Chuck’s Online Bargain Bonanza
Chuck Woodbury is a good travel companion for people who like small towns and freebies. He was a blogger ten years before blogs were invented, and his web sites are loaded with local insider information. If you prefer two-lane highways to Interstates, you’re one of his people.
Twenty years ago, Chuck sold a small business in Sacramento and used the cash to buy an 18-foot motor home and some early desktop publishing equipment, plus a laptop that could run on batteries. He loaded the camper with the tech gear and several large boxes of Cheez-Its, filled the gas tank and his travel mug, and the quarterly newspaper Out West was born. For the next 13 years, Woodbury drove on the roughest roads his rig could handle to the smallest towns he could find. He wrote about potato ice cream, a popular dessert in Idaho Falls, ID; a general store in Ferndale, CA that still stocked items it carried 98 years ago; and the early years of Laughlin, NV, a low-rent Las Vegas where the average age of visitors is 57. He also wrote a lot of funny, engaging columns about pit toilets, aggressive chipmunks, and the things that go through a person’s mind when he’s spending the night alone in the emptiest part of the continent. Subscriptions were $5. He never made much money, but by the time he retired the camper in 2000, he had produced a lot of good writing and made a lot of friends. You can see some of his favorite columns at the website outwestnewspaper.com.
Chuck is still looking for humor, inspiration, and bargains in out-of-the-way places, but now he’s delivering the information through several web sites. His biggest is RVtravel.com, which mostly contains practical information on such topics as how to keep a portable toilet smelling fresh. But the site also contains new dispatches in the Out West tradition, such as a campground in Sutherlin, OR that offers free drive-in movies. My favorite Woodbury effort is freecampgrounds.com, which is built and maintained by users. As the title implies, it’s a list of about 1900 places across the U.S. where you can sleep for free, with updated reviews. Most of the places are parking lots of the Wal-Mart variety, but some are really intriguing – such as a free campground run by Canon City, CO that gives you a half price ticket to the Royal Gorge Bridge, and a free 23-hour parking area one mile from the ultra-exclusive beach in East Hampton, NY. The parking lot next to the beach is for village residents only, but the beach itself is public and the walk will do you good.