About a year and a half ago, we started talking about getting a camper and going camping. At the time, it was early in the planning phase of our life plan. We started looking at floor plans online and talking between the two of us. We also started talking to our kids to get their feelings on the matter. Two of the three of our kids were very excited to do it with us. Our middle child was a totally different story though.

She was very adamant about not wanting to go because she didn’t like bugs and the house that we live in was full of memories that she didn’t want to lose. At the time we were only talking about going for a weekend or two a month, but she still didn’t want to have anything to do with it. It wasn’t until later that we started talking about living full time in an RV. When that dream started though, her devotion to staying in our home intensified.

When we got our camper and went camping for the first time though, she changed her tune and all of them started on the “I don’t wanna go homes.”   The kids absolutely love being in the camper, they even wanted to stay in the camper when we got home. Even our middle child totally changed her tune and now wants to live in our camper full time. So, I guess, when you start loving your camper more than your home, it’s time to hitch up and hit the road full time.

How to combat the “I don’t want to go homes.”

Plan your next stay

Before we bought our membership in a local private campground, we were limited financially, to about one weekend a month. This gave us two weekends a month to choose from because of my husband’s work schedule. While we were camping we looked around at other campgrounds to stay at or if we liked the park we were in and wanted to stay there again, we would make a reservation for our next month’s outing. 

Since now we have a membership into a local campground, and our children love it there, we have a little more flexibility into when we can go and how long we can stay. The campground we bought into is close to my husband’s work, so he can work while we are camping. We can also stay up to three weeks at a time for the same price as we could stay somewhere else for a few days. This gives us more freedom on when we can go camping.

Whether you are just a weekend warrior or a full time RVer, make reservations for your next location as soon as possible. This allows you to have a better selection on where to go, when to go and some parks even let you choose which spot you would like. 

Having your next reservation made before you leave gives you the opportunity to tell your kids when you are getting ready to go home when their next adventure will be. This helps some with the “I don’t want to go homes”. 

Research New Places

If you do not work remotely and can’t just travel wherever, you are probably going to be limited to the distance from home you can travel when you are going on a camping weekend without taking a day off of work. Luckily, for us, my husband works 12 hour shifts. This gives him a three day weekend every other week so it gives us some extra time to travel and stay. However, if you still have a Monday through Friday 8-5 job, you will be limited to travel distance and time. However, maybe on your camping weekend you can take an extra day off or only work half a day on your Friday.

Keeping this in mind, look for new campgrounds within your driving distance area that you can stay at. Some places will have more options than others, some areas may only have a few. However many you do have, check them out online while you are camping. Look at what amenities they offer, what is going on in the area when you plan on camping next. Maybe there is a carnival scheduled for a certain weekend that you can camp on and that can be a day outing. Maybe the campground has a chili cookoff and you want to go then to enter your chili or partake in what others make in the cookoff. 

Just remember, camping is fun, so do your best to make it even more so.

Don’t Think About It

The last thing that you want to do when it is getting close to time to go home from a camping trip is to dwell on that fact. No matter how badly you might not want to leave, there will come a time when you don’t have a choice. Some campgrounds will let you stay as long as you want, charging you a monthly rent. Others may not give the option to stay more than a month at a time, or maybe even less than that. 

When we signed up for the private resort membership where we stay at, at the very most you can stay for is three weeks at a time at no cost (other than the cost of the membership). However, you can do a week buyout and stay for seven weeks, but then you have to leave for at least a week. 

At another local campground, they do not offer monthly rentals for anything more than a few months, and then it is only under special circumstances. Even then there isn’t anymore of a discount than he gives for a week (buy 6 nights, get one free). 

One way or another, there is going to come a time when it will be time to leave. When that time comes, it is best to try and keep your kids, and you, thinking about the positives. Maybe you will come back soon? Maybe you will be going to a different campground? Whatever you have to do to keep leaving off your mind and keep it on the fun you’re having and the memories you are making. 

Capture Your Memories

The main reason that our middle child gave when asked why she didn’t want to live in a camper and sell our house was because of the memories that she has had there. I think this is also one of the driving factors for not wanting to go home when we go camping. 

So while you are camping there, capture your memories of your time spent. Take pictures, make crafts, do videos, etc. With everything going digital now and most people always having a good quality camera in their pocket, taking pictures is one of the easiest ways to capture those memories.

Digital Storage

With those pictures, there are several things that you can do with them from there. You can simply dump them onto your computer or onto a flash drive to save them. If you have an IPhone, you can get a flash drive, like this one, that has a lightning connector on one end and a regular USB on the other. You can plug this flash drive directly into your phone and download the pictures to it. You can also get USB drives with USB-C connections for newer android phones or tablets. 

You could also upload your photos to an online drive like Google Drive, Dropbox, or Microsoft Onedrive. Each of them have free accounts that allow you to upload between two and five gigabytes of storage. Anything over that you will have to pay for extra storage. The good thing about these are that all your pictures will be stored in a secure server that can be accessed from anywhere.

Another option that you can use, is your own personal cloud drive, like this one. We use one of these for our pictures. It is hooked into our home network and we have an app on our phone that once we open it, it will automatically start uploading any new pictures to that drive. As long as our home network is up, it can be accessed from anywhere.

Photo Books

If something physical is more your speed, I recently found out about a website that you can make photo books on. There are several options that you can choose from to have either a one off photo book, or one that is automatically made and sent to you at a regular interval. You can make photo books from your phone or even connect your account to an instagram or Facebook account. If you do this, you just have to post your pictures to one of them and once it reaches 60 pages worth of pictures, it will automatically print the book and send it to you. You can choose several different styles of books as well as pages. You can edit the book before it prints to exclude certain pictures as well. They also have what they call a baby guarantee, where they will reprint it for free if your photo book “gets too much baby love”.

Scrap Books

If you are an old fashioned kind of person or one that just likes crafting, maybe your best option is to make scrapbooks of your adventures. Scrapbooks allow you to actually keep those projects that your kids made while camping, that special flower that your honey picked for you or that a leaf rub that you kids made for you. 

The scrapbook route allows you to keep the actual thing that was made instead of just a picture of it. However, scrapbooks tend to be a lot bigger and take up more room if you live in your RV full time.

What About Your Family?

Does your family ever get the I Don’t Want To Go Homes? I’m sure that most people will get this at one point or another in their lives. What do you do to combat the I don’t want to go homes? Leave a comment below and let us know.

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Until its time to hitch up the camper again,

Happy Camping!