I have lived in a truck across Europe for years, and one question shapes the whole life. Where do you want to wake up tomorrow. A beech forest in Slovenia one week, a fire road behind a Pyrenean village the next. I ran a script across the whole continent and built a map of about forty thousand candidates. The file sits at the bottom of this post.

The question itself does most of the work. Most people answer it by accident. They wake up in the flat their parents picked, the suburb the employer routed them into, the cheap room the algorithm found in whichever city the cheap flight landed, the dormitory the university assigned at seventeen. The walls stay still, the view stays the same, the soundscape outside the window was decided by a municipal planner who left office in 1973. Answering the question on purpose means being able to move, and moving daily means a small home that comes with you.

A small home pushes you outward. Vehicle dwellers know this and apartment dwellers refuse to believe it. With six square meters of interior, the dwelling stops being the destination and the country around it becomes the living room by default. The forest is the kitchen extension. The lake is the bath. A long ridge with a view is the office. You stop curating an interior and start curating a location, which beats every interior decorating decision you will ever make, because locations on this continent are infinite and your interior is six square meters.

The freedom is physical. Open the back door at six in the morning and there are deer in a Carinthian meadow. The wind shifts and the air gets bad, so you move twenty kilometers. On Tuesday afternoon you decide Wednesday should happen in another country, and then it does. The benefit compounds with every day you use it, because using it teaches you that you can.

Then comes the parking. Nobody admits this at the beginning.

Ask any full-time vehicle dweller who has stopped posting Instagram photos and they will tell you the same thing. They sleep at Walmart, or its European equivalent, a supermarket lot off a ring road in some industrial town. Gas stations work as a backup. Motorway rest areas too. So do residential streets in cities where the neighbors call the police at midnight. Morning arrives with engine noise, fluorescent lights, and the diesel exhaust of trucks idling at four. The cortisol load in these places is real and measurable, and after six months of it the lifestyle starts to feel like punishment.

The other failure mode is the official campground. It solves the legal question and the water question and inflicts the same damage in a more expensive register. You pay thirty or forty euros a night to sit in a numbered rectangle three meters from the next numbered rectangle, separated by a thin hedge, surrounded by hundreds of other vehicles whose owners are running generators and television sets and arguing with their children. The shower block is clean and the electricity works. Your view is the awning of a German caravan from 1998, your smell is somebody’s barbecue, your audio mix is somebody’s dog, somebody’s radio, somebody’s reversing alarm. You have traded the asphalt of the supermarket for the asphalt of the campground, paid for the privilege, and given up any actual relationship with the place you came to visit. A campground in the Dolomites and a campground in Brittany feel almost identical from inside the vehicle, because the campground is its own place and the surrounding country has been demoted to a postcard you walk past on the way to the toilet.

Mobility is supposed to be about choosing the location. A supermarket lot is the location someone chose by no longer choosing. A campground is the location someone chose because they confused infrastructure for nature. The truck moves. The dweller does not. With an entire continent of wild country available, they still sleep next to a row of shopping carts or inside a numbered rectangle, because finding a better spot has become harder than enduring the bad one.

A better pattern exists, and long-term vehicle dwellers converge on it independently, the way people in different cities all figure out the same shortcut. Picture a small parking area at the end of a dead-end road, surrounded by forest, used during the day by hikers and dog walkers, and empty after dark. Single-track or forest service road class. Space at the terminus for two or three vehicles. Trees come right up to the windows. Half a kilometer of woodland separates you from the nearest house. After seven in the evening the silence is complete; the only light comes from the moon and the only sound from owls. You sleep in the dark, in the cool air the forest pulls down at night. You wake up to woodpeckers and the smell of pine resin.

These spots exist across Europe in extraordinary numbers. Every forest district has them, every mountain valley, every coastal pine belt. Hunters and foresters and locals need somewhere to leave a car when they walk into the woods, so the spots were built for that purpose, never with tourists in mind, which is why they still work. The infrastructure of quiet rural Europe is also the infrastructure of long-term vehicle living, and most of it is invisible to the apps.

The apps are the second problem. Park4night, iOverlander, Campercontact, the rest of them, all built large databases of camper-friendly spots, populated by users, ranked by reviews. Park4night alone has been downloaded over twelve million times. The economics of a popular spot in a popular app are easy to predict. A pull-off with space for two vehicles ends up holding six on a Friday in July, then twelve, then a fire ring built from stones somebody pried off a wall, then a pile of toilet paper behind the nearest tree, then a sign from the municipality banning overnight parking, then a barrier at the road entrance. The tragedy of the commons compresses into a single summer. The quiet spot dies because somebody photographed it and the review went to two million phones.

Every long-term dweller learns this and stops trusting the apps for sleeping. The apps are useful for services: water fills, dump stations, laundromats, propane refills. For the actual sleeping location, the answer is that you have to find your own, and the finding is most of the skill of the lifestyle. After a few years you carry a private mental map of several hundred spots across a continent, indexed by region, by season, by wind direction, by which forester closes which barrier in October. This mental map is the asset. It is what separates the person who lives this way for ten years from the person who quits after one bad summer.

I have been building that map for years on the road, one dead-end at a time. A few weeks ago I asked the obvious question. The criteria for a good spot are concrete. It is a parking area or pull-off, at the terminus of a dead-end or low-class road, with forest coverage in a small radius around it, far enough from settlements that nobody hears you, with reasonable approach road quality and ideally tagged as a hiker or trailhead lot. Those criteria are all expressible in OpenStreetMap data. So I wrote a script.

The script ingests OSM extracts country by country and identifies every parking node and area. For each candidate it computes a forest coverage score from surrounding land use polygons, checks road topology to flag dead-ends, measures distance to the nearest settlement and to the nearest motorway, weighs road class, and assigns a tier. A green-tier spot is a dead-end, deep in forest, isolated, with a road good enough that a truck can reach it. A blue tier is two of those three. Yellow is above average. Gray meets the minimum bar. I ran it for every country in Europe over a week. The output is about thirty-seven thousand scored parking nodes, with a master file consolidating every per-country result.

Not all of them are perfect. A fraction are gated; others turn out to sit closer to a road than the map suggests. A few are loved enough already that a Friday in August will be unpleasant. But many of them, in my testing across half a dozen countries, are exactly what the criteria promised. End-of-road clearings I would never have found driving past, because the entry road is two kilometers of forest track that gives no indication of what is at the end of it. Spots that locals know about and tourists do not, that hikers leave their cars at on weekend mornings and that have been empty every night I have slept there.

The file is attached. KMZ format, opens in Google Earth, OsmAnd, organic-maps, most outdoor apps, color-coded by tier. Use the green and blue tiers first. Treat the yellow tier as a fallback after cross-checking against satellite imagery. The script and the source are at the bottom for anyone who wants to run it themselves or improve the scoring.

A note on the broader point. The reason for sharing this is simple arithmetic. Better parking makes the lifestyle better, and a better lifestyle means more people can answer the question deliberately. There is a version of Europe where a few hundred thousand people live across the continent in vehicles, sleeping in forests, working remotely from ridges and beaches, paying rent to nobody, and that version of Europe is materially better than the version where the same people pay sixteen hundred euros for a studio in a city they did not choose. The constraint is not the hardware. Vehicles are cheap, insulation is solved, solar is solved, lithium is solved. The constraint is the sleeping location, and the sleeping location is a discovery problem that map data and a hundred lines of Python can largely solve.

So the question stands. Where do you want to wake up tomorrow.

Download: Forest parking spots, Europe, KMZ, ~1.5MB

Note: the file may download as .zip because KMZ is technically a zip archive and the server detects it that way. Rename it to .kmz after download, or import the zip directly into Google Earth, OsmAnd, or organic-maps; all three handle it correctly without the rename.

Pipeline source: github (forthcoming)