What do you leave behind when gone for the day?

Collapsible cone

I carry one of these, since we usually travel light and seldom have things sitting outside. I wrote "occupied" on it with a marker. Takes up very little space when stored.

Mother in law or a kid seem to be good choices depending on the day.

We've seen people leave a chair, another had a sign made that said "occupied" and we've been at campgrounds that provided a sign or orange cones for campers to use.

I leave behind a small orange traffic cone with a sign that says occupied. I usually put that in the driveway area. Typically I also leave a folding chair. Even with those steps, I have had issues. In Rainier I returned for the day to find someone just about finishing erecting their tent in my campsite. They thought I "left". In Canada I had the same. They were desperate and I actually gave them my spot and stayed in parking lot where I could do night photography. I had a similar incident at Mammoth, Yellowstone, where the campground host got confused.

I think there were a couple of other incidents which I forgot or suppressed in my mind. It is a sinking feeling to return to a full campground late in the evening and find your site taken.

Two cheap camp chairs chained to the camp table or a tree with a note “occupied” pinned to one. I also take a photo of my “paid” tag on the post.

In fifteen years of fulltiming, we've never had a problem leaving chairs, mats, etc., behind while out for service or whatever.

This summer we left one evening to travel a brief distance to camp overnight where we were having service work done. We were booked at our camp for the summer and didn't think twice about leaving our two chairs and mats behind. We knew the mowers would take the opportunity to mow our site so we put everything up on the picnic table. We told the camp owners and our friend who would be mowing.

We arrived back the following day around 4 p.m. and found our stuff was all GONE. No mats, no chairs. I was certainly miffed. Our mats were easy. . . the next door neighbor had them. We walked over and retrieved the one. The other was at his door and my DH didn't think it was ours, but he came out and very apologetically brought it back to us. He was so totally embarrassed, thinking we had gone off and left them behind. But he didn't know what had happened to our chairs. We drove all around camp, but didn't see them out. We told the owner and the friend who mowed, but they were no where to be found.

Later we had to go out for a bit. When we returned, there were our chairs stacked neatly on the picnic table where we had left them. So someone close by had to have taken them and saw that we were back. To this day, no one has come forward to admit having taken them, but glad they are back.

We have a small motorhome that we sometimes take and we don't tow a toad with it. We made up signs that say "Site Occupied" and place them on the electric pedestal and the picnic table. We made two more and keep those in the big motorhome now and put them out. We used old license plates and spray painted them, then used plastic stick on letters and put some light chain to hang them with. The next time we went out for service, we used those and nothing disappeared.

Dale

Before I got my TT, I would put an old lawn chair in the middle of my camping site entrance with a sign saying "This site is paid for and is occupied for today."

Put a tablecloth on the table, leave some stuff on the table, leave a couple of chairs around the fire pit, that's the minimum, but if you're really paranoid about this pitch a small tent.

We used to leave our rug, aluminum table and grill. "Used" too until some low life stole our aluminum table and took the rest to ranger station and said we left all our stuff. That was at a Army Corp park in Virginia. Grrr....now we don't leave anything.

We just leave our 125 pound jet black chow lab mix behind, usually inside the RV. He's friendly with us, not very friendly with strangers. Never had an issue