Episode: 624
Title: HPR0624: Urban Camping ep 3
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0624/hpr0624.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 00:03:17

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Hi everyone, this is Clot 2 and this is the How To Be an Urban Camper mini series.
This was the third episode of the series.
So today we're going to, well, first of all, last episode, if you want to call, we talked
about shelter, how to find it, and where to stay, where not to stay, things like that.
And got a little bit of listener feedback from on that one.
One from a friend of mine who I'm not too clear on whether I'm permitted to say their
name, so I will just say a friend.
And they mentioned stairwells.
Stairwells of buildings are actually really quite often, really great places to sleep, actually.
Those typically speaking they're not well patrolled, they're quite frequently not well monitored,
and they're inside, and it's kind of a good place to kind of crash for a night.
So if you find your way into a stairwell and find that the building closes down around
you, that might be a perfect place to get a little bit of sleep overnight.
So keep that in mind.
Some listener feedback source reminded me of motion detectors inside of buildings.
These are good to be aware of.
If you find yourself going into places that are closed down, you know, whether it's like
a hotel or a college or whatever, you can usually find places that kind of shut down overnight.
Like I said, last time kitchens are frequently a pretty good place, and a lot of times
don't, people don't really patrol these areas.
So if you find your way into those places, sometimes you can sleep there, but you do need
to be mindful of motion detectors.
If you hear a sound, go off, then definitely clear out of the area, but also be aware that
you might not always hear the motion detector, they might not be set up that way.
So be mindful of that.
That's something that's fun to kind of experiment around with.
Wander around buildings more often when you don't actually need to use them as a place
to stay.
You know, it's all part of scouting out.
Certainly anytime I find myself in a hotel or in an office building or whatever, I typically
see where I can get into, like what areas of that building I can actually make my way
into.
And it's always a coin toss as to whether people are going to actually ask you what you're
doing there and whether you can actually pass yourself off as a messenger or just someone
who's lost.
The whole lost story frequently, it kind of gets you out of getting into trouble, but
it doesn't really usually give you a very good reception I've found.
Passing myself off as a messenger or something like that, that's a lot more successful
usually.
Sometimes that gets me further into an office than, well, I really need to be, but I mean,
you know, sometimes you find a stairwell or something like that that you maybe didn't
expect to find.
Again, that's just kind of, I don't know, something to experiment around with.
Your listener feedback from my friend Skirlit says, she says that I didn't mention a, for
a shelter, a thing called a yurt, why you are tea.
Now this is something that Skirlit had told me about some time ago, and actually a listener
of the Good New World Order, Ron, he emailed me about some of these as well.
And what these yurts are, well, they're, they're a little bit like if you could imagine
like a teepee or even an igloo, but, but it would just be made out of wood.
They're kind of, they're fairly small, but they're, they're actually pretty spacious,
but it would be a one room little house.
And Skirlit's friend is actually building himself a yurt on some land in Northern California.
And that's going to be his home, and it's pretty cool.
It's a little bit like camping, you know, and you can obviously make it as elaborate as
you want to with septic tanks and all that and running water and stuff like that.
Or you can do it more like camping and just use it as a home base, stay there a couple
of months, be out on the road another couple of months playing music or whatever you do,
go back, back and forth, that kind of set up.
So it just depends, they're relatively cheap to, to make and you usually buy them as a
kit from what I understand.
So it's not dirt cheap, but it's, it's a lot cheaper, for instance, than buying a house,
something like that.
So that's a yurt.
I don't know how that falls in our very loose definition of urban camping, because on
one hand it's owning a home, so you're very much not homeless, but it is certainly an alternative
way of living.
So that's kind of, kind of interesting.
The resources used for it are a lot lower than for an apartment.
It's usually a very small place, and it is usually something that doesn't necessarily
have, it's not on the grid, you know, you can set up solar power and stuff like that into
it, but it's not something that you necessarily are hooked up into the city's grid or whatever
with local counties grid.
So that's kind of really kind of cool.
And Skrillett also reminded me that van living and, and yurt living and all these other kinds
of living, you can really harness solar power, fairly cheap.
If you go onto the internet and just kind of shop around for solar panels and batteries
and things like that, you can actually power quite a bit just from having a solar panel
say bolted to the top of your van.
One note is not to bolt it or, or rather, I think Skrillett's friend had super glued it
or something like that or bolted and super glued solar panels to the top of his van.
Now that he's building himself a yurt, he's kind of regretting that decision because
the solar panels that he could use for his little self-made house are super glued to
the top of his van.
So don't super glue them, you may bolt them or whatever.
But there's all kinds of cool solar gadgets coming out now, little solar powered iPod
chargers and all kinds of interesting things that help people have that, that reduced ecological
footprint, but still get their fun technological toys.
That was feedback.
Thanks a lot for the feedback, both people who sent me feedback.
And with the topic of today's episode, which is the fun, fun, fun topic of hygiene,
personal hygiene.
Yes, never really thought I'd be doing an HPR episode about personal hygiene, but specifically,
obviously, this is personal hygiene as an urban camper.
If you think about most of the stuff that you would learn in a, I don't know if it would
be a survivalist class or just kind of from going out into the woods and camping, it basically
all applies to urban camping, except that you actually have typically a few more resources
open to you as an urban camper, but the same general rules apply, obviously.
I mean, showers are strangely a highly controversial subject.
Some people love them, some people do them because they're necessary.
Some people think that people shower too much, some people think that people don't shower
enough.
So explaining each of those points, some people love to take showers, and they take
hour-long showers, and it gets kind of ridiculous and wasteful and all that other good stuff.
Other people might have grown up in a military family or maybe we're in the military, and
a shower means a two-minute activity to wash off sweat and oil, and that's it.
I tend to be more of a two-minute shower kind of person, so showers aren't that big of
a deal for me, and they come in unexpected places, actually.
And we should also talk briefly about the weather two-shower or not-to-shower question,
and you'll meet people who think that showers really are not as healthy as they're made
out to be, versus people who think that people should shower twice daily.
Between those two extremes, I'm sure there's a good solution, and probably a dermatologist
would know for sure, but you kind of have to mitigate your own feelings on showers and
how frequently they should be taken and how long they should be, and how luxurious you
feel they should be.
So if you're one of the people who really requires luxurious, long, hot showers all the
time, you may find that urban camping affords this only with either membership to a gym or
making very good friends with showers.
If you join a gym, it's usually very reasonable compared to, for instance, rent on an apartment
for 12 months.
You can get a gym membership, certainly, probably, honestly, less than you would pay for
the apartment for one month.
Relatively speaking, it's dirt cheap.
On the other hand, if you're broke, that doesn't really help you a whole lot.
But let's talk about if you're not broke first.
So gyms are great.
If there's a gym in your area, or if you can arrange it so that you are near-age gym as
a place that you're going to sleep or whatever, then that would be fantastic.
You can go in as much as you want and take as long of showers as you please.
There you have that.
You also might be able to get a locker with your gym membership.
And that's kind of nice because then you can actually store quite a bit in the locker.
And if your aim is to be mobile and not to have to carry around three backpacks all the
time, that's a really nice luxury right there.
You can just stash your clothes in your locker and never have to think about it.
That's actually what I did for a while this past year.
I had a gym membership.
I had a locker and my clothes got to be stored right there in the locker.
I didn't have to carry that particular backpack around with me to the cafe and to the job
and stuff like that.
That's quite handy.
The disadvantage of the gym, I guess, would be that you're kind of limited to their hours.
But most gyms that I've seen have pretty good hours.
They try to be open really, really early and frequently fairly late.
The edited advantage would be that you, well, go to a gym a lot.
You know, if you're not the type of person to get a lot of exercise, you might find that
going to a gym to shower in the first place might entice you to actually work out a little
bit.
So that could be another good thing.
And again, gyms are communal places.
They're kind of places that are operating at full power, no matter what.
So if it's more of a community center, you might even find that it's a pretty good place
to hang out and get stuff done.
The gym that I was a member of had little rooms off to the side for social events and things
like that and classes, all kinds of things.
So it turned out to be a really good resource, just if the library wasn't open or if I felt
like I was overstaying my welcome at the library or cafe, I could go to the gym and work there
as well.
The other option, of course, would be making friends.
So if you have friends and you're staying over at their house or whatever for a night
or two nights every week or every month, whatever, then capitalize on the fact that they have
a shower and utilize their shower facilities.
Those would be the two easiest options of finding a shower.
A little bit more rare would be, or I guess it's rare, would be, well, looking around and
finding showers in unexpected places.
And here are a couple of places that I've found showers that I would simply not have
really thought about if I wasn't a urban camper.
So I think one, two, not the past three jobs I've had, but the past two of the past three
jobs that I've had had shower facilities in them, I kid you not.
One out in California had a shower downstairs in this little room off of the men's restroom.
It was like this shower and it was intended, I think, for bicyclists because it was a
quote, bicycle-friendly workplace, meaning that you could bicycle in and then if you wanted
to shower, you could.
Or if you bicycled over at lunch, your lunch break, which a lot of people did, then when
you got back from bicycling around town in the middle of the day, you could take a shower.
They literally had a shower right there on premises.
I was living in my office.
I, it was so simple, it made it really, really nice.
The most recent place that I worked also had a shower and they had a shower again.
It was in a room off the men's restroom and I'm not sure what it's for.
No clue, but it's there.
It exists.
It is there.
Another score and completely unexpected.
So those are workplaces.
Again, I don't really think that every workplace is going to have a shower, but I think it's worth
looking into.
These were all sort of the downstairs areas and kind of far in the back.
You know, they weren't really, they weren't necessarily the places that people went to often
I don't think.
So if that helps you get an idea of where to look for showers, then maybe, but yeah, they
just, you have to look around.
You have to really poke around a building and you just never know what you'll find.
Hotels, I've found showers in hotels, obviously in hotel rooms, but I also mean in either,
and again, like kind of back the sort of recessed restrooms that I kind of always had the
feeling that maybe they were supposed to be staff restrooms, but they weren't, you know,
they weren't back in the staff areas.
So you could access them.
Obviously not every hotel I've ever been in has that.
It's more like when you can find it, then it's a score.
Another place that actually I've found to be fairly common are churches.
And I will tell you that the churches that I've found to be more likely to have showers
than others have been Baptist and Mormon.
Those are the two church types that I've found seem to have showers more often than other
ones.
And again, it's still very rare, but I have definitely found them.
And this is on both coasts, actually.
So I think they're there for, because these are very sort of community activity oriented
churches.
They're really big.
And so I think they have like basketball courts and things like that.
So I'm gathering that maybe, again, just kind of as an option after getting a lot of
exercise, then you can take a shower.
That's kind of my guess, I'm not really sure.
But they do exist.
The problem there, of course, and a lot of other places, is that you can't just walk
in unless you either work or go to church or work at the hotel or whatever.
You can't really just walk in and say, hey, I'm going to use your shower really quick.
They exist, but they aren't necessarily readily available.
And certainly it's not something that you would want to count on every other day.
Or however often you think you need to take a shower.
So you've got various places to look.
If you absolutely cannot find a shower and really need to take a shower, truck stops.
So the bigger truck stops, again, these are on the highway typically, maybe not the easiest
place to get to under certain circumstances that kind of depends.
But truck stops do have showers a lot of times.
You have to pay outrageous prices for them, though, and comparatively.
So if you can swing a gym membership, heck, even if you can ask a family member for a
gym membership for Christmas or something, then that might work to your advantage.
But those are the places to define showers.
By far, the easiest one is a gym.
The gym membership, you just swipe your card, you go in, you work out, take your shower,
hang around, work on whatever you want, and then leave.
It's no one bothers you, no one asks you why you're coming in to use the showers.
You know, it's just, it's really simple.
So if you can swing that, it makes it really, really convenient.
That's the biggest, that's like the top, the top question that I've ever get when
I, when someone finds out that I'm an urban camper.
That's the first question that they kind of awkwardly ask.
Other questions tend to be things like, how do you find a bathroom?
And those are amazingly easy to find, that's, I'm not even sure why people are confused
about that.
Bathrooms tend to be in every restaurant that you go into.
It's obviously, if you're going to be urban camping, you want to kind of get familiar
with the area.
Find out what restaurants there are, what restaurants are 24 hours, and what restaurants
tend to be really easy and friendly to go back and use their bathroom without like explaining
why you need to use their bathroom and stuff like that.
So that's really simple.
Public libraries tend to have bathrooms readily available.
What else?
I don't know.
It's almost so simple to me that I can't even think how to explain it.
So that's, I don't know, that doesn't really puzzle me very much.
There are, there is a question of like brushing your teeth and flossing and just kind of
doing your hair or whatever people do.
I tend to be very low maintenance.
And I think a lot of urban campers either are or fall into being low maintenance.
So I think that you're, if you perceive that you would need a long time in a bathroom
to dress yourself up and stuff, I think you'll find that urban camping minimizes that a
lot more.
And I think that's a good thing, frankly, I really like that.
Some people might not like that, but I think that you find that you, you'll get a feel
for which bathrooms you can go into and kind of have your toothbrush out and your floss
and your deodorant and everything and kind of like sort yourself out.
Obviously, the little coffee shops that tend to have private restrooms, those are really
good because you can take your backpack in there, unpack a little bit, brush your teeth,
just kind of get yourself straightened out for that day.
Otherwise, if you get to places early enough, you can usually capitalize on their bathroom
before traffic really starts to get in there.
Shaving, if you shave, I don't really shave that often, but if you need to shave, again,
just getting to bathrooms early and or locating the ones that actually have private, private
bathrooms will work out pretty nicely for you.
Clothes and laundry are, again, really, really obvious, really simple.
There are laundromats all over the place.
They tend to be open 24 hours, so you can do your laundry and maybe catch some z's while
you're at it.
That's pretty simple.
I've never had a problem with that and in some jobs, once again, depending on what kind
of job you've got, sometimes you'll find that there are laundry facilities and if you're
working a graveyard shift, you might be able to take advantage of that.
That's there, that's a possibility.
One thing that I tend to go through amazingly quickly when urban camping are shoes and
socks.
I guess it's because you've got them on all the time and I tend to walk a lot just for
whatever reason I go through shoes and socks really, really quickly.
You also need to be mindful, I guess, that you have your shoes and socks on a lot when
you're urban camping.
Probably too much.
They're always on your feet, they're getting worn out, possibly smelly, it's just something
you want to be aware of.
For some reason that was one thing that really struck me the first time that I was urban
camping at how frequently I had my shoes on.
The time that I was urban camping and I was able to sleep in my office, that was a whole
different ballgame.
I could take my shoes off and I was quite comfortable and I didn't have to ever really be afraid
of someone discovering me and me having to leave or at least to have the appearance that
I wasn't actually living in that spot or sleeping in that spot or whatever.
But if you're more out in places that are kind of touch and go, you might need to keep
your shoes on and so you're talking about shoes and socks being on your feet all day
and then all night and then all day and then all night and that just gets bad.
So change of socks, good idea, keeping updated on your shoes is a good idea and by updated
I mean, if you need to get a new pair of shoes, try to swing that if you can because they'll
get worn out really, really fast and possibly really, really smelly, really, really fast.
So just keep that in mind.
It's like one of those things that you don't really think about until you suddenly start
living in your shoes for like days at a time.
Doing your hair and things like that, I tend to not be very, again, I'm not very high
maintenance in terms of hair styling and things like that.
Actually, I just get up and go but in terms of hair cuts and things like that, I've found
that not just while urban camping but just in general, cutting my own hair is much more
efficient, both cost wise and time wise and everything else.
So I tend to just cut my own hair and I tend to do that in whatever random private bathroom
I find and I guess a lot of urban camping can be kind of summarized by taking advantage
of things when they present themselves to you.
So it means that you have to kind of keep your eyes open and be ready to discover little
things that you can use while urban camping, whether it's a shower that you discover out
of the blue or a bathroom that affords a lot of privacy and you can just unpack and straighten
out your gear, shave, cut your hair.
So there really is a lot of opportunism involved, I think.
And I don't think that's a bad thing.
I actually think it's a great thing and I actually think it's good training almost.
And the way I think that we tend to live when we believe we have control over stuff and
we own stuff, I think that we become very demanding and we expect there to be exactly what
we want when we want it.
And then when that doesn't happen, we get very upset and it throws us off in ruins our
day.
Urban camping, you don't tend to think that way.
You tend to think to look at things as more sort of a natural flow and you kind of discover
that, that you don't really need as much as you thought you need, you don't need that
kind of regular scheduled, everything must be where you want it to be at the exact time
and you start taking advantage of things that present themselves to you.
I just feel like that's a much more somehow organic or natural way of really living in
a way.
It works better actually because you find that, yeah, you didn't actually expect to find
that bathroom where you could shave and cut your hair and cut your fingernails and stuff,
but there it is right there.
So why not take this opportunity to do those things?
Now, well, you're not really planning your life around, oh, when am I going to go get
that haircut or you're not wasting your morning, you just, you get started.
You go do the stuff that you want to do and then suddenly you stumble across a bathroom
that is perfect for what you need and so you go in, you shave, cut your hair, organize
your gear, change t-shirts, change socks, whatever you want to do, and then you leave.
And it works out.
It works out beautifully.
It's a very sort of natural flow and you don't have to force it.
You don't have to structure your day around it, you don't have to hunt it down.
It just kind of is there.
It just presents itself and you use it.
It's kind of neat and it's a rhythm that you can get into.
So those are really, I think my notes on personal hygiene, obviously it's pretty self-explanatory
except that I guess it isn't necessarily so just kind of keep in mind that there is
that angle to being an urban camper there.
You do have to think about it a little bit more.
So you do have to kind of think, okay, what do I look like right now or how do I smell
right now and just kind of make sure that you're not forgetting that as strangely as that
sounds.
I mean, obviously some people would never forget any of that.
Other people I think are more prone to kind of let that fall by the wayside.
You probably don't want to let that fall too far to the wayside.
You probably want to kind of keep that in mind.
I think even more so as an urban camper, because if you are homeless and I mean, you know,
without a home, and then you start to smell homeless and this time I mean the bad kind
of homeless and you start to look homeless and again, I mean the bad kind of homeless.
Then you start to look and sound and smell a lot like a real homeless person.
And that's not what we're going for.
We're going for the whole urban camping thing, the mentally stable homeless by choice kind
of homeless, not the other kind of homeless.
So keep that stuff in mind, be hygienic, be safe.
So there you go.
That's as much as I can possibly think to say about the wonderful subject of hygiene.
Next episode we will talk about organization, how to organize all that wonderful stuff
that you have as an urban camper.
Talk to you then.
All the river rinds things by the linden tree.
Melody.
Melody.
It's calling me.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
There's a street happening for me day by day.
So far away.
I can't believe it's straight.
I long to hear the church belled between the chimes.
How love will rhyme.
And come the time.
Right moonbeam fiver on the rippling,
Right river and my tree,
Heart waiting by the vine.
Love deemed remind me,
I left my heart behind me
By the hero river ride.
Right moon, right moon,
Right moonbeam fiver on the rippling,
Right river and my tree,
Heart waiting by the vine.
Right moonbeam fiver on the rippling,
Right moonbeam fiver on the rippling,
Right river and my tree.
Right moonbeam fiver on the rippling,
Right moonbeam fiver on the rippling,
Right river and my tree.
All river ride.
Thank you for listening to Hacker Public Radio.
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