How To Find Camping Near Me?

Today is all about “How to find camping near me” by using Campendium.

I am excited to be walking you through how we find 95% of the free campsites we stay at by using Campendium, and how this has proven time and again to be the best method for us.

Before we get to the tutorial, I need something from you. What I need from you is for you to know how you want to camp for free? There are so many ways to do it. You can do it in a huge Class A RV with tons of amenities, or you can do it in a car and a tent. There is no right or wrong way.

Also, what type of cell connectivity you want is very important. If you don’t need any, that’s cool too.

Campendium Home Screen

We’re going to be using their search bar, let’s go ahead and dive in with one of the easiest options out there.

We’re going to be looking for “free camping near me” in Quartzsite, Arizona. Right now that is showing us the free camping and the paid camping, so we’re going to want to edit that down to only the free camping. We’ll go here to price, click on it. You see it’s at zero to $200. We’ll go ahead and scroll that all the way down to zero, but also click on always show free. That way, it’ll remember you in the future to give you those free spots if that’s what you’re looking for.

Sorting Campendium Results

Let’s use the “sort by” tab, because this is the best dropdown option when I’m looking for free camping – I want to find the highest rated campground of all the reviews.

Here in Quartzsite, we got a lot of options, but once we click on highest rated, it’s going to give us, in a list on this left hand side of the highest rated camp grounds.

Palm Canyon comes in at number one with five stars and 28 reviews. That’s huge on Campendium. That is a guaranteed successful spot, so we know that’s going to work.

Let’s click on it and look what it shows us on the inside. What we see at the top is Palm Canyon. It’s in the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge. It’ll give you a phone number. That’s probably going to take you to the Kofa office, and also the website will bring you to a federal website.

Using Campendium’s GPS Link

What I really like though is this GPS coordinate options. You can click on this GPS option and it’s going to show you right on the map where that’s located.

Scroll out a little bit, and I can see a detailed location with typography on Google Maps. I can even click on the satellite imagery to get a better sense of what the area is going to look like as far as if it’s going to have growth, if it’s going to be desert, if it’s going to be mountainous.

Right here we can see by the topography, this free campsite is tucked back right against where a small little mountain range begins, and you can see the road from the satellite view, which is always a good sign.

Then we can also get directions with this GPA coordinates they give us. Let’s say we’re looking to come in from Yuma, Arizona, we can get easy directions right to the spot, so pretty nifty that Campendium links that right in their description.

Campendium Rating & Review Layout

The rating system is based on five different aspects, the access, the location, the cleanliness, site quality and noise. This is receiving pretty high stars on all of them.

On the right hand side, you see cell coverage. We got Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are all showing what looks like a usable bar strength.

As we scroll down farther, if a site is this good reading the reviews can be fun, but it’s not necessarily to do a deep dive into all 28 reviews, but we can just scroll through and look at the main headline.

In addition to the reviews, there is also a blog post section where you can see more in depth reviews. But the cool thing about the blog posts section too is that you can also link videos to it, so if you want to watch a video, you can just scroll down and see if any of these are coming from You Tube.

Campendium Pro Tips – For Finding Camping Near Me

Just as we used Campendium to find the best free campsites, we can reverse that functionality and use Campendium to find the most luxurious RV resort we can possibly find. What we’re going to do instead of looking for free camping is we will put this average nightly rate and start it with say, 40 bucks and see what we come up with.

Instead of looking at all the free campsites, we’ve immediately limited this search to the most high end sites in terms of price, but now we can go ahead and sort this by highest rated as well, so this makes us have two different categories we’re filtering, 40 bucks and above and the highest rate of those. Just like we did with the free campsites, we can now check out this resort and find the best resort in the area in terms of ratings and price.

The next insider tip I want to show you is that you got to take reviews with a grain of salt. I know in this day and age almost everyone has become savvy with spotting reviews and the credibility of them.

Just because it’s one star doesn’t mean it’s not credible, but the fact that the title is, “Scary,” puts that emotion into it. It makes me think it might be a little dramatic. Then I can even go over to the left to see that BR reviewed it, and that BR only has one review.

This is his only review, with that whole picture, I really can disregard this review. One guy with one review with one star and calls it, “Scary,” and then all these other four and five star reviews.

Thank you so much for joining me here today, guys.

I hope you were able to take something away from that tutorial. Let me know in the comments below if you have used Campendium before or if it’s your go to site. Here’s another comprehensive resource if you want to learn how to camp for free.

The Best FREE Camping in the USA

We love camping across this amazing country. And, we really love it when its free. Here’s our list of the 20 Best Free Campsites in the USA.

If you haven’t tried free camping before, also known as boondocking, take a look at our beginners guide to boondocking filled with everything you need to know to get started.

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