RV Trip Planning 2019

Planning for RVer’s is a debatable topic. There are certainly two camps of full-time RVers. Those who plan and those who wing it. The planning that I’m writing about is a pre-plan of the RV route to all destinations and RV parks for the year or at least a few months in advance. It is a huge amount of work and can take several weeks to complete working a few hours a day.

Many enjoy the ability to make last minute changes to their destinations. To stay at one place a bit longer or take side trips to discover something new. They either like the spontaneity or else don’t like having to plan the details. I can understand that logic.

Either way, you do have to plan a route and call RV parks for reservations. Doing it day by day is certainly much less of a burden. But there is the uncertainty of actually having a place to pull in to without having reservations well in advance.

Our process has been to have the entire year planned out for both route, destinations, and RV parks. We try to have this done by early spring (April 1st). Why go through all this work up front? Well, we are both planners by nature (my 30+ years in accounting) and it provides some comfort in knowing this phase of our year is completed and then all we have to do is travel and enjoy.

Another reason is that all of the popular destination RV parks are now booked up well in advance. There are something like half a million new RVers each year as the baby boomers are retiring the RV industry is in full ramped up mode. LINK

Boondocking (off the grid) is not a good option for us as we now have a residential fridge that runs on 110 volts. Arriving to an area and finding no place to plug in would not be a fun way to end a day of driving.

Having a published trip schedule is also helpful to try to meet up with family and friends. That is one of the joys of this lifestyle in being able to enjoy some company.

Our Planning Process

We begin by both agreeing on the main area of focus for the travel year. For us this is usually March to November. This year our focus is New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. We will also have many other states and destinations before and after, but that is the main focus. We also have to decide where to “winter” this year since the winters book up very quickly at the better places.

State Focus

Once we have the few focus states decided, then it is time for some research within those states. What are the must-see places in the state? For that we use Trip Advisor. Below is a screen shot of the first page for Wyoming:

Then I checked another website called “planetware.com.” They also have some good ideas.

Route Plan

Next on the process is to map it all out based on the Trucker’s Atlas routes. For this task, I take some small post it notes and mark each major destination in that state, in this case Wyoming.

The next step requires going to Google Maps to determine the distances between the destinations. Since we try to cap our daily miles to no more than 150-200, sometimes we need to book an interim stop for a day or two.

Finding an RV Park

There are a few popular apps to find RV parks at a specific town. We used a few, but RV Park Reviews (now RV Life) is one of our favorites.

Almost Final 2019 Plan

We have almost finished the planning part and still need to book a few more RV parks. Hopefully, we will have this completed before leaving our winter home in the Rio Grande Valley. Here is the grand plan:

That wraps up another segment of Our Epic RV Journey. We continue to count our blessings in this retirement journey. Thanks for following along! Hit the subscribe button below to be notified of new updates and leave a comment if you wish.

Take care and God Bless.