Is Northern Stay really Canadian?
Yes. Here's the whole story.

We didn't start Northern Stay because we spotted some gap in the market. We started it because we ran into the same frustrating problem twice, and the second time around we figured we might as well fix it ourselves.

In 2019 we finally did the thing we'd been talking about for years. Sold the house, packed up our stuff, and hit the road in an RV. No fixed address. Very long list of places to see.

The first few months were genuinely great. We boondocked in places that weren't on any map. Stayed in resort campgrounds. Pulled into a Walmart parking lot at midnight a few times and called it an adventure. North America is incredible when you slow down and actually drive through it.

But after a while, the daily logistics started wearing us down. Not the big stuff. The small stuff that never stops.

Water was a constant thing. No water means no cooking, no showers, no toilet, so there was always a checklist running in the back of your mind about where the next fill was. Same with tanks. We cut trips short more than once because we were full and there was nowhere to dump. Solar sounds great until you park in the trees for a week during a grey stretch and watch the fridge slowly stop being cold. And laundry. Anyone who's spent time living on the road knows what laundry becomes when you don't have a machine at home.

There were also too many nights pulling into spots in the dark not knowing if we were welcome, and more knocks on the door from cops than felt comfortable.

That's when we started looking at campground memberships in the States. You pay one fee and you get access to a network of campgrounds with full hookups, power, water, sewer, showers, laundry, wifi. The nightly rate goes to basically zero. Most of the daily stress just disappears. We got into a couple of those programs and everything changed.

Hot shower every morning. Laundry whenever we wanted. Show up somewhere and know it's going to work out. This was the version of the life we'd imagined before we ever left.

Then COVID happened.

The government and our families said the same thing at the same time: get home. Now. We were in Southern California. We pointed the rig north and drove.

When we got there, we looked for the Canadian version of what we'd been using in the States. It didn't exist. Canada has beautiful campgrounds, no question. But the infrastructure around them is all over the place. Some parks have slick online booking. Some have a phone number on a wooden sign out front. Planning a route was frustrating. Good sites sold out constantly. And there was nothing like the membership programs we'd been using. No pay-once, show-up-anywhere, full-amenities system.

We figured someone else would build it eventually.

So we did the thing we didn't want to do. We bought a house in Moncton, unpacked our stuff, and settled back into the kind of life we thought we'd left behind. COVID was doing what COVID was doing. We rode it out like everyone else.

And life was fine. Genuinely fine. Moncton is home. We have people there, family, history. There is nothing wrong with it.

But we kept looking at each other.

Not in a dramatic way. Just that look. The one that says: we know what else is out there. We've done it. We know what it feels like to wake up somewhere new with nowhere to be and nothing to prove. And now we're looking at the same ceiling every morning, driving the same roads, going through the same motions. Is this really what the next sixty years look like?

Eventually we stopped having the conversation and started making the plan. We sold everything again, rented out the house, and hit the road.

New rig, same memberships, same freedom. Another winter moving through the States and everything worked exactly the way we remembered. Comfortable. Cheap. Predictable in the best way. We'd figured something out that most people hadn't, and we knew it.

The summer of 2024 looked exactly like all our other summers. We were planning our next winter trip the way we always did. Paid the campground deposits. Booked the national parks. Got the Disney tickets. Everything was lined up.

Then fall came and the headlines started. And for the first time in years of doing this, we found ourselves asking questions we'd never had to ask before. Are we actually welcome down there right now? Is the border going to be okay? What happens if something goes wrong?

Our families and friends came out of the woodwork again, same as 2020. Stay home. Don't go. It's not worth it.

But we'd already paid. And more than that, we knew the United States. Not from headlines. From hundreds of real interactions over years on the road. The people who had waved us into their campsites, shared their fire, given us directions, invited us to stay for dinner. A few months of bad news wasn't going to erase all of that.

So we went.

And right at the border, things felt different. The questions were different. The tone was different. A level of scrutiny we had genuinely never experienced in all our years of crossing, and an unsettling moment of wondering whether we had made a mistake.

We came home that spring and the conversation we'd been circling for years finally landed somewhere real. We were done planning trips that started with a knot in our stomach. We wanted to camp closer to home, on our own terms, with the same infrastructure we'd had in the States. And the fact that it didn't exist yet stopped feeling like someone else's problem to solve.

We started by talking to people. Thousands of campers. What do you actually need? What would make you do this full time? What's the thing that always stops you? The answers were remarkably consistent. It wasn't the camping that was hard. It was everything around the camping.

Then campground owners. Hundreds of them. Calls, visits, conversations over coffee and across picnic tables. Some of them were skeptical. Most of them were tired. Tired of competing without the marketing budgets the big chains have, tired of empty sites mid-week, tired of watching guests drive past them to book at a corporate chain. They'd been waiting for something like this too, they just didn't think anyone was actually going to build it.

We talked to associations. Product developers. People who had spent careers in the outdoor hospitality industry. We asked a lot of questions and we listened to a lot of answers, including the ones that told us we were wrong about something and sent us back to the drawing board.

We spent real money. More than we planned. That is probably the most honest thing we can say about 2025.

And then, slowly, something shifted. People started saying yes. Not polite yes. Real yes. Campground owners who had been skeptical called us back. Campers who had said "let me know when it's ready" started asking how they could get in early. People we respected in the industry started putting their names and their support behind us. The idea that had started as our personal frustration started to feel like it belonged to a lot of people.

That was the moment we knew we were building something real.

And then the market responded in a way that honestly surprised even us. Over 15,000 families raised their hand and said yes, I want to know more about this. The waitlist blew up. People we had never spoken to were finding us and signing up and sending us messages saying this is exactly what I've been looking for. That doesn't happen for ideas that don't matter.

We launched in February 2026. Members started coming in. Bookings started happening. Campground owners we'd spent months building relationships with started seeing real reservations show up in their systems.

And now it's almost May. Our first real camping season. The one where everything we built stops being a plan and starts being something people are actually living. Families pulling into parks, hooking up, sitting around fires, waking up somewhere beautiful with nowhere they have to be.

We are so ready for this. We genuinely can't wait to see it.

We weren't looking for the campgrounds with the best online reviews or the nicest pool decks. We were looking for the ones that feel like the camping we grew up doing.

A lot of that is family-run parks. Places that have been in the same family for 30 years. Owners who got into this because they love camping, not because somebody told them the returns looked good. Places where the person checking you in is the same person who built the desk. Where the people around the fire that night are the kind who hand you a beer before they know your name.

But it's really about the character of the place more than the ownership structure. We want parks that care about their guests, maintain their facilities, and feel like somewhere you'd actually want to spend a week. We've found those in all kinds of parks. What we're not interested in is the anonymous, cookie-cutter experience where you could be anywhere in North America and it wouldn't matter.

We're picky on purpose. The network is only as good as the parks in it.

Why we have campgrounds on both sides of the border

When we talked to thousands of Canadian campers about what they needed, this came up over and over. The Alaska Highway. The Pacific Coast run. Wintering in Arizona. These aren't edge cases — they're the trips people spend years planning. A membership that stops at the border doesn't actually serve how people travel.

The Alaska Highway is a bucket list trip for hundreds of thousands of people. The Pacific Coast route from California up through Oregon, Washington, BC, and into the Yukon is one of the great road trips on this continent. Canadian snowbirds have been heading south for the winter for generations. These aren't border crossings, they're just part of the journey.

We built Northern Stay around the way real campers move, not around lines on a map. If your membership only works on one side of the border, it doesn't work for how most of our members actually travel. So we made sure it works everywhere they go.

The parks we work with in the US are the same kind of parks we look for everywhere. Good people running good campgrounds who genuinely love having guests. We've met incredible people at every one of them. The camping culture on both sides of the border has a lot more in common than it has differences, and that's always been our experience.

Northern Stay is rooted here. But it travels with you wherever the road goes.