As for LA, skip it if you can. It’s a hellhole for RVers. Keep going on down to San Diego, which is friendlier, though not cheaper. Venice is the only place in LA where you can park free, but it’s generally unpleasant, due to harassment by police and locals. You can find lots of neighborhoods to park in, as you head out toward the suburbs, and when I was there in May of 2010, I was able to make a deal with a parking lot in Hollywood to let me park for about $30 a day, but I had to leave around 3AM…so, good for going to the clubs and such and doing the tourist stuff, but it’s not a place to camp. Last time I was in LA in April of 2011, I camped in Anaheim at one of the many RV parks surrounding Disneyland. It’s not cheap, or particularly nice, and besides Disney there is nothing interesting in Anaheim, but it is at least a place to camp near LA that is free from harassment. The location I mentioned in this blog post didn’t work as well the second time I visited, and I was asked to leave by police a few minutes after I parked at around 1AM, though I was able to find a few places in other neighborhoods that worked OK. You just have to be willing to move a lot, or stay very, very, very far away from anything worth seeing/doing in LA.

The next time I visit LA (if I can’t avoid it), I plan to do what I did when I visited New York City and Detroit. I placed an ad on craigslist, looking for someone with a long driveway in a reasonable location, and offering to pay a few hundred bucks to park there for a few weeks. Worked out great in both cases, though I was still farther out of NYC (ended up in Ridgewood, NJ, staying with an awesome lady who’s restoring an old Minnie Winnie) than I would have liked. LA has a lot more driveways than NYC, though, so I suspect I can find something there.

San Diego, on the other hand, was always fine. I parked in a couple of different neighborhoods, and never had any complaints. And also spent some time at an RV park on Mission Bay, which was nice, and only slightly overpriced, given the cost of real estate in the area. So, as southern California cities go, San Diego is better for RVers than LA, though seeing Venice and some other stuff in LA is worth doing…once.

Nope, I am gainfully employed with my own company, and have no desire to take on any other work. I’m also probably not a qualifying genius.

Enjoy life – it’s way too short to be spent aggressively disputing who owns what view…or viewpoints (for that matter).

It’s actually really strange to visit Los Angeles and Venice because in most places, people are excited to see RVs. RVs mean big tourist dollars in most places, but the culture and lack of RV parks in LA/Venice guarantees that the rich RVers skip the city entirely, so all that remains are the folks with no money and ugly old rigs. It’d be simple to solve the problem, I think, by letting extended stay RV parks exist outside of the normal hotel tax requirements. I’ve noticed some cities do that, and I’ve also noticed that LA has much higher than average occupancy taxes, so I think there’s some unintended consequences happening there. But, real estate prices may also be a contributing factor, though San Diego has some great parks with fair prices in reasonably good locations within the city, and the real estate there isn’t dramatically cheaper than LA, so I don’t think that’s a complete explanation.

HOWEVER, what M@X is saying is completely true. YOU are the EXCEPTION to the rule. These people DO NOT pay taxes, do NOT contribute to the community, and only TAKE and abuse the system that was put in place for good people like you.

People who work VERY hard and pay LOTS of money to live a nice, clean, peaceful life here in Venice (like myself) find it a complete slap in the face that you would say “if you dont like the trashy disrespectful bullshit the RV dwellers display on a daily basis then MOVE”.

These people are NOT just passing through. If we work hard and pay our dues then these people have no right to LITERALLY shit on our yards.