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
