A New Home Base?

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you know that we were going to check the campgrounds to the north of Iowa City to see if they would indeed open on April first.

Well we checked and they didn’t. And even worse than that, all campgrounds in Iowa are now closed because of Coronavirus. And that includes our lovely spot by the river that we’ve repeatedly come back to a number of times over the past few weeks.

So now what? How do we find a place to park our rig legally and securely?

We had seen a lot of farms on the road south of town. Many with a house, several garages, a barn, a few silos and lots of space. If only we could meet an owner somehow and strike up a good rapport and be offered a place alongside the garage where we’d be out of their way.

But we had no idea how to go about meeting people, short of pulling into their driveway and knocking, but neither of us was really comfortable doing that –

“Hi! You don’t know us from Adam, but here we are barging into your life unannounced and we’d like to park on your land and have access to your electricity, water and a bathroom. Is that OK with you?”

Still we thought there must be some way, so this is what we tried:

• • Craigslist
  • Facebook housing groups
  • And believe it or not, an online vacation rental website…

I started posting the following request on all of these platforms:

Looking for a place to park and live in our Camper Van, April through June 2020. My wife is a Travel Nurse and she has a temporary job at University of Iowa hospital and we would like to be within 10 miles of the hospital for easy commute by bicycle. Near a bike path would be great.

Ideally we would like to have a “home base” where we can securely leave our van when riding our bikes (or leave our bikes when away in the van), and plug into electricity and also have access to drinking water (we have a hose) and if possible, a place to dump our grey water and black water. (a bathroom or outhouse would be perfect)

Our van is a self-converted Sprinter. Here’s a little more info about who we are: www.TimShannonLTD.com

And at first we didn’t get much response. It took several days for a Facebook group to accept my request to join.

I got one response from Craigslist but there were no utilities at all – just a vacant lot on the side of a road with a few other vehicles parked there (and nowhere level for us to park that I could see).

Another response on Craigslist was from a woman who was very sweet and offered her driveway, but there was no acceptable safe way to dump our waste, and the electrical was way out of code and not safe for us to use.

And many vacation rental hosts replied that they wouldn’t be able to accommodate us and politely declined.

But one host was extremely helpful. She couldn’t accommodate us either but she had access to a Facebook network of, well I’m not even sure what the network was. She put a request out and over the next couple of hours, she was flooded with offers to help us out.

– a woman in quarantine riding out the pandemic with her boyfriend (which leaves her home empty)

– a family with a garage and an extra bathroom wanting to help out

– a woman who’s brother is moving out of the basement because he’s being deployed and she could use help with rent now

– and many more…

We got connected with one of them and it looks like we might have a place! Just need to confirm this afternoon that the electrical is going to work, but the house looks newer so we’re thinking it’s probably OK.

And just this morning we received “The Knock” from a policeman very politely informing us that we were parked on private property and would have to move (we didn’t realize it was private – it looked like a county road to a soccer park complex that’s closed due to Covid-19), so this place we’ve now found comes at the perfect time!