🎯 Finding safe places to stay with a motorhome (using Park4night)

If you don't like being tied into campsites and booking things months in advance, then using Aires or Approved Stopovers is a brilliant way to be able to tour around Europe particularly and parts of the UK without having to do so much planning or prep in advance. Now, I put out a video last week about how I use an app called Park4Night to tell me if a road is suitable or not, for motorhome to go up, and a comment that I got on that video was, well, how do I choose which aire or place to stay at? How do I know if it's going to be safe? So I thought I would make a quick video sharing my thought process, how I choose places, how I find them, and the sorts of things that I look for. So I hope you find it useful. So here we go. This is Park4Night, and when I am looking to find places, particularly in Europe, this is the app that I tend to use, whether I'm trying to look for campsites, Approved places, paid places, or free stops. And I'm going to walk you through my thought process on all of those, not necessarily the campsites, but if, if we find any, I'll share my thoughts on them. But I just wanna show you how it works and also how I assess whether I want to stay at places or not. So the first thing we're gonna do is pick an area, and I'm going to do some of the research for my trip when I go down. So I'm taking part of the Wandering Motorhome Club. We're doing a group trip down to south of Germany, and the trip is going to end in Nüschenstein, which is down here, and I'm then going to spend some time exploring this area and probably into the Dolomites as well. Now, if you know a place that you want to be around, so for example, Innsbruck is obviously there, but let's say you wanted to be around Salzburg, why not, then you just type it in and it can come up. But if you don't know an exact town, or like for example, this area here, there's not like a big town or anything, you can just bring the map to where you want it to go and then click search in this area. Now you will see lots and lots and lots of different colored things here. These ones are like your helpful bits. So it's either public toilets or laundrettes or a place where you can get drinking water. But when you're trying to find somewhere to stay overnight, they're not what you're looking for. So then you use the filters. Now, there are two main types of overnight stays. You've got the paid or approved spots, or you've got the free—not necessarily winging it—but the free ones that people have found. And don't forget that on Park4Night and on Search for Sites and on Camper Contact, all of them are what's called user-generated content, which means that it is all. Put in. So all of these places are put in by people like you and me. So you found a spot and they've gone, oh, this is good, I'll put, put it on Park4Night, and then they decide whether it's going to go in as a free motorhome area or a parking lot or a private car park. And there is a lot of inconsistency, particularly around those 3. I mean, surrounded by nature is normally what exactly what it sounds like, but the parking lot or a free motorhome area could be interchangeable. So the ones that I tend to look for when Trying to find somewhere to stay overnight is surrounded by nature. Parking lot. I don't ever choose to stay at the motorway rest areas. I will use the services there in the day. I'll stop there for lunch or, you know, to get fuel or whatever, but I don't ever choose to stay on them overnight purely because there are a lot of reports of people getting break-ins at those stops. And also they're noisy. You've got trucks coming day in or hour in, hour out. So it's always quite noisy. So I tend to avoid those picnic areas. Free area, paid area, because I don't mind paying if it's somewhere safe. Private car park for campers, obviously not the off-road 4x4 because I have a motorhome. I personally don't like the on-the-farms because the owners tend to be quite inquisitive, or they tend to try and encourage you to come to their vineyard or come to their shop or whatever, so I would rather pay for somewhere than use those, but that's my personal preference. If that's for you, then by all means tick that. Obviously, we're looking for somewhere to stay overnight, so the service area of that parking Useful, but not for this. The extra services we spoke about, and again, homestays is staying on someone's either driveway or field or something, and they can be brilliant, but there tends to be more interaction with the locals, which when I'm staying on my own, I don't particularly like. If I'm staying, you know, with Adam or whoever I'm traveling with, then I probably will use this one or the on-the-farm one a little bit more, but on my own, I feel less comfortable with it. Now you can also filter if you need specific things. So if you're going in winter, so say between October and March, it'll show you the ones that are open for that time. Pets are generally allowed on all of the free places, all of the Aires. It's campsites. So if I was just looking for campsites, I would select pets allowed. Obviously, if I'm traveling with Mac, which I pretty much always am, to make sure that I find campsites that are pet friendly. If you need services, now don't forget, you don't need these every single night. So only if you know you're gonna need them or you think you're gonna need them on that particular night, then that's good. And then obviously, if you need toilets or showers, then you need to select those. I'm self-contained in my motorhome, so I don't need to worry about that. I also don't worry about electricity or internet access because I have got all that in my motorhome, and I will only select the laundry option, you know, once a week or once every 10 days or whatever when I really, really need it. This one is one that is important to me, making sure that I've got decent signal, but not every person who puts in these places puts them in the same level of detail. So not everybody will say that dogs are allowed. They'll normally say if they're not allowed, but you won't always get dogs allowed on the wild or free spots, same as you won't always get an internet, even if there's a perfectly good internet connection. So I don't tend to select them. So we're going to apply the filters, and you can see that immediately we've got rid of a few. There's still quite a few here. So then it becomes, it becomes a lot easier when you've got a specific route or you've got specific places you want to see. Now me, for the purposes of this video, I know that I'm going to explore somewhere around here, I just don't know exactly where yet, so I'm going to just see what I can find. In fact, for the sake of this video, I'm going to take off the campsites for now. I've already starred, so this star means I've already favorited it. And let me walk you through what I liked so much about this particular one. So first thing that I'm looking at is obviously motorhomes are fine to get there. You can see 2 big motorhomes there. I'm not going to have an issue getting there. I can immediately see the views around it are beautiful. And again, more pretty pictures. So the first thing I do when I look at a place is I look at the pictures. If they don't have any pictures, I don't stay there at all. So we look at the pretty pictures. Then the next thing I do, I have a sort of cursory glance at this, and if they're really low, then I'll I want to do some more digging, but it doesn't always put me off. I have a quick look at what services are allowed, and we'll see more of those shortly. I can see that it's free. Gratuité just means free. And I look then at the different stars and things. Now, I can immediately see good, good, good, good. And yet, what was this a couple of weeks ago? Somebody has put that a sign has gone up prohibiting motorhomes, which is a great shame. Looks like this is no longer an option. For staying there overnight. So we need to go back to the drawing board. So let's close that one down. I would probably remove it from my favorites as well, but I will do that another time. So let me then look— in fact, I'm not even going to start on that area. I'm going to start in this area. So I don't tend to like big cities and big towns. I tend to like being out in the middle of nowhere. So if I was going to explore this sort of area, this is the sort of road or sort of place that I would start looking at. No real reason, it's just a road I've picked. I could easily picked this area, but let's have a look down here and just see what all of these nice green bits are. So I can see here, first thing I'm looking at is, I've got a picture, yes, but it's a campervan, so is my motorhome going to be all right to get in there? Square for a vehicle up to 6 meters. My motorhome is 6.5. I think you could probably get that in there, frankly, but let's have a look. The place is fine. One of the British arrived late so as not to disturb the locals. Yeah, that's fine. Quiet parking spot, great for one night. So I probably could stay there, but I'm going to see what else is around. It doesn't immediately leap out to me. Small road suitable for vehicles. I prefer to go in reverse because it's difficult to turn around at the bottom. So although it looks lovely, not a cat in hell's chance am I going up that with my motorhome. Definitely not. happening. So then we get to Wiggly Windy Roads, viewpoint of the waterfall. I mean, it's, it's lovely, but that is quite small, and this is not looking good so far, is it? So this is exactly the thing that I go through. Forest road, quite bumpy, wouldn't recommend for long van. Nope. And then absolutely not. So, you know, we said we'd started somewhere. I'm just going to move down a little bit more. Now this is a little bit more like it, although immediately I can see that it's quite built up. Well, actually it's not as built up as the first photo makes it look. So this one I can see it's fairly flat. It's obviously got some decent spaces, but there are businesses and there will be people around there, so I expect there to be arrive-by or leave-by times. But it's got nice enough views. You can see they're decent-sized motorhomes, so people are obviously staying there. So, it's got okay reviews. Small parking, side of the main road, no water, toilets, that's fine, great view of the mountains, great parking, camping obviously not allowed but maybe possible to crash when too tired to go on your journey. So, that's an interesting way of putting it. Great parking for a day or a night, camping obviously not allowed but possible to crash. So, yes, it, it It's fine to stay there, but you're not allowed to get all your bits out, which you're not allowed to do that anyway when you're using airs. Slept here without any problems before going to the Aquadome. How exciting! And that was a couple of weeks ago. Good, good, good. This one's only got a three. Arrived late after the Aquadome. No problem for an overnight stay. Nearby road quite noisy. Overall good stop considering the free few alternatives in the area. And this is the problem. So Austria and then coming into the Dolomites is a really difficult place to stay off grid. Not all of Austria, but this sort of area because a it's busy, but there's also a lot of national parks, so just something to consider. So we've gone all the way down to here, haven't really found anything, and that again looks like a teeny tiny little road. So I'm now thinking, all right, that way is not looking particularly brilliant for me. So you can see it's not always easy to find places, and it can be really, really, uh, a little bit stressful, but just a little bit time-consuming is probably the better Better word for it. So if you're getting to this point and you're like, oh, there is literally, there's nothing around here, then this is when I start going for campsites because, you know, with a campsite you'll be fine. You won't get turned away. It just means you're going to have to pay for it. And this is the balance. Sometimes you can find aires and sometimes you have to go to the campsite. So first thing, dogs, always good. And then actually that's not bad, €30, nice little campsite. Small number of parking spaces makes sense to make a telephone inquiry in advance, and I do tend to do that if I'm looking at campsites. I would tend to book. So if you go on the contact area, you can either do the phone or you can go straight through to their website, and if I do that, then you can make a booking request, and this is what you'll find at a lot of European campsites is you type in the dates you want and your vehicle details and your name and everything and your email address, and it's a booking request, and they will then email you back. So you don't always book them immediately. Immediately online like we might in the UK. So I wanted to just have a quick look at that one that I saw that was red. So red means it's a paid air, basically. And as you can see, that looks absolutely beautiful. It's got stunning views. It's got decent facilities, but you can see there it has got a— hasn't got a dog in it. Now, it doesn't mean that dogs aren't allowed, but it means that I need to do some further investigation because it could mean that dogs aren't allowed. Electric columns, toilets and showers included. Oh, no dogs allowed. There you go. But it's not always consistent, sadly. The first thing I'm looking for are photos. So this is a photo of an approved motorhome area. It's obviously got proper parking bays, which are long. Then I look at the different things. So it says one mobile is allowed. That's fine. Obviously caravans generally not, and goods and buses aren't. So it's got the price there. So between 6 in the morning and 10 at night is €8. And then from 10 to 6 is another 7, and then I think that must be student tariff, maybe. Now, here we go, quick tip for you. If you're faced with a sign like that and you're like, I do not understand what that means, you want the Translate app on your phone. So you just— in fact, hang on, if I record my screen for you, you can see what I'm doing. There we go. So you find the Translate app on your phone. Let me just kill that. You open up the camera app, you point it right in front of you that way, you point it at that, and it will translate it all for you. And then you can actually press a little button and it will translate it. So the student tariff actually means hourly rate. But yes, so that's how you do that. So It's got three out of five stars, which is all right. Obviously very basic accommodation, so that's fine. Swimming lake with a restaurant and bar, kiosk and barbecue nearby. Got the drainage, which is fine. So I look then to see why it's got such, and it's got some really not brilliant reviews recently. Parking visiting city, toilet can be emptied and refilled. Not possible to empty it. Thirty one euros for two nights, which I don't think is bad actually. So that's what. Just €15.50 for a night, which I think is pretty good, especially in this area. Impossible to get in. I don't know if it was full. When trying to get a ticket, I was charged 2 times €25 without being able to get in. Okay. Not a nice campsite, not particularly well organized, no waste disposal. So it's not a campsite. This is where you have to take these reviews with a pinch of salt because these aren't campsites. This is an aire. They're much too expensive for what you get. And again, People aren't realizing where they are. So this is in the middle of rural France. You are going to be paying €15, €17 for the night. So I actually don't think that's that bad. Okay. So this one here hasn't got any photos, not, not a single one. And it's also a motorway service stop, but I wouldn't park there anyway, but no, no photos. I just, I wouldn't ever go there. So those are the kinds of things that I think. I look at the photos, I look at the reviews, I look at obviously things like if dogs are allowed or facilities, if I I need them. And then I look from a personal point of view. Am I happy to stay in this area? So for example, Innsbruck, big city. I would not be happy to stay on my own because you're going to have a lot of opportunities for passing trouble. And that's what I tend to look at. I would rather stay in the middle of nowhere because the likelihood of somebody coming by who is going to be aggravating is very, very low. Whereas in big cities, more people, more opportunity, more possibility. So that's what I kind of think. If I'm going to stay in a city, I will stay on a campsite or an approved aire somewhere like that. If I am going to stay in somewhere like the Tyrell National Park or the Dolomite National Park, I would tend to stay in an approved place as well, purely because— but I think it was this one that had the comment about Uh, yeah, this one here. Stopped by the police. It's generally forbidden to spend the night outside a campsite in the Tyrell. So if you are going to stay somewhere like that, then I would start looking at the ones with the red. So I would change my filters and I would remove the nature, I'd remove the parking lot, I'd remove the picnic areas. Free motorhome area is still absolutely fine, although you get very few of them as well, because it just means that it's an approved place to stay, and you can see immediately how much quicker that has made things to narrow it down. So, if I didn't want to stay at a full-on campsite, I can now look at this one here. Pictures are good, views are good, price isn't bad actually, and then you would just start looking through all of these, these different reviews, and it can take a while. Some days it's really easy, and some days or some areas it can take you a little while, but those are the kind of things that I think about, and hopefully that helps. I hope you found that useful. If you want to know more about wild parking or staying off-grid with your motorhome or your campervan, don't forget to grab your free checklist. The link for that will be in the notes for you. If you do want to know more about staying off-grid or how you figure all of these places out, I am doing a workshop at the end of this month All about wild parking, staying off-grid, gear you need, how to set up your vehicle, how you can sort of figure out a whole route when you're not planning any campsites, all of that kind of stuff. All the details for that will be in the notes for you, and if you happen to be watching this video after it's gone, you'll be able to get access to the replay on that same link, so check that all out in the notes. If you'd like to get more videos for motorhoming and campervanning, then by all means click subscribe, and if you are planning to do some trips across into Europe, you will find this video useful. I'll see you there. Take care. Bye.