OK, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to describe a little more in detail exactly what it means to live in an RV in San Diego.
By law (at least in San Diego), we are allowed to park in parking lots at the beaches, bays, cliffs and parks except between the hours of 2AM and 4AM. We are permitted to park on the side of any city street for up to 72 hours straight.
On days when Ben has to work early in the morning, we usually park Tater on the street in front of the hotel where he works the night before. I work remotely from my laptop, so we either get a room at the hotel or I can work from the RV as long as we are within wi-fi range. Eventually, we will have satellite internet but for now I have to work wherever there is free wireless.
Once Ben is out of work, we hit the road. Sometimes we go back to Ocean Beach (always my first choice because everyone knows Ocean Beach rules!). Sometimes we go to Shelter Island (nice and quiet and right on the bay…lots of older, upstanding RV folk stay here). Sometimes we park on Catalina (between Tony’s house and Catalina Lounge… convenient, but inevitably some punk kids will bang on our door or window at night). We also hit up other cool neighborhoods and places we’d like to check out… or go camping and/or check out sites in and around San Diego County (lakes, mountains, desert… anything nature-like that we might want to see).
The best parking spots are on roads that aren’t heavily traveled. Preferably, we will park near a baseball field, an embankment, a hotel or parking lot. If we must park in a residential area, we will park near an apartment complex where there are many tenants, or a house with a tall fence… basically anyplace where we won’t be bothering a homeowner. I know firsthand what it is like to have an RV parked in front of your residence and it can be very intrusive and irritating. So we try to stick to areas where no one will bother us or be bothered by us…and we rarely stay in the same place two nights in a row. We never stay in a parking lot at night because we’d be required to move Tater to the street at 2AM, and no one wants to get up at 2AM to move.
As you can see in the photos below, RV living is quite common in San Diego. We almost always have RV neighbors, no matter where we park.
