mdilthey

Seconded. This will never be the place for that kind of talk. Keep it to yourself, Squeezebox, or go elsewhere.

bikenh

If you don't want to strictly stay with during a bike trip then probably one of the nights while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. One of the towns along the trail has a freebie hostels for the thru-hikers. The basement of the police station. Thru-hikers, including me love to write/call home and say they are spending the night in jail.

On a bike trip I'm having trouble thinking of any 'unusual' nights. I've gotten so used to the same old general style of campsites that I always focus on using the same kind of campsite so I get the same results. It might have to be on my first trip back in 2012. I decided to attempt sleeping in a local cemetery. It wasn't posted closed after dark so I went for it. It wasn't the best nights sleep by far, but not the worst. I did have visitor overnight, I think it was skunk but I can't say for sure. The rustling in the grass nearby kept me awake until it made close approach around 2-3AM and then it walked off. As it walked off I saw it by ambient night lighting only but it looked like it had a skunk style tail on it. I didn't have the tent setup so I didn't have the protection of the tent around me to keep the animal 'at bay', hence the extra nerve factor.

With this question comes another one I'll ask in a separate post.

I have to agree the Alaskan privy so far is the best. Not a spot I have ever thought of using. I think more details are needed, why the privy.

foamy

The bathroom of a town park in Missouri. Started out on the picnic table under a large pavilion. A storm came through with high winds blowing a pouring rain right through the pavilion. My bag was soaked. Spent the night drying my bag with the hot air hand dryer. It rained continuously till about noon the following day.

CliffordK

One memorable "ride". I had my bike compacted as much as it would go on a train in Italy. Wheels off, tied together. It wasn't bothering anybody. But, the train conductor told me I must get off at the next stop which happened to be a small town halfway between Verona and Bologna. It was a "local" stop, and the last train of the night with them rapidly closing the station as the train left.

I was heading towards Parma, so I put the bike back together and headed off. Turned off my lights when nobody was coming to save battery power, then lit them up for the occasional car.

When I got as far as I could go, I found a small walled town which I don't remember the name, but I slept in a little guard room adjacent to the city gates.

hilltowner

During the many years over which my habits have developed, my preferred style of touring has come to mean accepting a significant lack of precision predicting exactly where I'll be spending the night. When I first started out I spent a good deal of time working out such details, then unexpected events had the habit of relegating such plans to use as a way to get a campfire going.

I gave up trying so hard and now stick with deciding only on when and where I can reasonably get started and finished within the available time and treat each night's destination as a part of the discovery process. I can safely say it's been one of the best features of touring for me. With a hammock I can usually find someplace to sleep if I'm willing to be creative. My sense of what does or doesn't make a good spot to spend the night must be pretty well developed since I have yet to get discovered and asked to pick a different place. Which is not to say I'm always certain what the outcome will be.

So in answer to the O.P.'s question, for me “weirdest” probably means “most likely to get me in some kind of trouble” and since every tour includes at least a couple of spots with greater than the usual minimal likelihood for trouble, the fairest answer I could give would be which tour included the greatest number of such places. I suppose the one I did the summer before last has that distinction having spent nights in such places as the trees behind a business park in Ironwood, MI, the pedestrian waiting booth for the ferry in South Baymouth, ON, the boat ramp in Omemee, ON and a picnic pavilion in a park in Stirling, ON. Of the fourteen overnights spent on that tour only four were in more traditional locations (motels and campgrounds) the rest were of the stealth variety. Six of those were pretty out of the way and unlikely to draw much attention, just the way I like it, and among the best places to stay in terms of serenity, solitude and sublime satisfaction.

So if it means spending a night in the penalty box of a hockey rink/tennis court as I did on one tour through the Gaspe, in return for other nights spent pleasantly sleeping alongside a remote bike path or the Cascapedia River, which I also did on that tour, I'm willing to put up with a weird one or two.

Big Lew

My first long distance tour was at age 14 when my buddy and I rode up through the
Fraser River Canyon from the Fraser Valley near Vancouver British Columbia.
Being quite inexperienced, we camped down in a little ravine by a rushing creek on
the first night without a tent or tarp. By morning everything was soaked from the
spray as the creek doubled in size. The next evening we chose a grassy glade covered
with leaves from a big cottonwood grove. Had to pack up out of there in the middle of
the night because there were hoards of earwigs amongst the leaves. Last evening we
tried to sleep on oak benches in an old railway station. We had a hard time getting sleep
because we had to sit up every time an adult came into the room. It was a long 13 hours
before we were able to catch the train home.
Many years later I once slept in an old trapper's cabin to get out from a storm. Brought my
Mt bike and gear inside but had a terrible time trying to get any sleep because of the family
of packrats calling it their home. Fortunately, other then a couple of small chew holes in one
pannier, those rats didn't do any damage to my tires or other stuff, but their scurrying around
during the night sure was upsetting.

Doug64

It wasn't really weird, just different. We had to improvise shade at a small campground in southern Idaho. It was one of those 100F + days. Once the sun went down we could finally get into the tent.

Used our para-cord clothes line and a couple of our tent stakes to guy this table into a useable, and hopefully, safe position.

Medic Zero

.

I've slept in a lot of "weird" places over the years, from cemeteries to stealth camping, but I think the weirdest was on my way back from a gig in europe. The band had split up to make our separate ways home, everybody doing their own thing. When I made it to Frankfurt I had a little less than a day to kill and no money left for a hotel.

After stashing my bags in the train station lockers (those were the days!) I spent most of my remaining time walking around, exploring the city. Well after midnight I was tired of walking and ready for a few hours rest, I ended up settling on the ATM lobby of bank. Even though I didn't have any money left in my account, my card let me into the vestibule, and by rearranging a couple of large poster sized standing displays I got a bit of privacy from any passerby. Luckily no one needed to withdraw cash in the middle of the night. Set my alarm for about 0500 and was gone before the city woke up, no harm, no foul (I put the advertising displays back in place).

I'll always have fond memories of "Hotel Bankomat".

Ty0604

I've slept in a few weird places on my current trip; The back porch of an abandoned house in Jackson, WY and the men's restroom in a city park in Shoshoni, WY. The campgrounds were too expensive in Jackson and my campground in Shoshoni was 13 mile off of my route.

Miele Man

Touring in Ontario, Canaada I've spent the odd night in a small-town jil cell. I'd go to the police station and tell them I was touring and ask if they could put me up for the night. They did. My bicycle was kept behind their counter and I'd sleep in the cell with my sleeping pad and bag. They did take my boot laces and belt though. Surprisingly comfortable too.

I wonder if they still allow that?

Cheers

Turkey222

My day on the road on my first tour, 30 miles from Fairbanks, Alaska. I was climbing a pass and very exhausted since i had never ridden more than 20 miles before. I came across a bar and Inn named "Skinny Dick's Halfway Inn". Asked the nice man that owned the place where the campground was (blue sign indicated a campground). There was no campground, but he let me pitch my tent on one of the cabin porches.

jon c. 

We used to regularly look for cemeteries to spend the night. A lot of good, flat ground and it's usually pretty quiet.

Shimagnolo

Trying to drive straight thru from IN to CO, I fell asleep somewhere along I-76 between the NE state line and Denver.
Then I was rudely awaked when the car ran off the road at 65mph and proceeded to go bouncing along in the grass median.
I hate waking up like that.

FBinNY 

I've slept in barns, firehouses, jails (not under arrest), Salvation Army missions, church rectories, under bridges and all sorts of places, the only common thread being shelter from weather.

But the one that stood out as weird was the night 3 of us were put up at a county home for the destitute aged in upstate NY. The place was nice enough and the seniors and us enjoyed each others company. What made it weird was that they made us fill out a formal application stating that we were homeless and destitute. So there were our 3 birth dates among the others with the minor discrepancy being a 50 year spread from ours to the next older person.

Jseis 

After a long 120 mile day including the South Baymouth to Tobermory ferry we rolled into Owen Sound late and crashed in the dugout of a baseball field. Then there was the morning we woke up in the Canadian Rockies on what we thought was a field...turned out to be the end of a ski slope. But nothing compared to sleeping in the brush next to ticket booths of the NY toll way, the hobo camp by the rail line in Niagara, or in the landscaping entrance by the sign welcoming you to the Syracuse International Airport.

tortron

In one of Paulino Estebans boats on the shore of lake Titicaca.

Turkey222

that reminds me of sleeping on the river beside a kind homeless man in Missoula.

DropBarFan

On a weekend car trip to NYC I tent-camped at NJ campground across the river--all-asphalt lot designed for RVs. Right next to the lot was a Caribbean disco with thunderously loud music. OTOH pretty cool that a bike tourist could theoretically camp so close to the Big Apple.

Synzygus

I slept one night in the top of a lighthouse in the Oslofjord in Norway. Oh, and it was on a prison island - I was not an inmate...

thumpism 

I had an entire empty resort hotel to myself on the Italian coast one post-season September night, courtesy of a local fellow who unlocked the building for me. Very strange place to walk around in for hours and an even stranger one in which to sleep, and there were dozens more like it along the coast in that town.

suburbanbeat

So many weird places which at the time seemed so perfectly normal given the circumstances.

Last year I slept in the shower stall of a bathroom in a state park. The night air became MUCH colder than I was anticipating, forcing me to flee my tent for the heated park bathroom. Lots of people came in and took loud, smelly poops only a few inches from my head. Not fun.

While doing our cross-country trip, my friends and I slept on the floor of a rich agriculturalist's airplane hanger in Tribune, Kansas. We were wildly grateful, as we otherwise would have slept outside in 80-degree, muggy Kansas air. You can see a clip of that night here, at the 13:08 mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wlYe1HPNGo

GerryinHouston

Same experience in Fano, Italy. Abeach resort. We booked 2 rooms between Xmas and New Year for 1 night on our way to Ancona. They opened the kitchen for us, cooked what we ordered (had every item on the menu) and then they locked us up inside the hotel and left. They warned us to use the emergency exit (alarm will sound) only in case of a real emergency. Next morning the cook and the concierge were there to prepare breakfast for us.

I asked whether they do this often and they said once or twice a month (looking dubious, like who in his right mind would come to Fano in the winter?)...

Roughstuff

Like a few others, I have slept on highway median strips, though often they were pretty wide and often forested. I did this in Japana many times since the place costs a FORTUNE ($4 for a cup of coffee) and even the hostels are expensive. In the USA I camped one night on the back of a flatbed truck at a truck stop in Pennsylvania. The guy showed up around sunrise, rousted me out with a bit of humor, and offered me a ride all the way to Utah where he was headed. We lashed the bike down and I spent a few days in the cab. Rode my bike all the way back.

tarwheel 

When I was in college, I hitchhiked from Denver, CO, to the mountains of North Georgia. Along the way, I slept:

- On a gravel parking lot behind a restaurant in northern New Mexico (in hindsight, not a wise choice, but fortunately nobody drove through there).
- In a hostel in downtown Albaquerque, NM, which was having a police strike at the time, so there was no law enforcement.
- In a jail cell in Canton, NC. I got dropped off at a nearby gas station about 10 pm, wondering where to sleep. A cop car drove up, so I asked the policeman if there were any camping areas nearby. He told me there was room at the jail since they didn'thave any inmates, so I took him up on the offer. It was freaky when I realized that they had to lock me in the cell, and I got up very early the next morning to get out of there.

BigAura

Wow! +great photo!