Travels with Tosh — A Journal; Ep. 40

Thursday, 712 December 2024

Tosh, one of the things I have noticed and not written about are the mini-business models going on here in the Long Term Visitor Area, LTVA, of the desert southwest that straddles the California/Arizona state line. I shall change that today.

As you can imagine, having been with me for the journey, there are many varieties of camper here in the LTVA. Here are some of them:

**Those who, like me, live in a tent, and have tent storage;

**Those who sleep in a car, and have a tent for storage;

**Those who have what I call ‘hard-sided’ units, such as a van or outfitted former school bus — and they come in any size — called a “schoolie” in the long-term camping vernacular;

**Those who have a for-sure recreational vehicle, whether a monster Class-A diesel pusher, a Class-B, or a Class-C, that is capable of self-support, meaning they have wastewater and fresh water tanks on board; plus,

**Just about any combination of these.

People can be very creative when it comes to outfitting a vehicle they own or picked up for a small price that needed repair.

Now, as you recall, the rules here at the LTVA are pretty simple. This is 3,000 acres of dispersed camping, meaning there are no established campsites, and three toilet facilities; two of them are full bathrooms with flush toilets and sinks, and one is a vault toilet, the most common kind in public land campsites.

Self-contained vehicles — those with the wastewater and fresh water supplies on board, plus tanks to hold the human waste — can camp anywhere they want. They must then figure out how they will refill and empty their tanks when needed.

Those in tents, like me, must camp within 500 feet of a bathroom facility, to protect the sensitive ecosystem here. I have seven containers for water, which I fill on a regular basis, and use the toilet facilities to brush teeth and wash my face. I carry my garbage once a week or so to the dumpsters provided by the Bureau of Land Management, the BLM, the organisation that oversees the acreage.

I have no difficulty managing any of it, but because self-contained units can park their rigs anywhere in the 3,000 acres, what differences are there for them? How do they dump their waste tanks, and garbage, and fill their fresh water tanks, some of which…