Forum Discussion
SteveRuff
May 06, 2013Explorer
DW and I have spent the past several days sketching out our trip to the Pacific Northwest. We are leaving May 19th, and plan on traveling that area until Sept. We have identified 14 National Parks we intend to visit as well as many many State Parks. Surprisingly, what we have discovered is that it is often economically unfeasible to stay in state parks due to the camping fee being compounded with either a "use" fee or a "vehicle" fee. $25 to $30 a night is certainly a reasonable, even very good, price to pay for a site that might not have sewer hookups but does provide water/electric and perhaps a dump station, but then to add another $5 per vehicle per day and suddenly we are paying $40 a night when full hookup commercial sites are available for less. Of course, many of these facilities offer no hookups at all but still maintain the price structure with the added use or vehicle fee making it impossible to justify unless one feels the need to commune with nature. I have no problem with this style of camping and even enjoy my brief stints at boondocking, but I will choose the National Park using my "Geezer" pass and do it for the $8 to $10 rate. I will not be in any one state long enough to justify buying their annual pass, so, they, in effect, lose my business. What the state system loses goes into the local economy so they are happy, and next year the state fees will need to increase because they have too many empty sites and it costs almost as much to maintain an empty campground as a full one.
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