Journal · Field guide · 2 min read
Ask Claude where to sleep tonight
Twenty to eight, outside Biarritz. Every beach car park has its height barrier down, and every barrier is exactly my height minus a bit. The kid has been driving since Bordeaux. Sunburn on her left arm only. She pulls into a bus stop, gets out her phone and doesn't open the map.
One sentence into Claude: campsite near Biarritz with room tonight for a small van, quiet, not by the motorway, under half an hour. She drinks warm water from a bottle. I tick.
Three answers. One behind the dunes. One up in the hills. One by a river, with a note that it fills at weekends, and it's a Tuesday. She picks the river. Of course she does.
Ten to nine. A pitch under a plane tree, somebody's guitar, somebody's dog, the river doing whatever rivers do in the dark. She's asleep by nine. Me too. Well, parked.
← Somebody still looking. Should've asked.
Here's the thing, in plain words. Vacamp works inside Claude now. Claude asks Vacamp what the map would: which campsites are near, whether they have room on your dates, and what a pitch costs where the campsite's own booking system says so. Same live data as the map. Nothing gets booked. The kid still books direct, with the campsite.
The only difference is the asking. The map wants a place and two dates. Claude takes the whole bloody sentence, with all the bits a map has no box for. Quiet. No motorway. Somewhere to swim before breakfast.
It does the dull part too. Ask about three nights down the coast and Claude goes through the campsites one by one, instead of the kid going through them with twelve tabs open and a cold coffee. When it doesn't know something, it says so. That's more than most campsite websites manage.
Setting it up
- In Claude, open Settings, then Connectors.
- Find Vacamp in the directory and press Connect.
- Claude sends you to Vacamp. Sign in with Google. Done.
No address to copy, no form. Even I'd manage it, and my radio gets one station. ChatGPT and other apps that speak MCP still want the address typed in: https://vacamp.ai/mcp.
Seven the next morning. The kid swims in the river before breakfast. I stay on the grass, dry, letting the neighbours think it was my idea.
Keep it unbooked.
Bo
