Mary: Well, I got the bus back. Max is out of the shop. Now I
can get some things done but today what I'm gonna get done is
I am going to get back in the Wayback Machine, go back to
2022, and I'm going to show you where I went after I left the
Badlands. When I left the Badlands, I was running low on
power. It doesn't happen often because I have a good solar
setup. But after several days of rain, or if, for some other
reason there hasn't been any sun on my solar panels I sometimes
need, just need a boost. And when that happens, I look for a
cool place with electrical hookups so I can plug in. That's
how I discovered Uncle B's. Uncle B's is a Hipcamp. Hipcamp
is basically Airbnb for camping. You might remember I stayed in a
Hipcamp that night, I almost got hit by the tornado back in
Kansas. That was my second Hipcamp. This one I'm going to
show you today, Uncle B's, was my first which, I know it's out
of order. But yeah, it's a little confusing. You can handle
it though. This place is nothing like the other one which was
very bare bones, you know, hands off, just a parking spot with
some electrical plugs, no host or anything. Uncle B - Brian -
makes his hipcamp a true experience, which is probably
why he's the 2023 winner for the best Hipcamp in South Dakota. I
gotta be honest, Uncle B's isn't free. And it's a little more
expensive than other places that I've shown you. But it is so
worth it if you need a cool place to hang out, either with
or without hookups, in South Dakota and I'm gonna give you a
discount code for the place. I'm gonna let Uncle B himself tell
you about the place mostly, but stick around to the end because
that's when I'm going to tell you how you can enter a drawing
to win an Uncle B's t shirt, and how you can get a discount so
that you can stay there. Check it out for yourself. Okay. Take
it away, Uncle B. Here we go.
Brian: I bought the place in 2011 as just bare ground.
Nothing out here except for the old railroad bridge and the
north half of the pond that's still here and the grove of
cedars and few trees around the pond. So no house, no building,
no structure, there wasn't even an approach. I used to have to
drive through a ditch when I first bought it. So the first
thing I did was parked the camper back behind the trees
over there and put in a fire pit ring and I'd come out after work
and on weekends and hang out here and camp on my new place
and work on the barn a little bit. A year went by and I spent
the entire summer building a barn and got the barn all
together and... a relationship I was in didn't exactly work out
like it was planned. And in January, I was kind of looking
for a place to stay. So I ended up finishing off a couple of
rooms in the loft of the barn, a little kitchenette, a little
bathroom, there's a bedroom up there and a wood burning stove.
And instead of my dream house getting custom built by scratch,
I moved in a building, remodeled it, stayed in the barn loft
while I did the remodeling. Now you can fast forward four or
five years and I hear about hipcamp for the first time,
described as an air b&b for campers. I got online and I
looked at their website and I went well.. because I've got a
campsite already back there where I have my camper. And the
barn loft is empty. nobody's using it. It's got a bathroom
and a kitchen and what the heck, we'll go ahead and list on
hipcamp and see what happens. Maybe I'll get a couple of
campers. So I started out real real reasonable, 16 a night,
with a bathroom and a shower and August 29 of 2020 posted my
first open date and I got two bookings for that first day.
Both of them gave me a phenomenal review. And the next
day there were one or two more, then two more. And by the time I
finished out the 2020 season in six weeks, I had just about 80
guests here. Hipcamp does some voting for the Best Hip camp for
each state. And that year, bless their hearts, those people that
had stayed here there were enough of them to vote for me
that I got Best Hipcamp in the state of South Dakota. And that
got me so fired up that winter I plotted and schemed and planned
and I came in and I built a shower house with a couple of
showers and a clubhouse. And I trenched in some lines and added
some water and added some electricity. And I also do the
great big old garden over here with the intention that I'm
gonna do farmers markets. That seems like a great way to do it.
And after looking into that whole racket, like for instance,
Sioux Falls farmers market, you have to be voted in by the ones
that are already there. There's $1,000 application fee non
refundable. And every, all the competition, the other 12
vendors out there all have big fifth wheel refrigerated
trailers and staff. And I'm just Uncle B with a pickup truck and
some baskets of fruit. So I decided you know what? Hey,
camper guest. If you'd like any of this produce, please help
yourself because I'm gonna end up feeding it to the chickens if
not, so they all got fresh peppers and tomatoes and
different things like that. But I would also give everybody
s'mores. They all get a candy bar and some graham crackers and
marshmallows and so those showed up on the reviews too. And after
I had about 20-25 good reviews, I thought well I can kind of
pull back on the s'mores a little bit. And the first person
I decided, well, we're probably not going to do smores They
pulled in with two younger kids and two adults saying, we've
been talking about smores ever since we read your reviews. So I
had Lisa jump in the car quick and run to the store and get
more more smore stuff because I guess we're gonna stay with this
s'mores.Well eventually I did bring my rates up from 16. And
I'm not going to get rich doing this anyway, but I've wanted a
campground for years. And I always figured you've got to be
at a destination if you're gonna have a campground and so Hipcamp
gave me the chance to test that theory. It turns out if you're
far enough from a destination, people stop here to rest on
their way to a destination. People that aren't used to
seeing flat planes and looking 10 miles in every direction or
seeing a sunrise and a sunset from the same spot think this is
just magical.
Mary: Would you recommend this if somebody said to you, Hey, I
got a farm. I'm thinking about doing this, would you recommend
it to them?
Brian: The smart part of me says do your do your due diligence
first make sure Planning and Zoning is gonna let you get away
with it. Sounds like a lot of counties won't have a problem
with it. I just picked around wrong County has started in
maybe. 2021 is rolling just beautifully and I've got a full
campground I was visiting with when the sheriff's office pulls
in. It was the sheriff himself and he had cease and desist
paperwork. Because apparently I wasn't zoned to have a
campground. So it was, a surveyor came out. And that was
a couple thousand dollar expense to re survey some of the
property office commercial. And then I had to send a letter to
all my neighbors and everybody who lives here was all very good
with it. And the guy that lives out of state that owns the farm
ground around me objected. Either way, three county
commission meetings later, they went ahead and approve my
request to be rezoned commercial, and now I'm zoned
commercial. And, yeah, if zoning wouldn't have been an issue, I
would say this has been a perfect experience. It's great.
The best part about it is turns out to be the people. It's kind
of corny, but it's like meeting new friends every night. You
know? Anytime I've got a half full or more camp, it seems like
most often there's one fun group that kind of attracts the rest.
And pretty soon that's the bigger bonfire and you got two
or three camps around there. And sometimes the whole camp will
move to one campsite and everybody sits around has fun.
That first season I opened I had somebody stay for three days and
it was kind of neat. They were from Austin, Texas. And they
were looking around maybe at property in Sioux Falls thinking
about coming up and maybe opening either a restaurant or
food truck. My Garden was ripe and full of fresh produce. They
went and picked all the ingredients, my roma tomatoes
and onions and made pizza out there in a Dutch oven over the
fire. If you're wanting to camp in some guy's backyard at the
farm you're already pretty cool. But the list has just been
phenomenal. Some of the people around here, the countries that
they visited from and the feedback is so good and yeah, I
guess that's kind of what I feed off of, just - nothing like
reading a review after somebody's left and going, look
at what a great time they had. I had a father and two boys that
went from California all the way to the east coast and back home
again. And their review said that they stopped at several
national parks and several different places and everybody
that asked their boys what the best part of their vacation was.
They say it was staying at Uncle B's farm. I had a guy stay in
the barn loft last year. And he had a cigar box guitar. Three
strings, kind of homemade deal and I'm kind of musician, I got
a couple of guitars, and you can't impress me much, buddy. He
blew my socks off with some of the blues he was playing with
that thing and when they left they left a note saying to check
my youtube channel and it's stick in box blues on YouTube.
The guy is a full fledge phenomenal musician and I
thought that was really really cool too. I had a couple from
Germany. I had a guy here earlier this season that was
from Turkey, Colombia, South Africa. A neat guy named Preston
I remember, and his side job was making prosthetic devices for
animals. I had I had a young gal who was so excited because she
is just out of college just graduated was headed for her
first job as a park ranger in Yellowstone. Recently I had this
gal with this really cool old skoolie, you know what, that's
cool. She's kind of semi celebrity out here and a great
person to have. I do have a a couple from Ohio that are here
now, which, they thought they'd stay maybe a month while they
found a house or apartment but they're not having any luck
finding a house or apartment. So they've been here about six
weeks now. And I do have a traveling nurse I think coming
in here first of July, scheduled for two months. So I'm we're
starting to get longer. And I've only got the three hookup sites,
I think I've got to add a few more sites. That's not a bad
thing.
Mary: Not a bad thing at all. Tell me about your animals. Tell
me like how did you end up with peacocks?
Brian: I didn't have any intention of getting peacocks,
didn't even think I wanted peacocks. But I've got a
neighbor across the road, Sue. She's a very, very nice lady,
she gave me the bus as a matter of fact. She asked me if I would
help her catch some peacocks. An older friend of theirs was
getting elderly and they're gonna need to put them into
assisted living. And he needed to sell the house and he had
lived there for 20 some years. And for 20 years, peacocks had
been running wild on the property and reproducing and he
didn't even know how many he had. He would just go out every
day and dump out some buckets of feed and they'd come and eat. He
wanted to catch and sell as many of those as he could before he
sold the property. So We'd sneak over with these great big
fishing nets during the night, sneak up on them in the dark.
We'd net them and we put them in cages. And he pretty much sold
like 30 and then he said, that's enough. He said, there's,
there's a few left you guys are welcome happens you want 'em.
And Sue asked if I wanted them and I said, Well, I don't need
any more birds. I don't know what I would do with them. She
says, you can sell them for pretty good money. A male goes
for about 300 dollars. Yeah, I'll take a couple of 'em. So we
went over one more night and I caught two males and two
females, Peter, Paul and Marys. I still haven't sold one yet.
But because they're fun to watch, and they're pretty, but
they don't have the personality that some of the other birds do.
The guineas are supposed to be tick eaters, though. And I still
get tics but imagine what it would be like if I didn't have
the guineas. my first batch of chickens were given to me by one
of mom's friends. She said, I'm kind of done with them. If you'd
like them, a lot of them are old and spent, they're not going to
lay real good. But hey, they're free. So I went and picked up
eight or 10 chickens from her and she said, Would you please
take this turkey? and said, I really don't want to Turkey,
Dawn. she said Well, he's been raised with the chickens. He
doesn't know any other turkeys. He's kind of - it'd really be
nice if you... So I went ahead and took the turkey and he was a
hoot. You sat in that picnic table long enough he'd jump up
on the bench next to you to kind of start rubbing up against you.
I had him around four or five years. And he finally - I looked
it up, they're supposed to live about eight to 10. And we
figured he was about 12. And he finally tipped over one cold
winter. And my good friend Mike, more being funny than anything,
thought this place just wasn't the same without turkeys. So he
brought me over two pairs. We've got that big, big cycle going on
works great. The chicken coop goes in the garden, I grow the
vegetables, vegetable goes back to the chickens, I get the eggs
and everybody kind of wins. So they probably are the most
useful bird out here. I don't know, the solace that you get
and just kind of watching a flock of chickens. The fact of
the matter is, this sounds pretty immodest and conceited.
So if this was your first hipcamp I don't know if I'd
expect the movie and the video game and the nice showers from
your next camp necessarily, not saying that there aren't nice
ones out there. There certainly are. But I think I set the bar
pretty high.
Mary: Yeah, why do you set the bar so high? Don't you think
people would come without the produce and the smores and the
eggs? Why do you do all that?
Unknown: Way back when I was a youngster, my dad was always a
ham radio operator. And we had he had a mobile two meter rig in
the car. And we were on vacation. He was talking to
somebody on the radio and and we ended up pulling in and meeting
him somewhere. Dad was going to meet this new friend he had just
met on the radio. If that guy didn't go to a store and bought
all three of us toys, the coolest toys you ever seen, I
got a spy detective kit. But this guy didn't know us from
anybody and gave us these which to him may have just been
trinkets. But to us that was just the most incredible thing.
I remember what that little token that that guy gave did for
our vacation. And I still remember him to this day, 40
years later. And I guess I'm kind of trying to do that just
one little bitty extra special thing that will make your
vacation more memorable or better. Just happy to do it.
Mary: Every guest at Uncle B's gets not one, several welcome
gifts. And now you can get one more and maybe two more if
you're the winner. There's a discount code in the description
of this video. That's gift number one and everyone who
leaves a comment on this video will be entered to win an Uncle
B's t shirt. Just like the one that Brian was wearing in the
video. Make sure that you leave a comment and not a reply to
somebody else's comment because only actual comments are going
to count. And each account is only going to get one entry no
matter how many - leave 100 comments, I would love it if you
left 100 comments, but you're still only gonna get one entry.
The winner is gonna be chosen at random. It's not chosen by me.
But it's going to be chosen by a comment picker app so that it's
guaranteed to be random and fair. And I don't just pick you
because you're my favorite. And then I'm going to announce the
winner on the next video. After I do, you'll have a week to get
in touch with me and give me your address so I can send you
the prize. Good luck. I'm gonna see you next time.