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Jeremy spent the first few months of the shutdown working 7 days a week. About mid-June, his bosses finally allowed him to take weekends off, which was a relief. We could finally get out of the house for a camping trip!
Unfortunately, Shenandoah NP and Blue Ridge Parkway campgrounds hadn’t reopened, and after we thought about it, we realized that we didn’t really want to camp in a crowded campground anyway.
What is HipCamp?
About the time I was looking for a campground, I happened across the mention of an app called HipCamp on Instagram. I followed the link and was intrigued by what I discovered. HipCamp is basically AirBnB for your yard or driveway. You can list your yard or driveway for camping: RV, tent, or both. Many of the listings I reviewed read similar to an Airbnb listing, with mentions of area attractions and add-ons offered by the host.
While it is an app, I’m old school and prefer a larger screen for looking at things. So I went to the website to look for potential sites. This way I could open multiple tabs and quickly compare locations, number of camping sites at each location, and area amenities. I did use the app when for communicating with our host, and he was great at responding promptly.
We have to stay within a two hour radius of our home (Jeremy’s work is pretty strict- go outside the two hour limit and you’re in quarantine for 14 days), but I still found a lot of options.
I ended up booking a site right on a river, at the edge of a field. Hosts set their prices, and I thought ours were reasonable. We paid $35 a night for two nights, plus we prepaid for a bundle of firewood. Add in the HipCamp fee, and we paid $88 total for two nights. It was a little more than if we’d gone to Shenandoah NP, but we didn’t mind paying a little more for all that our campsite offered.
Our HipCamp Experience
We were pleasantly surprised when we arrived and realized we’d have even more space than we thought. Our host had a couple tent sites also along the river, but we couldn’t see them from our RV site, and they couldn’t hear our generator. There were no hookups, which wasn’t a problem for us. Our host provided a composting toilet for tent campers to use, but we used the bathroom in our RV.
We loved playing in the river, sitting in the breeze, and relaxing. The boys ran around and we didn’t worry about the noise they made or them running through other campsites. Crowded campgrounds aren’t great for our rambunctious, high energy children who need some space to roam. Our host also had some adorable baby pigs that we got to spend some time with.
All in all, we had a great experience booking a campsite with HipCamp and a fun, relaxing weekend as a family. The only downside we experienced was the poison ivy plants on the edges of our campsite. I’m pretty sure we all managed to tramp through it at least once. Fortunately, only minimal breakouts occurred, so that’s a win.
We also appreciated not being right next to other campers and being able to maintain social distancing. It would have been much harder to do this at a larger campground.
Want to try out HipCamp?
If you’re ready to give HipCamp a try, use this link to get $10 off your first booking. I’ll receive a small commission after you go on your first camping trip, at no additional cost to you. If you’ll be in central Virginia and want to know where we stayed, send me a message and I’ll share our host’s info.
If you have the space available and want to earn some extra money hosting campers on your property, go here to learn more about being a HipCamp host. Use this link to sign up, and you’ll receive $100 after your first booking. (I’ll also receive a commission, at no cost to you.) We don’t have the space at our current home, but I can see us becoming HipCamp hosts when we relocate in a couple years.
Have you used HipCamp before? How was your experience?
