$5 Nat'l Forest 🌲 Campsite. Grilled shrimp 🦐 Camp fire 🔥 2yr full-time Class B RV Travato vanlife

In today's video, I show you a National Forest five dollar boondocking site that's pretty amazing. I'll show you what sites to select and which ones not to. It's truly boondocking because there are no services, so you need to be a fully self-equipped van or rather RV. We build a campfire, we grill spicy Asian shrimp, and I show you how I do a Volta charge-on-demand session to top off my energy pack so I go for a full another 24 hours. Big, big video. Let's go. Thanks for tuning in today. Really appreciate that. My name is Scott. Welcome to Go Small, Live Large, a YouTube channel dedicated to the Class B RV lifestyle. That would be van lifestyle in particular. 2017, pretty unhappy with my life, the status quo, corporate commute, etc. 2018, completely reinvented that, including purchasing my Winnebago Travato GL. G is a four-point, L is for lithium, which is pretty awesome. Since February 2019, I've been living full-time in this van, a 21-foot camper van built on a Dodge Ram ProMaster chassis, front-wheel drive, gasoline engine. It looks a little different because I've done some things to the exterior, but largely it's a Winnebago Travato carrying me around for well over two years now. Pretty amazing. What we do here is we learn together, we share together, then you decide what's the best way for you to RV. I'm no expert. I get no medals for living in my van, just the way I choose to RV. Whether you're part-time, no time, still researching, or full-time like me, hopefully you'll find this video a little entertaining and a little educational today. Let me show you around the campsite. I'm in campsite number two here, and it starts here. One, two, three. We'll find out how many actual campsites there are. I don't know. I've backed in. This site I would actually not recommend staying in because it's really uneven. I've moved around a few times trying to get it to even out, and it's just not even. This comes with a picnic table, which is really awesome. I put my tablecloth on it, but it's actually concrete, and that's kind of cool, except that it's too thick for my tablecloth pins. So that's not cool, but it hasn't been overly windy, so that's okay. Fire pit. We're going to fire this up tonight. We're going to burn some pine cones. This neighbor's table is really close, so I'm glad there's nobody here. That's really awesome, and again, there are no hookups at any of these campsites, so you're truly boondocking. No electric, no sewer, no water. There are the vault toilets over here. Let me zoom in for you right there, and if you're not familiar with vault toilets, it's basically a toilet stool with a seat and a cover, and you kind of are doing your business in a big old pit, and it doesn't really smell amazingly, but there's zero water in there. Again, no flushing, no washing, etc. Let me show you how you pay for this right here. So unlike some of the boondocking out in the National Forest and other places, this does require five dollars per night. So the way you do this is you get your little envelope out, and you complete it with all your information here. It's five bucks a day, which is pretty cheap, really, and then you put your money in, and you tear, money goes in there, then you tear this off. I'm sorry, then you tear this off, and this is your permit number, and this goes on the pole that you saw on my campsite. So it's kind of hanging there, and then this, you look at, and you stick it in the thing like this, and that's how the Forest Service gets its money. What's kind of interesting, it shows you where your money goes. So if you look at this, 5% of it goes to envelopes, signs, information, 15% for feed collection, and 80% for site improvements, and they do have garbage service, which is real nice. That's what these cans are right there. Let me show you around the campground. As mentioned previously, this is site number one, and it goes one way around the loop here, and this is site 22 right here where this camper is, and this actually is a good site right here. I would stay here. It's very level. This is not a great site. I would not stay in site two. Let me give you a run around the campground here. This is the only pull-through site here. The class C was here last night. Church bus met them. Very cool. This site's a no-no because of the tree limbs. That'd be site 13. Very unlucky. This site here, number 16, is really good because it's super flat. This one would be a good one, 17, flat. This one here, too, is also very good because it's flat. That'd be 18 garbage cans. There's two sets, one on each side of the camp. This one's not bad, but you're looking at your neighbors, and again, this is site 21 there, so a couple of campsite recommendations there and one place definitely not to stay, which is the one I'm in at 02, and since I've already dropped my envelope in, I didn't bother moving. I'm only staying here, I guess, three nights, two nights, three nights. It's been pretty cool. Today, we are truly powered by Volta. I got my devices charging right here. The app says, hey, you need a little juice in the system, so we're running a live charge-on-demand session right now in the rig in the middle of this beautiful national forest, which has zero hookups, no water, no sewer, no electricity, so with 30 amps of shore power, 48 volts, I'm able to run as if I'm plugged in shore power, no problem, top off the energy pack a little bit, and we're good to go, clear through till late tomorrow morning when I roll out of here. Awesome. Thank you, Volta. Okay, what I'm going to do here is prepare the grill, and the shrimps are soaking inside. Let's do the grill. What we're going to do is get the shrimp ready, and let me show you how I'm doing that. Pretty basic here, so these are frozen shrimps. These are the smaller size, 51 to 60 shell count. Don't you love the size of my freezer? RV jealous, right? What I've done is I've thawed them out in water that's got Old Bay seasoning in it. Just love Old Bay. How about you? What I'm going to do is actually put these on the barbecue just as is. I'm going to put a little bit of this garlic sauce on, which is super hot, and because it'll just kind of burn into the shells a little bit, which I will remove when I eat them, that will make them a little bit spicy. I'll save some for dipping, but I don't like it super spicy, and we're going to microwave the California blend to go with the shrimps. These are about ready. Okay, so what I'm going to do is just put them on the grill just like this. These will not take hardly any time at all to cook. All right, if you can keep your eye on the shrimps, I'm going to go do the vegetables. I'm going to microwave these frozen veggies into the microwave, but what's wrong with the microwave? No light on, right? Ah, inverter not on. How do we solve that problem? One button turns on the inverter, and now we have 30 amps, 8.7 kilowatts, 48 volts of voltage use, as if we were plugged into shore power, in silence, the most important thing. All right, let's go check on the shrimps. Okay, these are looking really delicious. Thanks for keeping an eye on them. I'm going to transfer them to the bowl so they don't overcook. So I'm going to turn this up high and let it bake that off. Looks pretty good, right? Put these out here. We'll get the veggies. We might have a glass of white wine with this, so not too bad. Let's try one of the shrimps. Put them on the plate. Put the shells in there. What do you think? We'll put a little extra hot sauce in here to dip in. Test the veggies. I love cauliflower. Do you like cauliflower? Okay, peel, dip. Just spicy enough. They're a little messy. We have to get the tail pull off just right. Take a little handle. If you learn anything, thumb up, please. Helps me know you like it, and YouTube shares it out, which would really be awesome. Comment below. What kind of meals do you like to do in your RV? Is this a campsite? Sweating, sorry. That you would want to visit? Let me know that in the comments below, please. Where are you watching from? And then subscribe to the channel if you enjoy this kind of content. All right, I'm going to eat my meal, so we'll see you on the back side. Fire coming up next. Campfire time. Now, I am a certified boy scout amid up until life scout ranking, which is the one below Eagle. I had some mandatory merit badges. I just didn't finish in time before I turned, I think, 18, isn't it? So I aged out of the program, but so many of my earliest memories as a kid is from boy scouts. I just love boy scouting. So I'm officially able to do this, but I have no lighter fluid or other, except whiskey, to get the fire going. So I have no idea how this is going to turn out. And if it just smokes, I'm going to douse it out, because that's one reason I don't do campfires very often, because they tend to smoke versus burn, and it just permeates me, the clothes, and the van, and I just don't like that. But let's give it a shot. Now, these are pine cones, so they should burn pretty readily, I think. We get some action now. Yes, it's going to work. Cool. Now, what I did is I double-checked with the staff that came out today to work the cleaning toilet and the garbage, and I just made sure that it was okay to burn a fire using pine cones. They even told me where to go get wood. I didn't need it, because this camper that was on the site yesterday left some firewood. So that's what we're hoping kind of ignites. That's doing pretty good. I'm impressed. Pine cones are filled with sap, as you probably are aware, so that's why they burn so great. And I have a whole other sack right here I picked up just around my campsite. I'm pretty proud of myself. That's pretty cool. This might be my first solo campfire ever. What I normally do is find other people with fires and join them. That's really easy. I might actually go grab a Shiner Bock beer and enjoy this. Let's do it together. Grab a beverage, and let's enjoy the fire for a minute. So are you familiar with Shiner Bock? Shiner Bock, I discovered in Texas, the Dallas-Fort Worth area particularly. It's made only in Shiner, Texas. It's a little tiny town. It's the most amazing beer. It's Bock style. It means it's dark, but it's really light, and it's got so much flavor. Cheers. Thanks for joining me. I really appreciate that. Let's have a sip. After a hard day at the office recording videos, I'll do another thing. This is really nice. A camp chair, which I really love this camp chair. I use it all the time at picnic tables. In a setting like this out by the beach, it's just a really, really awesome chair. This is on my Amazon store, on my website, GoSmallLiveLarge.com, and I would highly recommend this chair. It folds up to literally just a few inches, and it fits against the back wall. Pretty good fire. What do you think? So when you go camping, what kind of fire activities do you like to do or not do? Do you avoid them altogether? This, I had free wood available, so why not? I knew pine cones would be a pretty good combustion source. That turned out to be the case, and I just love joining other people's fires. I do it pretty regular, and it's just a great, interesting way to meet people, and there's something, for me, very primitive, very tribal about a fire. It's just mesmerizing to stare at, right? So I hope you enjoyed this video. It's been a pleasure making it for you. With that, I just say thank you very much, and until we see you soon, I wish you to journey on. Heading east from the freeway, you're gonna make this bend here. So when you're coming up on this building on your left, heading east on the road, that's when you want to slow down, because the forest road is right here. The sign is hidden by the trees. You see that? It's really hard to see. Now, if you miss this road, there's a forest road right there you can turn around in, but this is where you want to go. The road is in pretty good shape. It's hard-packed gravel and dirt. Watch the tree limbs, and there are some potholes that are pretty big, so you'll want to avoid those. And then coming up here on the right is a campground entry. So you pull into here, mind the tree limbs, and this is where the pay parking is. It's a one-way loop.