Overnight in a parking lot

There are advantages and disadvantages to taking your home with you wherever you go. The one advantage is you don’t need to get a hotel room as you travel long distances from Rv resort to RV resort (or even back to home), but the disadvantage is you can’t park just anywhere to sleep.

On the road

Thankfully there are a few options other than finding a vacant spot in a campground on your route. One such option is the parking lot of a business that allows free overnight RV parking. Two such businesses that we have used are Cracker Barrel and Wal-mart. We have spent the night in each of these at some point.

On our recent drive back to Pittsburgh, we spent the night at a Cracker Barrel in TN. The nice thing about choosing Cracker Barrel is it’s a great place to go for a good meal, and we usually can pick up some yummy snacks in the store too. There are a few drawbacks to the parking lot vs a campground, the first being no hookups. Thankfully with a full tank of fresh water we are able to go a few days washing dishes, flushing the toilet, and even taking a quick shower. For power, we do have a battery and solar panels on the roof. You just need to be carefully about not having too many things drawing current at once, like only run one AC, no microwave, or hairdryer. (all learned thru trial and error). Secondly, you can’t always put even one slide out, which makes it tight quarters for those nights.

Tight quarters for the night

Still, sleeping in a parking lot is faster, easier, and cheaper when the goal is to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.