Road Trip and reservations

[garcia5g]

Originally Posted by FCloud9

Like many seasoned Airstream travelers have said, you need to select your main driving route to your final destination. Figure out distance from home to destination and compute approximately how many miles per day required to reach your destination. Although, we are fans of generally not making advance reservations, summers are busy, popular tourist areas even busier, and National Parks with a few exceptions are often packed, reservations are best if you have your heart set on a particular experience. After you figure the number of miles planned, we use AlStays to evaluate if there are good camping spots ( both campgrounds/potential free spots we like-Cracker Barrel, Walmart, etc.). Despite not making advance reservations, we always do lots of advance planning and very often adjust our travel miles/per day and route when we find we might end in a congested metro area or area void of any good camp spots. So we might have a planned itinerary for first few weeks of a three- four month adventure and only reserve if convenient but careful not to lock ourselves into a tight schedule. For us, weather is frequently the biggest factor in length of time at anyone campground. Unexpected finds a,OMG the route are also more enjoyable without tons of reservations with both booking fees and cancellation losses. Our first time camping in Oregon, we thought was a disaster due to 100% reservable state parks, until we learned only half of Oregon's state parks are 100% reservable, the others are first come. We loved Oregon and spent nearly two months without advanced reservations. After five years on the road, usually 3-6 months travel per year, we could not survive without AlStays RV app and Campendium for finding best campgrounds and quick overnight spots. That said, finding your comfort level for miles/hours travel per day really helps planning. Traveling frequently from east coast to west we've found our preferred interstate routes and now know many spots we've camped (and look forward to revisiting) and we know we can comfortably travel 2300 miles in 5-7 days with less than $100 camping fees. We rather do quick overnights to move closer to our destination and splurge a bit at our desired destinations. Everyone's different but until we find our next home out west, that's how we roll!
Never been to WA but looking forward to exploring after we relocate.
Have a great trip,
FCloud9

Thank you so much for your response. Much appreciated!

[uncle_bob]

Hi

How tolerant of heat are you? Put another way, if it's 80 degrees at midnight ... will you sleep ok?

If you need AC, you will need a lot of power to run it. If you have been on the road for hours and hours, it will take a while to cool the trailer down.

The gotcha is that a lot of the "easy to schedule" stuff (like the farm we are currently parked at) also is no hookups. Harvest Hosts is doing well by us.

Weekdays you can usually find a lot of places to pick between, even if you need hookups. When you hit the weekend (Friday and Saturday), things can get tight. Make it a holiday weekend and they get very tight. It's also tougher when the local schools are out than once they go back into session.

That said, we've been on the road for about 1400 miles at this point. The only "well in advance" reservation was to get work done at JC. The only paid stop so far was a very nice COE site reserved a day ahead. (Everything else has been Harvest Hosts). Looking forward, Memorial Day on the coast would be a bit tough without some planning ....

Bob

[garcia5g]

Thank you!!

[Bbelk]

The way I like to travel is to 1) Get out of Texas in one or two Loooong days. After that, I like to limit the travel to 2 or 3 hundred miles and spend two nights. That way I get a full day to explore and visit where I am for a day between travels. This requires that I find someplace worthy of two nights and get reservations. I like State Parks. They are all full by the end of January for the travel months of June, July and August.

I have never had trouble finding camp sites when I don't plan ahead, but they often end up places to park and sleep with no particular charm. Life is too short for that.