The frugal traveler looks at a hotel and sees extortion. Even a hostel is unnecessary, and a campground isn’t much of an improvement.Twenty dollars a night to sleep on the ground? The frugal traveler knows better.
The frugal traveler turns to stealth camping. Any place can be a campsite, if you lower your standards enough. Enter the rest stop, the semi-flat mountaintop, the park bench in the middle of a city. It might be inconvenient, and it might be illegal, but the frugal traveler knows a free night is worth it.
Stealth camping comes in three flavors:
The Miserable
The Dangerous
The Magnificent
Back at Tim Hortons, I scoured the Internet for camping forums and climbing blogs. Almost everyone, it seemed, stayed at the campgrounds around the lake. A tent site cost thirty dollars, but thirty dollars also meant access to indoor plumbing, fifty-cent showers, and a laundry room—and after two days of climbing, those perks held some appeal. We almost paid.
Maps do not mark nameless places. Guidebooks rarely print recommendations of ambiguous legality. So the frugal traveler must listen to vague rumors and offhand comments. Although they carry more risk, they also carry more potential than any official source.
I was eating my last donut when I found a trip report from 2012. It mentioned an unfinished neighborhood on the east side of Skaha Lake, where developers had cleared a few acres, bulldozed it into lots, and laid out roads and driveways. They would have built houses, too, if only someone had shown interest in buying them. But back in 2012, the developers’ problem had been a stealth camper’s solution.
The blog contained one picture of the abandoned neighborhood. The lake appeared in the background, and from the angle, I could guess the approximate location. I went to Google Earth to get a better idea. I found one housing development in the hills east of Skaha Lake that had been unfinished at the time of the satellite photos, and it looked similar to the place on the blog. It gave Mike and I a destination, and it gave us an opportunity.
The frugal traveler will see what the typical traveler does not: the everyday spots that even the locals overlook; the places that are not designed to impress; the places that are, in their own way, still wild. This type of sightseeing is not safe, nor is it comfortable, but it is authentic.
The campgrounds stuck to Skaha Lake’s western side. We drove on its eastern side, where much of the land had already been developed. Beach access here came at a price: four hundred thousand dollars for a house with a view, a few hundred thousand more for a house on the water. Mike and I were looking for a nameless road that matched my memory of Google Street View.
Ten kilometers later, we found one. It led away from the lake and up a valley. We rose above the houses along the shore, and at the top of the road, we a found a housing development. It matched the one from the 2012 report—but the place had changed. There was one house, now, perched at the top of the hill, and two cars waited in the driveway.
Mike and I pulled into one of the empty lots.
“Do we stay anyway?” Mike asked.
“It’s the only house here. They might not even see us.”
“If anyone says something, we can say we came here to watch the sunset.”
And it was a good place to watch the sunset. We were parked on top of a bluff, without trees or houses to block our view. We could see all of Skaha Lake below us, and Pentiction tucked away to the north, and the sun dropping toward the hills far to the west. It was a view you could not find at a lakeside campground. It was a view you could not find at a $600,000 lakeside mansion.
Mike and I ate dinner on the bluff. We sat on a log and cooked a warm meal over a camp stove, watching the lake change colors with the sun. Someone had built a firepit there, its rocks black from past fires. Bits of dry wood littered the ground. Once the sun set, we started a fire of our own. We sat close to the flames and talked about books, and women, and God.
The frugal traveler possesses a specific set of priorities. He values excitement more than security. Self-reliance more than dignity. Knowledge more than convenience. When assessing his dreams and finances, if he finds that the two do not align, the frugal traveler will travel anyway. He does not travel because of money—he travels despite it.
NPR called Josh “a modern-day Jack Kerouac” after he wrote about his 7,000-mile, no-money hitchhiking journey through the United States. After hitchhiking, he found homes in the Pacific Northwest, the Episcopal Church, and the post calvin. He now helps authors introduce their books to the world as the marketing manager for HarperCollins Leadership, builds websites as the owner of Branded Look LLC, and makes trail maps as the owner of Where We’ve Been Trail Maps. Josh’s writing has appeared in places such as The Emerson Review, Front Porch Review, and Perspectives.
