Tonight, DW and I sat down with a calendar and planned out our camping trips for the entire summer. This is kind of necessary for us, since we both lead busy lives and spontaneity is not one of our strong suits.
Showing up to a campground on a Friday night hoping to get a good site doesn't work for us; we'd rather have a site we chose waiting for us when we get there.
So what we do is decide in advance which weekends we're going camping, and where. We have about half a dozen provincial park campgrounds that we like, ranging anywhere between half an hour and two and a half hours from home. We plan to spend the long weekends at the ones farther from home, and regular weekends closer.
The provincial park campground reservation service staggers the reservation dates; starting on certain dates, you can only reserve at certain campgrounds. Staggering the starting dates reduces the load on their servers, which prevents crashes which have happened in the past. And the CSRs who take care of all of this aren't under as much pressure. After logging in, you're only allowed to make three reservations. Once you're done your three, you have to log in again and wait your turn. It's a fair system and works pretty good.
So now that I know when and where we're going camping, I prioritize which reservations I have to make first. This is based on when I'm allowed to make those reservations and my perception as to what kind of demand there will be for campsites on any particular weekend. Obviously, there will be more demand on a long weekend than a normal weekend. Because of this, I'm making the reservations out of order from when they actually will be needed. For example, the first reservation I'll be making is for our 6th trip of the summer, the second reservation will be our 8th, and the third reservation is for our first trip. And so on.
Kind of convoluted, I know, but planning and prioritizing our trips ahead of schedule, and making the reservations based on how busy the campgrounds will be on any given weekend has actually worked well for us in the past. I keep track of it all so when the reservation system opens online, I have it in front of me.
What does everyone else do to make sure you get the sites you want at the campgrounds you like?
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