hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0602.txt

Episode: 602
Title: HPR0602: Urban Camping ep 1  
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0602/hpr0602.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:47:24

---

Hi everyone, this is Clat 2 and this is the first episode in my Urban Camping mini-series.
This episode we're going to talk about what Urban Camping is, why you might want to do it,
why other people do it, and things like that, and then the other episodes will go into
more of a how-to sort of thing where someone who's actually been in Urban Camper will
give you real life tips on how to make it happen for yourself.
So Urban Camping is a new term that I learned fairly recently, and this has actually been
an activity that I've been doing for a little while off and on, and I still do this off
and on, and so we're calling Urban Camping what other people might call being homeless
or being a vagabond or being a hobo.
All of these kinds of terms denoting that you don't have a regular place that you pay
rent on and stay there and kind of hang out there all day and stuff like that.
I don't have any pretense about what makes a real live Urban Camper versus a wannabe
or a poser Urban Camper.
I don't really feel like I own the concept enough to start deciding who isn't a real Urban
Camper.
Otherwise, if you're someone who has, like, I don't know, eight roommates in a small
little apartment and you just don't relish going there and being cramped and so you prefer
to spend all your time out and about in the city and you want to call yourself an Urban
Camper, I'm all for that.
If on the other hand, you simply have no apartment whatsoever and literally stay out and about
in the city because you simply have no place to go and you want to call yourself an Urban
Camper.
That works for me to another incarnation of this phenomenon might be if you're simply
what we sometimes call a couch surfer.
I mean, a lot of people know about couch surfer.com, things like that, places that sort of
open their doors to, well, Urban Campers, I guess, or couch surfers or vagabonds or homeless
people, whatever you want to call these people and they let them crash on their couch for
a night.
And I'd been thinking of this concept of Urban Camping for a while and I thought that maybe,
I mean, when you first think about it, it doesn't seem like a very acceptable concept
to sort of your average person on the street, well, I don't mean on the street, but your
average person who might just be around you, it seems like a little bit of a revolutionary
idea, something that might kind of scare them or freak them out a little bit if you go
up to someone and say, hi, I'm a homeless person.
They have a lot of preconceptions about that, which of course is why that term Urban Camping
is kind of cool.
It kind of separates it away from the crazy kind of mentally ill homeless that some people
fall into, which is a tragedy in itself and not something to be taken lightly.
So I'm not talking about people who lose their job and can no longer sustain a
place to live.
I'm not talking about people who are mentally imbalanced for some reason, whether it's
some kind of trauma in their life or just a chemical imbalance or whatever it might be.
And they simply can't operate in the same way that the rest of society does and sometimes
can't even take care of themselves.
Not talking about those people, not to belittle either of those two groups and say that they're
not significant or anything.
I'm just saying that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about Urban Camping.
So Urban Camping is a more voluntary or at least semi-voluntary kind of thing.
So there's a lot of negative association to this concept of not having a home of having
an apartment, whatever, kind of makes people stop and look at you funny if you reveal
that to them.
At least that's what I thought would happen.
And it does happen from time to time.
However, the people who kind of know you and you tell them that you're in Urban Camping
or you have no apartment, something like that.
I have found they've been really, really intrigued by this idea of having nothing to tie you
down and no imposed responsibility.
You've got a lot of freedom, I guess, is what I'm trying to say and I think they kind
of admire that.
I got to kind of thinking about what they might admire about this and I started wondering
if it was a distinctly American kind of dream or a fulfillment of a different kind of
American dream.
The big American dream being, if you're not from America, you wouldn't probably know
this.
But here in America, we have a term called the Great American Dream or something like that
and it means that you kind of get married and you have kids and you move into a house
and that's kind of what everyone's supposed to strive for traditionally speaking.
And so thinking about Urban Camping, I was wondering if it was tapping into the antithesis
of that where it's kind of that lone hero or that lone wolf or that one person who
kind of breaks off from the pack and does their own thing.
I wonder if, or I wondered if Urban Camping was kind of tapping into that sense of rugged
individualism like you see in all the great John Wayne westerns or the good and the bad
and the ugly with with Clint Eastwood's character wandering around kind of on his own, that
sort of idea.
And then I kind of pondered a little bit longer and thought, well maybe that's not, you
know, as much as I love the idea of regional folklore and stuff like that, I also love
the idea of the regional folklore kind of tapping into a more of a collective folklore.
And maybe it's not distinctly American, maybe it's just actually distinctly human, maybe
as social creatures where more, we do have a great amount of comfort in being together
and being secure and kind of feeling that we're part of a group and all this other stuff.
And in one way, something as simple as owning an apartment and kind of doing that kind
of thing or having a home, having a place to call your own, that kind of gives you a communal
feel.
You're part of a neighborhood, you're part of a city, you're part of whatever group you
feel you're a part of.
You can invite people over to your apartment or your house, whatever.
So that's that sort of social human dream, and I wonder if the urban camper out on their
own kind of sending for themselves without these creature comforts sometimes might be tapping
into the antithesis of that.
As such, be very, very admirable to a lot of people.
If they really look deep inside themselves and see what kind of inspires them, and this
really been my experience more, more than experiencing horror and disapproval, a lot of the
response has been that that's really kind of cool.
Wow, I wish I could try that.
That sounds really neat.
I would love to do that.
So I guess my point is that if you're listening to this and you're thinking of trying urban
camping, then let this be basically an encouragement to do that.
If you're listening to this and thinking that it sounds like a crazy idea, then listen
with maybe a little bit of curiosity and just kind of see what might be appealing about
it.
And if you're listening to this and you think that this isn't something you could ever
do, get too many responsibilities, whatever, still listen with open ears, because you never
know what's going to happen in your life.
I mean, not bad things, just in general, you might find yourself with some time and you
might be able to go try this for a little while.
So it is really fun and it's really cool and very, very, very liberating.
It can't be understated.
I don't think how liberating it is.
So that's that brief introduction, I guess, to the idea of urban camping.
And again, trying to wrap our minds around what I'm talking about when I say urban camping.
I really honestly cannot nail it down.
I have to say that for me, urban camping is a lot of different things and I think that
it's fair to group all of these things together because a lot of them share just a lot of
common problems as well as common benefits.
So whether you're living in your car, living in your friend's living room, living on the
street, which I hope you're not, squatting, sleeping over at your apartment that you do
pay rent for, but for whatever reason you don't want to be there a whole lot.
So you minimize the time that you spend there.
All of these kinds of scenarios, I would classify as urban camping and I think you could
benefit from what I'll be talking about in this miniseries.
Okay, so let's talk about some of the ideas or some of the reasons, I guess, that one
might try a life of urban campingness.
First of all, at least for me, I think it's a great way to divorce the cult of stuff.
So I mean that there's a big movement, I think in a lot of well-to-do countries that
says that we really need to have possessions and things and my feelings on stuff go from
very mild to very radical and on the mild spectrum, I just don't like having stuff to
weigh me down.
I like to be a little bit more mobile than having to worry about how I'm going to move
a bed and a chair and a table and whatever else other people have, like bookshelves and
books and plates and coffee makers.
While coffee makers, I might make an exception for it, but stuff that you just kind of like,
you almost start to worry about when you're not there, you know, someone going to break
in and someone going to steal my stuff is a fire going to happen and destroy all of
my stuff.
You're going to get evicted because I can't pay a rent and then I'll have to last minute
move all of my stuff, you know, you get like this sort of, you can't help it, you get
kind of like obsessed over these things that you paid for and therefore you worked for
and now you sort of have to take care of them for the rest of your life.
So actually freeing one's self from that relationship, it's one of those relationships
that feels fine at the time, it feels totally healthy and normal at the time, completely
fine for you to have all these things and so much stuff that you actually have to move
half of it out into the garage because it's starting to fill up your house so much, but
still you go out and get more stuff and people bring more stuff to you on Christmas and
on other holidays they bring stuff to you and you try to find more places for it and
it feels fine and it almost feels like you could never ever get rid of that.
I mean of course it does, right, that's the problem and you'll find I think that if
you get rid of this stuff, you actually feel a hundred pounds lighter, I mean you just
feel completely free.
I find that urban camping for me enforces and kind of ensures that I look at things that
I'm either offered or that I may think in the moment that I must have, I look at them
with a real, I look at them twice, you know, you don't just grab it compulsively thinking
oh I must have that now, literally when people offer me something, even if it has a perceived
high value, quite often I have to reject it because I know that it's not going to fit
in the four backpacks of stuff that I am able to transport.
So it enforces that for me and I like that, I appreciate that.
Now the more radical side of that, the radical end of the spectrum of that would be, I guess
you could call it a conspiracy theory, but I actually believe it so it doesn't really
seem like a conspiracy theory to me.
But if you think about what's a great way to keep people occupied, kind of keep people
from living their lives, one of the, I think the great ways of doing that for some organizations,
some big scary group, government or a business or the same, since it's basically all the same.
But if they were trying to keep a group of individuals consolidated and very busy with
internal kind of affairs, such that they couldn't really break out and start looking around.
One of the great ways to do that I would think would be to start keeping stuff on them
and really encourage that they go out and buy stuff and get more stuff and then take
care of that stuff and then when you run out of space for that stuff, fill up more space
with it and then make sure that you've got a good place to store all that stuff and keep
it safe and look after it and then grow a family around it and get lots of things dependent
upon you, such that if you had to walk away at any point, everything in your life would
basically crumble and fall apart and you'd feel horrible.
So to me, that kind of ties into this whole cult of stuff and the great American dream.
That's just a, that's the more extreme side of the theory, either way whether you like
my mild or my extreme theory, urban camping does help kind of focus that and make sure
that you're not caught up with those kinds of activities and that you're caught up with
whatever else you want to be caught up in.
I guess the danger there would be that some people don't know what else they would possibly
do without those kinds of imposed focal points.
So maybe that might not, might not be a good thing for you, but it might, it might be.
So continue down this ultra paranoid extremist route for a moment.
I think another reason that the urban camping lifestyle, as well as what that means, you
know, meaning that you've only got so much stuff on you anyway, you're able to pick up
and go at any time.
You can pick up your three backpacks and walk for whatever reason and you can, you can
fill in whatever reason you might need to get out of an area fairly quickly.
You're extremely mobile.
Another thing that this will help in my mind is lessening our impact as human beings
on the ecosystem or the environment or whatever.
I realize that it's a huge buzzword right now to say, oh, let's be green and that kind
of bugs me that people use that term now, you know, we're green now.
Companies are like labeling everything green and so you think, oh, good, if I get that,
I'm lessening my impact on the ecology and this is great.
And of course, we have no idea what they're talking about.
It's just a word.
There's no, they're not contract bound to say that they're doing certain things because
they got a green label.
It just means that they put a green label on their product.
But urban camping, I think, could really be appropriately labeled green because by
being an urban camper, you are, well, first of all, you're not having an apartment.
And either way, anyway, you look at it, apartments are, I mean, their little self-contained ecosystems
of sorts and that takes a lot of energy and resources to keep it going.
Think of how much electricity and water and all that other good stuff that you use in
your apartment or your house.
That's a big impact for one person to have anyway, but imagine how many houses around
you there are, how many apartments there are in your apartment building.
It's a big deal.
There's like a lot of stuff being used up and required, we of course require more energy
to run all that and we're not really managing our energy very effectively.
I mean, it's not like we're actually really utilizing wind power, solar power yet.
It's kind of an issue, I think.
And every time I have an apartment, I feel this way.
I do feel like I'm using a lot more resources for a single human being than really necessary.
And for a very long while, I was looking for like a cube apartment, like a tiny, tiny apartment,
you know, maybe eight feet by eight feet.
It would be really, really easy to heat that it would be very easy to light it.
It just, it wouldn't take up a whole lot of resources.
So those don't exactly exist, although my friend Deep Geek actually found an article
I think that of course over in Japan, they've got these little sort of cube apartments and
people can rent them.
And of course, it's, it's accordingly cheaper for, for the small apartment than it would
be a larger one, which of course in some places doesn't actually follow at all.
Like in New York, you get a small apartment and you're still paying as much as most people
pay for a normal size apartment.
So it would be great to find that sort of thing.
We don't have it at least here in the United States.
So just having, having no apartment at all seems not like, like not a bad idea.
Part of this too is that if there was a way to maybe, you know, just as a sort of a side
thought to have society capitalize on the public spaces.
And that's what urban campers do, right, because I mean, think about it.
You've got a library, for instance, a public library or even a cafe.
Now if there are 50 people in there, then that means that 50 apartment, or maybe 25 apartments
out in the real world are all shut down.
There's no power running on in them, it probably is, but, you know, it's, it's greatly reduced,
right?
So if everyone went to public libraries all day one day or if they went there every day
for a month, they would find that their electric bills, their gas bills, things like that
were reduced dramatically and accordingly, the footprint on the ecosystem would be reduced,
right?
Because now we're using less resources.
I mean, I know that wouldn't be the entire solution.
I'm not trying to say that.
I'm just giving an example.
But those libraries, if there's 50 people in them or there's one person in them, they're
still running the same amount of electricity and everything like that.
So it seems like we should capitalize on these places because they're there.
They're turned on anyway.
And if you go there, you can, you can exploit all of their resources that they're running
anyway.
And that seems very efficient to me.
And as someone who's a geek and supposed to be, I'm very into like the Unix philosophy,
I don't know, somehow I like efficiency.
I really do.
I admire efficiency.
And so it seems very inefficient to have lots of people staying home in their apartments,
running their TVs, running their air conditioning, running their heater, whatever, when they
could all be out at the same place, doing the same thing, but sharing the same amount
of resources.
So, I mean, if you're concerned about that sort of thing, that might be another reason
to try urban camping.
Another thing about apartments, of course, is that you're paying rent on them.
This has a whole host of interesting ramifications, right?
So the first one for me, again, starting sort of with the extreme, and we'll filter down
to another brand of extreme, for me, I really dislike the landlord rent model of building
a society.
I don't believe that most landlords, quote, unquote, deserve to be landlords.
I mean, most landlords that I've ever had their mean and their slimy, and they always want
to get as much money for the least amount of quality that they can possibly get.
And you can tell me that that's the American way and say that that's the greatest business
model ever, and that's why this country is so rich.
All you want, the fact is that that's wrong because human beings need a place to stay.
And so if you're going to require people to actually have to pay for a place, for shelter,
which is a basic human need, I just have a problem with that.
Sorry, I just do.
And I apologize to all the land owners out there, and all the people with apartment buildings
making a lot of money off of them, or getting a big headache from all the complaints,
from their tints about them, whatever your experience might be, I don't agree with it.
I think that shelter and food and things like that are basic human needs, and should
therefore be provided for everyone.
And I think that we are resourceful enough race that we could actually figure that out.
Yeah, someone would be making not as much money somewhere along the line.
I don't think that's really what we need to be concerned about personally.
I like to urban camp often because I really like not being subject to a landlord.
I enjoy that feeling very much.
Of course, a more pragmatic thing coming from rejecting this landlord rent model is that
you are saving a lot of money.
You'll find that when you are urban camping, your paycheck, if you have a job, it all goes
into your bank.
It doesn't go to your landlord.
It goes straight to your account, it goes into your pocket, whatever.
That's a big deal.
It's a huge deal in some cases, it depends on where you're living.
But you'll find that, along with apartments, tend to be associated with a lot of other
costs.
So rarely do you rent an apartment, at least in my experience, and get all of your utilities
included.
There's usually extra bills, whether it's just a phone bill or just a TV bill if you watch
television, or something more essential, like a heating bill or a water bill or something
like that.
There's always those bills, and then you'll find that there's always stuff that you need
for your apartment.
It goes back to stuff.
I mean, if you've got an apartment, you're probably going to need basic things like, I don't
know, dishes and dish soap and towels and curtains and trash cans and whatever else people
get and put into their apartments.
So all of these things really start to add up after a while, and you look at the amount
of money that you've spent, and suddenly you're basically, if you're employed, you're simply
employed to live in an apartment, and it's kind of weird.
That's a great thing about urban camping.
The related opposite end of that is that you may have no money at all, and you might need
to urban camp for that reason.
If you ever find yourself in that situation, I know this past seems like this past summer.
A lot of people are actually looking for work and stuff, you know, because I guess the
big thing was the economy, the economy was so bad.
I guess it supposedly still is, I don't really know, but a lot of people seemed to be having
some hard time.
So if you're ever actually finding yourself in that situation and you are up to trying
something drastic like urban camping, that's a great way to go, because in any amount of
money that you do make, whether it's off of a freelance kind of position, or simply
answering ads for work on Craigslist, like, you know, hooking up someone's home network
or fixing their printer or fixing their computer, you know, those things, make money, and
every since, or even playing a musical instrument on the street, you know, whatever your skill
is, you do that, and every since you make, goes straight into your pocket, and it's not
like you're working for anything, you're just working for yourself.
And that's, that's a great way to save up a fair amount of money pretty quickly.
And we'll talk, I mean, I'm not saying that there are no expenses when you're urban camping.
There can be expenses to that, and your style of urban camping might change as to, you know,
if you're employed or if you're not employed.
But we'll go into that in later episodes.
The final reason that I think for urban camping would be hacking society.
And I know that film kind of weird, and almost obligatory, like, that's a hacker book
for you episode, I should mention the word hack, but in fact, this is correct.
You're hacking society, and you can take that almost any way you want to, but the ways
that I think of it, is that I've hacked around the necessity that society keeps telling
me I have to have, whether it's something as basic as a landlord who owns an apartment
building, and will let me stay there for rent, or whether it's something a little bit more
frivolous, like a telephone line and a television, you know, I mean, people here that you don't
have, well, I don't know, any of those creature comforts, really, they do kind of, they get
a little bit thrown off by that.
But you're also, I think you'll also find that you're hacking around a lot of the rules
and regulations that society sets in place even unofficially, because they're, and we'll
get into this later as well, there are some rules on the, on the law books supposedly
about being an urban camper or homeless or whatever, and it's, it reads very accepting
and very tolerant, but I think you'll find that that's not the case, and in practice.
So if you're, if you're doing this, you're kind of, you're getting around a lot of the
things that people just don't expect, they don't, they don't want to accept that people
can live and be happy this way.
So I like hacking with people's minds and expectations in that way.
Of course being, being homeless requires a little bit of social engineering in lots of
different situations, whether you're getting a new job and you have to fill out an IW
4 form or whatever, and suddenly they're asking you for an address, and you don't have one.
So what do you do?
You know, little things like that.
It definitely helps you brush up on your social skills, your social engineering skills.
So that's a great reason to get into it, really.
You'll find, you'll find the opportunity to be a social engineer, presents itself a
lot more if you're urban camping, because generally speaking, you're having to deal with
people in, in ways that you've never had to deal with them before, and what we will go
into that, oh, as, throughout the whole series, you know, I think we'll encounter some of
those, some of those examples.
So that's great stuff too.
I think I said that was the last one, there's actually one more, and I, I associate it
with hacking society as well, but it is a little bit specific, and that is, if should
you have or feel the need to disappear off the grid for a little while, again, for whatever
reason, whether it's because you want to get out of town, for a vacation, or whether it's
simply because you need to not be in an address that you were formally associated with, or
whether it's that you don't even want, that you need to probably just not have an address
at all.
So, however the reason going, being, being an urban camper is basically disappearing from
everything, there's, there's really no precise record of you anymore, obviously it depends
on how you work it.
You might get a PO box, you might get a cell phone, you might get all these things in your
real name, which actually getting a PO box, not in your real name is not easy, but getting
another mailbox and a cell phone, all these things, I mean, if you don't want to be off
the grid, if you don't want to disappear, you don't have to, I'm saying it certainly
helps if you have no address.
It's a lot harder to find people when you can't go knocking on a door and expect to see
them on the other side of it, so that's something to keep in mind as well, might be a benefit.
So, those are some reasons that you might want to look into urban camping, and some of
the things that I really like about urban camping, I'm a really bad salesperson, so I'm
not trying to convince you to do anything, but like I say, those are the reasons I like
it. In closing, I want to give you just the pros and the cons of urban camping as I see
it.
I obviously don't want to make it sound all great and all easy so that everyone just
gives up everything they've ever had and walks out and thinks they're going to urban
camp for the rest of their lives, but I do want to give you, I guess, both sides of this.
So, the benefits of urban camping gets you out of a house, well, quite literally, right?
But if you're, you know, a lot of geeks are a little bit, I'd say, anti-social.
If that's you, you will find opportunities to interact with people a lot more if you're
out among people.
So, you'll meet more people, that's a big plus, or not, depending on who you are.
No more bills, really, that's a fact, extreme mobility, that's a big plus for me.
Disassociation from the requirement of stuff, very important.
You're lightweight, you're just literally lightweight, you feel completely light, you
have nothing but, like, whatever you're carrying around with you, and even that stuff, I usually
stashed somewhere.
So, you're just walking around with nothing, it's incredibly liberating.
Low maintenance.
You'll find that maintaining just yourself goes down so much when you're urban camping.
It's so simple all of a sudden.
I guess it's because you don't have, like, a bathroom to stand in front of a mirror for
three hours, you know, fixing your hair, or whatever people do.
That's kind of, it's an interesting thing that I didn't really expect, I wasn't sure
how that was going to go.
We'll go into the specifics of that, too, by the way, later in the episode, in the series,
but I did find that to be a really interesting one, that just kind of, the amount of time
you have to spend on, I don't know, just being, it really goes down.
Simplification, it really, really simplifies things, I found, drastically.
I don't know what it is, if you're just too busy figuring out how you're going to get
by that day, so you're very focused on what you're going to do, or whether it's literally
just when you don't have an apartment to kind of fill with drama, as it were, then you
don't.
You don't get the drama, and I definitely appreciated that, and I've kind of been able
to maintain the simplicity that I discovered through urban camping, even when I cease
urban camping.
By the way, the reason I cease to urban camping is simply a function of weather.
It gets cold during the winter, and I don't want to freeze.
So anyway, more benefits here.
Stress relief in a big way, yeah, it's just, again, you don't have stuff to worry about,
you don't have a place to worry about, you don't have money that you're always owing
at the end of the month.
It's just, yeah, there's enormous amount of stress just kind of flying away.
Again, it uses resources that your local community is already using up, so it's a green
lifestyle, you can put a little green sticker on you.
You save up money, that's a good one.
You disappear from people who might be looking for you, whoever those people might be, could
be anybody, and it chooses not to heartake in a system that's set up that you might
not agree with, and that's, of course, a big one for me as well.
The disadvantage is the things to watch out for.
It's probably not that compatible with a traditional family life.
Obviously, if you have kids in a spouse right now, being an urban camper probably isn't
going to really work all that well for you.
And even if you think that, if you're close to your extended family, or your parents
and stuff, and you think that urban camping might completely offend and horrify them,
again, it just might not be something that you're able to do without really kind of causing
a lot more drama in your life than maybe you want to.
So that admittedly is difficult.
There's no place to hang out with friends.
This one is something recent, something I completely didn't expect.
But when I was urban camping, just this most recent time for actually most of this past
year, about what, eight months or something like that, I kept meeting people, and it would
always come up like, oh, we should hang out, and it would always be like, oh, well, my
place, yeah, we can't hang out at my place.
Well, because I didn't have a place, you know, and so you don't want to, like, say that
right away, depending on who it is, obviously.
I mean, you don't really just want to say, oh, I actually am homeless, you know, you
don't want to say that.
So you kind of have to, like, sort of beat around the bush and kind of like, I don't
really, my place isn't really good, or I have a roommate, and they're really stubborn,
and they don't like visitors, you know, just come up with weird stories.
So that really doesn't work very well.
So be aware of that.
Of course, other people, you just tell, hey, look, I'm an urban camper.
I don't do the whole apartment thing, and they'll be fine with that, but it's still an
issue, right?
Because you still don't have a place to go hang out if they have, like, the grumpy roommate
or, or they live with their parents still, or something, you know, I mean, it's kind
of like, what do you do?
Where do you go?
There's no feeling of permanence, which for some people is a terrifying idea.
For me, it's really quite comforting not to have a feeling of permanence, but some
people don't like that from what I've heard.
Some people like to feel like they've established a home base for themselves.
They've got a place to go to.
They've got a place to rely on.
That kind of thing.
A lot of people find comfort in that from what I'm gathering.
So, urban camping makes that a little bit more difficult.
There's a certain ever-changing setting for yourself when you're urban camping, or it
might be something that you can rotate, like, every Tuesday, you're hanging out here,
everyone's there, you're hanging out there.
But there is that feeling of change, of frequent change, and a lot of people get freaked
out about that by that as well.
And then, finally, there's health and concerns.
This is a big drawback.
When you're urban camping, you tend to eat out, or you're not cooking for yourself, so
you can't really monitor what exactly you're getting, or whether it's the healthiest thing
around, for whatever reason, whether it's because you can't afford good food, or whether
it's just because there's actually not that much really healthy food out there being made
in restaurants and stuff.
So, it gets difficult, I find, to eat healthy when you're urban camping.
It gets difficult, certainly, to maintain temperature and stuff like that.
I mean, you may or may not have a place that is really, I mean, if you have your own
apartment, you can completely do climate control there.
You can set the temperature to whatever you want it to be.
Not a problem.
Urban camping, you may not have that luxury.
Things like that, things that kind of dictate whether you're healthy or not, basically.
That becomes a concern when you're urban camping.
You really do have to give some thought to that.
That's probably one of the primary things that you have to think about, actually.
So, that would be a big drawback of it.
In that sense, having an apartment is simpler.
Is it worth that trade-off, and definitely not for me, well, except when it reaches zero
degrees outside, in which case, yeah, actually, admittedly, the apartment thing is actually
worth it for me.
So, it really just depends.
That's about all of the good and bad things I can say about urban camping.
I hope that I've at least explained why on earth someone would be interested in urban
camping in this episode.
Hopefully, I've given you an idea of some of the neat things about it, some of the bad
things about it, and I'll come back next episode and talk about some specifics, and specifically
on finding shelter while urban camping.
Riding on an eastbound freight train, speeding through the night, hobo bill, a railroad
bump was fighting for his life, the sadness of his eyes revealed, the torture of his soul,
he raised a weakened weary hand to brush away the cold, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
he smiled there where he lay oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,
oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, what
It sped through the darkness, and the raging storm outside.
No one knew that Hobo Bill was taking his last ride.
It was early in the morning when they raised the Hobo's head.
The smile still lingered on his face, but Hobo Bill was dead.
There was no mother's longing to suit his weary soul,
or he was just a railroad bum who died out in the cold.