Let’s say you’ve got all this covered.

Unwritten rules you need to follow

Here are a few of those unwritten rules you’ll learn eventually. Campground etiquette is pretty straightforward – you don’t let your dog bark, your kids annoy the neighbors or your generator run too early in the morning or too late in the evening. You put out campfires carefully, pick up after your dog, and sit out in front of the rig in your folding chairs a lot. (OK, that’s not really a rule, but it’s by far the best way to meet everyone in the area).

You never dump black water anywhere except a black water dump, ever. And you don’t dump gray water anywhere except the same place. You don’t unplug your neighbor’s power cord (you might be sharing the same power source), and you don’t make a big fuss if you must arrive late at night or leave early in the morning. (My pet peeve? A big old diesel engine firing up – and warming up for fifteen minutes- a foot or two from my bed as the rig next door prepares to leave at o dark thirty). You drive slowly through campgrounds, don’t take shortcuts through a site when you’re out walking, and leave room for your neighbor’s slide out and awning. Oh, there are lots of dos and don’ts, but you’ll find that every one just boils down to common sense and neighborliness.

RV joys and unexpected moments

And here’s what you get in return:

• On the beach in Baja you’ll meet an amazingly beautiful young woman who keeps a mean dog, fights with her boyfriend and knows the words to every 50’s song ever written.
• You’ll be taught by a total stranger how to fillet a salmon caught less than 10 minutes ago in the Alaskan sea and then cook it for him in your rig.
• You’ll stand in a grove of fragrant pines and watch in silent awe as the aurora borealis swirls overhead.
• You’ll wake in the middle of the night to the haunting scream of a cougar on the hunt in the wilds of Wyoming.
• You’ll park and open all the windows and curtains on all sides of your rig and let yourself be enveloped by the sounds and smells of the ocean, just a few feet away. 
• You’ll go to bed one night on the shores of a beautiful lake and wake to find yourself up to the hubcaps in water from the tide.
• You’ll find a little churchyard in rural France to spend the night and wake at dawn by someone pounding on your door because you’ve parked in the middle of a farmer’s market.
• You’ll find yourself without a place to stay in Belgium and be invited to spend the night with a traveling circus.
•  You’ll drive through a small Maine town and see that a fair is going on and end up spending a week in their parking lot.
• You’ll meet a young couple in a tiny Canadian café and be invited to boondock at their beautiful farm.
• You’ll break down in Oklahoma and pull into a campground along the freeway and the mayor will come along and invite you to dinner at his house.
• You’ll wake up to smells of fresh-made bread in an outdoor clay oven on a beach in Mexico.
• You’ll have people on street corners shouting to be invited for lunch when they get a whiff of the bread baking away in your bread maker as you pass by.

And you’ll be amazed and sometimes positively stunned at the constantly changing, ever exciting, incredible world we are privileged to live in.

But mostly, you’ll make your own unique memories. And you’ll bless the day you turned around and went back to talk to the guy camping along that beautiful river.