Not that Ruth and I are experts at RV Park camping! We much prefer boondocking. But we have spent a lot of time workcamping at two different KOA kampgrounds. We spend 6 weeks at the one in Cavendish, PEI, and 6 months at the one in Kingston, Ontario. In fact, we're going back to the one in Kingston when we return from our Florida trip! We feel this amount of experience has taught us a great deal about RV Park etiquette.
One day, early in the summer of 2008, we were parked up in our spot at the Cavendish KOA.
We had a fairly large site at the Cavendish KOA. You can see the shadow on the ground of the motorhome parked in the site next to us. Well one day, not long after we had just started there, people who were parked in the row opposite us on the other side of the road started to walk across our site in order to get to the bathroom. Not everybody, in fact far from it...just one or two per day. Everyone else took the extra 30 seconds to walk around on the road.
We ended up moving the picnic table so that it blocked the part they were walking through between the little tree and Sherman. This helped fix the problem, but one day Ruth was outside in the front, and a woman who could have used the extra 30 seconds of exercise decided to cross through our site. Ruth stopped her and mentioned that it was our site she was walking through. The woman says "well I'm only going to the bathroom", and Ruth says "well could you please walk around the way everyone else does". The woman gave Ruth a look, and exclaimed "hmph, somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed!".
We have since learned that there are a few people who simply don't care if someone walks through their site. But the majority of RV'ers feel that they have paid rent for that little piece of property, and feel like their space is being invaded if others walk through it nonchalantly.
Good post about camping etiquette!
ReplyDeleteI don't like to see heads bobbing past or suddenly hear voices under my open windows as folks cut through. Also it's too easy for your outside stuff to *walk off* with folks who cut through right next to your rig. If given the distance and boundaries, it's less likely to have your stuff missing.
If someone comes too close to our rig, our dogs set up a ruckus too. Often that is enough to teach the intruders to go around, but on the other hand, it disturbs other campers nearby who hear our dogs barking. So keeping the peace is a fine line between keeping out inconsiderate folks. If they walk on the road, the dogs are quiet and watch them walk past, so they are good campground doggies.
We too mostly boondock, or at least rustic national forest campgrounds with widely spaced sites and natural woods in between sites... not too often you get folks cutting through.
Definitely worth typing that one for sure, I can't tell you how many campsites we have been at where we were the ones closer to the bathroom and people just "felt" like cutting through our site to get there.
ReplyDeleteI too, made a comment to one gentleman (using the word lightly) and he was not shy in telling me that the "campsites are for everyone" and I did not OWN the campsite so he can walk wherever he wanted.
I felt like cutting through his site a few times, but my manners taught me better.
I also remember when we had the Hybrid Travel Trailer, that people would cut through the site in the middle of the night, freaking me out in the dark.
Not nice!
I think boondocking is much better anyway!