Hello All,
First time out in our new rig comes up next weekend. We're very excited, and, like most newbies have done tons of shopping for 'necessary outfitting'. My question is, now much of the stuff like camp grills, camp stoves, lanterns, chairs, etc. do I need to lock up at night. I understand you can't tell the future, and the stuff is just stuff, but I would hate to wake up in the morning to find stuff missing.
We've camped for over 30 years. We have never had anything stolen from our campsite by people. We leave our chairs, stove, lanterns, fishing equipment ice chests, etc etc out. (The fishing equipment is usually behind the 5ver and not easily seen from the street.) We do use a chain and padlock on the generators. We did have a bear take our ice chest out to the street and help himself to some of our food.
Maybe we've been blessed - but for the most part, we have found the people where we usually camp to be good people.
I just remembered one campground where we woke up one morning and our chairs were missing - and in their place were other chairs. As it turned out, some kids had played "musical chairs" with the entire campground during the night. All over the campground people were laughing as they exchanged their lawn chairs with their neighbors.
DH is usually very observant about people - if he feels like some "characters" are out there, he will be somewhat more careful about what he leaves out -
I really don't worry about it. Generally speaking, the only time we've heard of people having something stolen overnight was at campgrounds that had weak security such as NFS campgrounds. It has never happened to us but it does happen. The perpetrators are usually locals that come through late at night.
2002 Dodge 2500 V10
2008 Wildcat 28RKBS
Honda 2000 gen
TomTom One 3rd edition GPS
Generally you can leave things out. No tool boxes or coolers or anything of real valuable. But chairs, bikes (cheap ones), grills, utensils are OK to be left out. JMHO.
I'm there to be relax and be carefree not to agonize over my stuff. Also I'm too lazy to keep carrying things back and forth. Once an item is out. I leave it out until I'm ready to leave.
Use the dollar rule, If you can't afford to replace it secure it. Plain and simple. A ten dollar chair won't break the bank, will annoy you. A $1,000 generator would had a pretty good impact on my check book. I think you will find that for the most part it's pretty safe, and that a lot of people might say this or that was stolen. But ten to one, it was left behind. JM2Cents Bill
Only problem I've heard of locally was some campers teens going through coolers for beer at the local KOA a coupl years back. Have never had any bad experiences myself.
never had a problem as you look around most everybody is in the same boat with their stuff sitting around also. YOu might hear about stuff missing from time to time but not often it seems.
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