along the edges of open awnings, strung across the front of campers, outlining the entrance to the campsite, or gently illuminating the underside of the RV. Some of our fellow campers had red-white-and blue American flags made of LED lights on a mesh backing secured to the fronts of their RVs. American flags of all sizes were displayed on flagpoles or planted along the edges of a campsite’s pad. About thirty minutes after sundown, fireworks for the 4th were set off from the dam across the lake and just a mile or so away from our campground. We had a great view. Some of our neighbors tuned into a local radio station that synchronized their playlist with the display, and we all got to share the same thrilling experience. The music was not too loud, and it helped put the exclamation point on the end of an enjoyable holiday. Sometimes people live in a neighborhood they like, sometimes they don’t. Either way, the only constant is the neighborhoods change – almost always slowly. What was certain about our weekend in the park, however, was that this neighborhood was going to change rapidly over the few days we were there. This nomadic neighborhood has a personality all its own and it gave me a story to tell. As I reflected on how to tell the RV story, or if I should tell it, I thought about all the events in my life that I wish I recorded but didn’t. I decided not to let this one pass.