Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tuesday, July 23, 2002
Seattle, WA
by M.L. Lyke

MOUNT VERNON -- Forget the caw of the raven. These campers wake to the whoosh of highway traffic and rumbling generators.

And instead of America's amber waves of grain and purple mountain's majesty, they stare at its dumpsters, abandoned shopping carts, the back of a Home Depot and, everywhere, asphalt.

Glorious, no-fuss asphalt.

"If you camp in a grassy spot and it rains, you've got mud. Here, you've got blacktop. It's clean. There's no mud and sand and dirt," says Minnesota retiree Jan Filipek, in one of eight RVs hauled onto this Wal-Mart parking lot off Interstate 5 early on a weekday evening.

By night's end, another half-dozen recreational vehicles, sleek fifth-wheels, truck campers, converted vans and beater cars loaded to bursting will be settled in for a free night's stay.

To the concern of some campground owners nationwide, a growing number of RVers across the country roll into Wal-Marts every night for this no-cost, no-frills, no-hookup sleepover.

Wal-Mart can be a last-resort stop for weary road-trippers, or a first-resort destination for travelers who plan cross-country trips hopping store to store, making new friends and meeting up with old ones who have a Wal-Mart and a highway exit number for a rendezvous address.

"We've probably stayed at 500 Wal-Marts in two years," says Thom Hansen, a full-time RVer who ventured south from Vancouver, B.C., in his 40-foot American Eagle for a three-day local shopping expedition with his significant other, Jane Robbins, and two cocker spaniels, Anthony and Merrily (think "life is but a dream"). "It's great to know you can drive 20 miles down the highway, and there's another Wal-Mart," says Hansen, a retired elementary school principal.

Doug Hawes-Davis, part of a Montana filmmaking duo that documented the Wal-Mart phenomenon in an upcoming film called "This is Nowhere," estimates tens of thousands of RVers use the parking lots each year. He suggests they represent a new American community, one attuned to the predictability and homogeneity that the more than 2,500 Wal-Marts nationwide provide. "Why do people go to a place just like the last place they were?" he asked.

Some RVers stay a night, some a few days. A handful hunker down until they get booted out. In self-contained rigs that stretch 40 feet, with pop-out dining rooms, wall-to-wall carpet, refrigerators, ovens, queen-size beds, TVs, VCRs and full-service bathrooms, these Americans are home, home on the road, where the deer and the antelope once played.

'Really good customers'

When they pull into Wal-Mart, some are ready to let their hair down. "We've seen people sitting around the asphalt telling campfire stories," says Tom Williams, a Wal-Mart spokesman. "They pull up their camp chairs, pull out their awnings." The giant retail chain, which opened its first store in Washington in the early '90s, has no official written policy governing RVers. Unofficially, Wal-Mart opens its corporate arms to them. Unless managers decide to yank the welcome mat, or local ordinances prohibit overnight parking, the lots are open to RVs. Even superstores with "no overnight parking" posted may be lenient toward gunkholing land yachts. Says one Florida Wal-Mart manager: "Who am I to say you can't shop for 24 hours?"

Wal-Mart, which was named the third-most-admired company in America last year by Fortune magazine, even puts out a special edition of the Rand McNally Road Atlas for its big-wheel visitors, listing the locales and amenities of Wal-Marts in all 50 states and Canada. With more than 30 million RV enthusiasts nationwide, and increasing numbers of travelers preferring road to air travel in post-9/11 America, the company knows what's good for it.

"The RVers are really, really good customers, to be honest," says Williams. "We jokingly refer to them as shoppers who take a long time to make up their minds." If Wal-Mart rakes in dough inside, campers save it on the blacktop outside. The average cost of an overnight stay at an RV park in the United States now averages $25. "We have some people, when they hear the price, ask, 'Where is the nearest Wal-Mart?'" says Linda Campbell, manager of the Blue Sky RV Park in Issaquah, where it costs $30 for one to two people.

Some new "premier" resorts run even higher. The fanciest may offer swimming pools, video arcades, 72-channel cable TV, golf courses and dances. One park in Las Vegas even has its own concierge. For fixed-income retirees living in a gas-guzzling land yacht for six or seven months out of the year, luxuries such as pinball machines and swimming pools can be bank-busters.

"We don't need them. We're not going to go anyway," says Jerry Filipek, who prefers hanging in a Wal-Mart parking lot for a few days, stocking up on sale items, cruising the area in the pull-behind Ford Explorer, then checking into a paid park with hookups for a night to empty holding tanks.

Although most local RV park managers say they aren't feeling the heat, campground owners in other parts of the country complain the Wal-Mart boondocking is cutting into their business.

'Something of a game'

David Gorin, president of the Virginia-based National Association of RV Parks and Campgrounds, estimates the practice siphons off as much as 10 percent of nationwide business. "For a lot of people, it's become something of a game," he says. "Let's see how long we can do this... let's see how much money we can save.'" RV parks, he points out, have to be licensed. Wal-Mart doesn't. In Whitehorse, a popular destination in the Yukon, RV park owners urged the city council to intervene, complaining some parks were half-full while the Wal-Mart parking lot boomed.

"We can't compete with free," one owner said. Lawyers argued successfully that Wal-Mart broke no rules. Williams, Wal-Mart's spokesman, says there really isn't any competition. "All we offer is a parking slot." Editorialists and e-chatters at some RV Web sites suggest Wal-Mart boondockers can help by limiting stays to one night -- foregoing awnings and asphalt barbecues, then move on to a paid campground.

A few blast squatters as "freeloaders" and warn they may ruin the free-stay privilege for everyone. Most Wal-Marting RVers, such as Ken Quin, use it as a quick drop-off. "We stay only one night, only on our way from Point A to Point B," says Quin, a Florida retiree overnighting in the Mount Vernon Wal-Mart en route to a campground in Black Diamond. Quin and his wife, Doreen, who estimate that this year alone, they'll put 13,000 miles on their 36-foot maroon-and-white rig with the "Gone plum crazy" sign, don't like to see squatters in the Wal-Mart lots.

"It detracts from everything," says Ken Quin. "You get the broken-down old campers, the people who move in and act like they own the place." Squatting has become so prevalent at certain Wal-Marts, some store managers have had to crack down. In a lot in San Diego, neighbors complained RVers were opening holding tanks in the parking lot. And at a congested Wal-Mart in Anchorage, where some boondockers have parked themselves spring until fall, one camper was spotted over the weekend sticking his holding tank hose down one of the lot's storm drains.

"The store in Anchorage had to move out a lot of RVs," says Williams. "The manager had little rules and regulations he gave to everyone, asking people not to stay more than two days. But people were using it to live there. We hate to do that." Williams describes Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton's long policy of "aggressive hospitality."

"Our culture is to treat every customer as a guest." That howdy, can-I-help-ya culture draws RVers. "Guests" at some parking lots have reported Wal-Mart "people greeters" actually knock on metal doors in the a.m. to tell them the coffee's on. Others say security guards have escorted them from store to door in the dark.

Time is on their side.

In return, some RVers pick up trash in the lots, gather all the wayward carts, keep an eye out for suspicious activity and shop like crazy. They're grateful for the freebie, grateful for the convenience. "At Wal-Mart, you don't have to have a reservation, or stick to a schedule," says Hansen, the retired elementary school principal. "One of the beauties of living in a motor home is that time doesn't mean anything."

They're also grateful for the security. Rest stops, many say, can be dangerous. Wal-Mart leaves the lights on for you. "We feel more comfortable here with all the cars going by than in a desolate area where you don't see a car for three or four hours. ... I actually like the traffic," says Jan Filipek, on the road for eight months with her husband, Jerry, and a 14-year-old cat named Kitty, curled inside a green plastic basket beneath the sign "One spoiled rotten cat lives here."

Welcome to camping for the 21st century.

The asphalt's easy in, easy out. Fast food outlets and malls, just like the ones at home, are likely nearby. The great indoors awaits just across the blacktop, where aisles and aisles of Wal-Mart everyday low prices and rollback specials await. Never mind that the smoky green perfume of a campfire is replaced by the oily burn of diesel fumes, and that the only wildlife in sight is a neighbor in a fifth wheel adjusting his satellite dish.

The price is right, from sea to shining sea.

"This is nice, but you wouldn't want to stay more than three, four, five days," says Jerry Filipek, looking out the window of a 38-foot Monaco "Windsor" at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Mount Vernon. He's thumbing through his modified Rand McNally, getting restless for the road, for another town, for another Wal-Mart parking lot.

"We just wake up in the morning and find out which way the wind is blowing," he says. "Then we say, 'Hey, let's go thataway.'"