Drew Cutter asked:

What do most of you do when you go to places like green river , gauley -
rent a cabin , pitch a tent ? Especially if you got 5-8 hour drive. I
can't see getting up early on Saturdays to drive .

Sleep in the vehicle. There are plenty of good spots around the
Gauley, including the parking lot at the base of the dam, and
throughout West Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

I have a full-sized van; a long-bodied Ford Econoline-250 with one
bench seat (which I mounted 12 inches behind the usual position, for
passenger legroom). Thus it seats five, with seatbelts, for day
trips, or twelve plus a bunnie (because it can only carry 11 kayaks in
addition to my canoe) on shuttle. For road trips I like to limit it
to three because it can sleep three comfortably, and because the two
front seats are very comfortable, while the third person can stretch
out, snooze, or whatever, on the bench seat while we're rollin'.

But I've put in over 100,000 miles (of 192,000 total since Nov., 1997)
with no passengers at all. I carry DeLorme maps of every state I
travel through, because DeLorme indicates National Forest and BLM
lands. Anywhere in the Appalachians or the Rockies I have found that
I can pull up a Forest Service road (or BLM road, in the West) 'til I
find a wide spot in the road to park and crash. Every third morning I
pull into a commercial campground and give the $3 for a shower and a
shave.

Don't make the mistake of building a mattress into the back; it really
limits yer flexibility and carrying capacity, since you then have to
keep the back dry, keep wet and muddy boaters off the mattress, etc.;
I just unroll a Thermarest on the floor. Besides, if I had a mattress
built in I couldn't roll my Honda Spirit-750 up a folding aluminum
ramp into the back (I've bolted rings into the inside of the body to
anchor camstraps), and STILL sleep in my usual spot. Makes it a
little tough to get into some of my storage compartments, though.


-Richard, His Kanubic Travesty
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Richard Hopley Winston-Salem, NC, USA
rhopley[at]earthlink[dot]net
Nothing really matters except Boats, Sex, and Rock'n'Roll
rhopley[at]wfubmc[dot]edu
OK, OK; computer programming for scientific research also matters
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