Top Tools for Travel Planning

Traveling can be so much fun and so much work! While we love exploring somewhere new, the process to find the right campground and then get familiar with the new surroundings can make it feel more like work ! We have developed a process using travel tools that make planning easier and more fun.

Step One: Decide where you want to go

Sometimes easier said than done, right? When your house is on wheels, you have so many choices. Even if you just want to get out for weekend or longer trips, there are just so many great places in the US. We usually start with a few tent posts – places we need to be. This gives us destinations to start our routing. For instance, we knew we want to be in California in May to visit Yosemite, Ouray in October for our event, Camp Carpe Diem, and in Texas for the holidays.

Then we break out our travel tools to start plotting a course and experiences along the route.

Step Two: Decide your basic route

Once we know the general direction, there are many choices in how to get there. This often gets determined if one of us has a burning desire to see something or to visit a particular area. It can also be determined just because we need to add a sticker to our map and haven’t been to a state yet. We start looking at the routes knowing we had a lot of unvisited states to add on our sticker map. This year, we knew friends were starting the year in Arizona, so decided to head that direction before making our way to the Northwest to escape the heat.

While we rarely make reservations for months in advance, we have a general idea by month of where we intend to go, allowing for the opportunity to make changes. For instance, our original plan to visit Southern California changed as Covid rules stayed in place. We hadn’t planned to stay in Nevada but decided March was a good time to visit Death Valley before it got too hot! Later, when we were able to get into California and visit Yosemite, we were caught in a heat wave and decided to scoot north as fast as possible.

Read the full list of Travel Tips here from Virtual Campground.