STEALTH RV URBAN CAMPING, Lafayette, IN Day 2 of 5 Day VLOG | Vanlife in a Travato GL

Best practice on street camping is just to be discreet. Here, I'll hang out in the bathroom. I know this is kind of weird, but this is just, again, one of the great things about this floor plan is that we have an actual room to chill in if I wanted to actually do a little work and be, again, very discreet, not creating any light that can be seen from the outside, is that I would, let me unsnap this, is it just literally close the... Hello, go small live large viewer. Thanks for tuning in today. My name is Scott, your host. Welcome to day two of a five-day vlog on van life in Paris, which we just left. Today we pick up on our way to Warsaw, but actually overnight in Lafayette, Indiana, which is the home of Purdue University. Stay tuned and watch this video if you are interested in best practices for stealth urban camping in a downtown environment. Lay out the whole agenda from about 9 p.m. until about 5 a.m. the next morning. Our sleep is interrupted by utility truck watering plants and a rainstorm. And then tomorrow we'll pick up on leaving for the Planet Fitness to shower and you can learn my work routine. Today we're talking about stealth urban camping in a downtown environment. Stay tuned. Paris, Illinois. Check. Done. Now head to Warsaw. Warsaw. Been to Warsaw? Warsaw is pretty awesome. Let's go to Warsaw. All right so I didn't realize that the time zone change coming out of Paris into Warsaw means I'm coming into Eastern time zone so it's actually pretty late. It is currently 9.15 and I don't get there till about 10.30 or 11 and I'm pretty beat so what I've done is I rolled into downtown Lafayette, Indiana which is home of Purdue University. I am literally in downtown. Let's show you guys this. And what I've done is check the parking signs very very carefully. I've driven around several blocks. I think this is gonna be a good block. Pretty sure this is the courthouse. Wait at this courthouse. Holy cow. Touch that so you guys can see it. That thing's amazing. And what I did is I rolled in and this looks pretty safe. It's commercial. I don't see too many apartments and there was a local sitting on the on the bench here in front of the tattoo shop. Turns out it's the mom of one of the of the manager of the shop and I just had a chat with him about parking the van parking restrictions and anything overnight issues and the bottom line is no and he's done it before and so I'm gonna go have a cold beer and this is the camp spot tonight and that's how we roll with van life. It's pretty spectacular. Urban camping maybe. Saloon in the name I'm into so Knickerbocker oldest bar in Indiana. Let's check it out. Yeah so that was super fun. Really glad I stopped in there. 1835 I think he said that the bar was established. This used to be a hotel now it's apartments and the bar is still the original bar, the back bar, the wooden part. Again just really cool just kind of cruising around. Can you guys see the moon? Oh yeah look at the moon. So awesome. Just van life boys and girls. Some nice folks over here still think it's the 4th of July. It's the 9th of July. Personal fireworks. Anyway what a beautiful night. Just extraordinary. Just extraordinary. What an exceptional building. Look at that. The fountain. That is really lovely. Really lovely. And look what I see over here. I see a white van. Let's investigate. And I saw this beer garden here earlier. Let's go check that out. Nope that's a commercial van. Not a Dagby's. Hub and patio. Let's go see what trouble we can find in here. Love the lighting. What a great way to end a day of van life. Had a little libation there. Look at this. Just an incredible view with the moon. OMG. Definitely stopped by Dagby's. Open till 3 a.m. Alright to the van we go. Again here's Lily. Here's some dude camped out on a... But it's time for bed so let's show you how we get ready for bed. Van life. Urban camping style. Again my best practice is to leave the front open like this. Shade shut. Here I'll turn the light on back here so you can see what's going on. Close this galley window. Careful of the plant. Actually let me get my Lucy lights. I think that's going to be best. So here's a view of what it looks like at the back at this point. I'll be putting a screen here but I'll leave this part open. Leave the Lucy light in the bathroom on red and that will help with the minimize the lighting on the inside. It's really warm in here and it's warm outside so one thing I'm going to do is turn the AC on for a little bit. So I'll power that right here and you guys can probably see that. So we'll turn the converter on. I've got plenty of juice as I had a big drive today. Let's just check that. So I've got a complete full charge. That's great. Back go the hats. So I'm going to turn on the AC and we'll just run this for 10 or 15, 20 minutes and just cool down the interior and then I'll turn the fan on. Alright so that's kind of the urban camping setup tonight is to just cool the rig Here I'll hang out in the bathroom. I know this is kind of weird but this is just again one of the great things about this floor plan is that we have an actual room to chill in if I wanted to actually do a little work and be again very discreet not creating any light that can be seen from the outside and have an illuminated environment. I can do it right here in the bathroom. Kind of weird but it's super effective having again another separate room that I would be able to illuminate and get some stuff done with a laptop or iPad and it can't be seen from the outside which is pretty awesome. So that's how we roll. Van life, urban camping, downtown Lafayette. Nobody knows what's going on in here. Pretty cool. Yeah the AC is doing a really nice job. This will be cooled down in probably 10 or 15 minutes and that'll allow me to sleep comfortably. What I'm gonna do is then use the max air fan right here in the ceiling to get some ventilation going but largely not run the AC all night unless it gets really warm back there again. But while it's kind of noisy on the inside, outside it's really pretty quiet and certainly in a little bit of a downtown environment the noise sound that the AC unit makes is pretty insignificant to the ambient noise from the cars passing by. This is a great street. Let me just give you a shot of that. Again very very quiet. This one cat kind of passed out over here which is okay but overall it's just really really quiet. And then the back window. So again that's how we roll. This is urban camping. I'm not gonna cover up any more windows. It looks like somebody would be in here living and I don't want that to be the the case. So I think what we'll do is actually go outside real quick so you can hear the amount of sound that the air conditioner does not make. And again this is the beauty of the lithium system is that I am running the AC on the inside and it sounds like a fan from one of the buildings maybe. Let this car go by. Wow, great old Mercedes. Let him go by so see if you guys can hear this. Again it's really really it's pretty damn quiet. It's operating right now on compressor mode and you really can't hear it. I mean there's noise from this building here. So again it's really pretty quiet. And again just think of the miracle of this. I'm running AC on the inside through my lithium system. No generator. It's pretty warm inside. I'll go see if we can get the temperature. That'd be fun to look at the before and after although it's been running for a few minutes. But let's go take a look at that. Just walking by you would never know I've got an AC rooftop unit going. Let's check the temperature. Wow, already really dramatically different. Wow, big slam. Let's lock the door. I'm gonna press the lock button here and you'll see the flash and that's it. The doors are locked so it's nice and secure. Nobody can get in. Again very safe. Go back here. I'm gonna hit the lights really fast. So it's 80 and dropping fast. This is about 85 earlier. And again nobody knows the deal, right? It's pretty amazing. Thank You Volta. Thank You Winnebago. All right so the audio is gonna suck because my microphone just broke. But let me put the Lucy light in the bathroom and clean the teeth before I put my mouth guard in. I had braces at one point well about five years ago. Massive project. Very expensive. Don't want to screw up that work. So every night I put in my retainer. But I want to brush and essentially floss. But this is actually a great augmentation to floss because it cleans very well between the teeth. All right so with that the next step is to get into bed. So now I've seen a few folks walk by and again here's the key to stealth urban camping. This thing's having a hard time focusing. Hello I'm right here. Is you don't want to have any illumination on the interior and you want to minimize the movement from what can be seen from the front. Because they can see in. The great thing about the Travato G floor plan is once you're in the bedroom though you cannot be seen with the blinds closed like we've demonstrated tonight. So my best practice again is to leave the cab and driver and passenger windows uncovered. Leave the street uncovered and do cover the sidewalk. Again it just minimizes the look that somebody is living in a van on the street. However you do want to minimize your visibility and your movement because they can sort of see in. So just take that for what it's worth. That's been my best practice so far. So I know it's super noisy you probably can't hear me but I just checked the thermometer right here and it's reading now 69 which is a little inaccurate because the cold air is coming from the roof vent here down the door and past the thermostat. But it is extremely comfortable back here. It's still pretty warm up front. In fact let's look at that one quick. That's why I got to give away my position here. So this one up front still says 87 degrees. So it's doing its job which is to cool the bedroom. I run for a little bit longer maybe 10 more minutes and then I think we'll be fine. Alright so with that I'm gonna kill the light and now we're in bed. Put up a buckle like that and you can see out the back. That's what that looks like and I like that. What I'm gonna do is sleep so that I can have my head this way so they can see what the hell is going on. Up the side window and again with the lights turned out here you can't really see what's going on back here which is just perfect. So with that we'll call a wrap. Van life. Paris today. Lafayette. Next stop Warsaw. See you in the morning. Alright so having a great night so far. It's about almost 4 a.m. Very quiet until about 10 minutes ago. This very noisy generator. You can see the flashing lights there. What this is is the utility coming through to water the planter which is by my um right by my bike. So I was kind of keep an eye out for him. Now this guy's cleared the area to take a quick look around. Pretty quiet. My friend is still on the bench here. Feel sorry for him. That can't be very comfortable. So this is kind of another best practice here since again we're up. So what I've done is I've moved the screen for the window itself up about 80% of the way and then leave a little bit of opening here. See that on the bug screen and you can see how it kind of kills the light but allows me to see out. So that too is a sound right? Yes. A little cloud burst which has chased away my friend and given Lily a little rinse but the sound didn't kind of cause me to wake up again. Almost time to get up. 4.45 a.m. So as always the best practice is to put the bed away. I never used my sheet cover last night. Too warm. We have the galley window open but it's in the lock-a-jar mode so I'll just close that. This bad boy off. Which you may be aware that you can run this while it rains which is great. My god this is so lovely. Oh my god it smells so good. Alright before I pull away let's just take a quick peek at the energy level here. So again the inverter has been on all night. I ran the AC probably for a total of about 90 minutes last night in two different sessions so we're at you know 67% I would say. And that is no problem to charge that up. Hello friend. My name is Scott. I am your host. Welcome to my channel. This is Go Small Live Large. We are a channel dedicated to learning and then sharing those learnings of places, people, van life as I work full-time and live full-time from my 2019 Winnebago Travato GL. L for lithium. And the Travato is a class B RV camper van if you will. And we're all about helping you understand the van life and RV lifestyle whether you are no time, part-time, or full-time. I've been full-time now since February 2019 and part-time prior to that since October 2018. This is a special video. There was so much information from my five days of visiting Paris, Warsaw, Holland, Lafayette, Indiana, and Elkhart, Indiana RV camp of the world. But I decided to break this up into four episodes and you'll want to watch each episode. I'm going to try and roll them out really quickly because there was so much really good information in here. I did it in kind of a vlog style which I normally don't do. And you're going to learn a tremendous amount from each of these videos and these stops we make. Now the Holland stop was important because we met with Volta, manufacturers of the Pure 3 lithium system that my rig has. Got an exciting, exciting announcement that's exclusive to Go Small Live Large. So watch that video coming up very, very shortly. And we visit Embassy RV in Elkhart. If you're not familiar with Embassy RV, when you're done with this video, watching this video, go to your browser and type in EmbassyRV.com. I met with Terry and his team and they are taking the Class B RV segment to an entirely different level based on the Ford Transit and the Ram ProMaster chassis, largely. And they are doing some superiorly, is that a word? Some serious innovative work in the Class B space. So go to EmbassyRV.com, check out their stuff. We got some really cool things coming up about that. And what you'll be seeing and learning from these four episodes is van life and my daily routine in doing van life. Again, a tremendous amount of information. I ask you to hang in there with me for each of these four episodes. I promise you, you're going to get something out of it. If not, well let me know. I need to do this differently. So with that, thank you for viewing.