Long Trip Planning Advice

[Kim Gass]

If you live and camp in open country space restrictions are going to be fewer

Have a big rig and come to a forested state like Washington its natural that state parks and national forests etc have smaller campsites. Tree removal is NOT cheap.

Maine is 95 percent forest. Most TT and motorhome users stick to a couple of areas like Bar Harbor and south of Portland. The rest of the state is wide open to small units. Usually 26 feet is the limit.

We go to Florida and are floored by the amount of big units we see. Not so in the White Mountains of NH.. And amenities in these areas are more limited. Flush toilets are a nicety sometimes but not always found.. Showers? Rarely!

We can start on eggs.. orange yoke eggs not from free range but from pasture fed chickens that eat ticks and insects. Im lucky to be able to get them from several places within ten minutes.

You can pretty much assume you will boondock in Canada too at Provincial and National Parks.

Water is not typically available at campsites where the ground freezes and stays frozen for months.. Washington and Oregon would have areas of that. Pipe maintenance and construction ( burying beneath the frost line ) is expensive. I dont imagine that KY and TN ground stays frozen for long except maybe the Smokies.

[koko]

Who knows. You might begin your journey and decide that longer stays in places like our beautiful Wyoming or Utah or Colorado are more to your liking than spending time in Seattle. Our area of the country is very camper-friendly. Probably 1 in 5 people in our little town own some type of RV. It's going to take you several days just to get to Seattle - three weeks isn't very long!

When we were in Washington we stayed in Anacortes, and this May we'll be in Port Angeles. They're both beautiful areas but not as pretty as Wyoming (we, of course, are partial).

[Square Dance Camper]

We did two major cross country trips (6 - 8 weeks) in our old pop up. I swear by the good sam book with the all the campground info and the "Next Exit" book, as well as a good old map. We also had Passport America and used that book. We did not use a GPS. Each night in the trailer we'd do a general plan for the next days travel. I'd drive first in the morning and then when my husband drove in the afternoon I'd peruse the books for our next gas stop, sightseeing stop, overnight stop and would use my phone to call ahead to find out if sites were available. No smartphone then, so couldn't get info from the web.
If you don't have any wifi booster, internet thingy of your own, print what you can and bring that and books with you, you never know what the status of wifi or your phone signals will be.

[BuckeyeHB]

Some great suggestions on apps and sites. When you make your reservation save a screenshot of the reservation on your phone or tablet. Sometimes you get to an area that does not have cell/internet connections, if you don't have the reservation saved to your phone then you are out of luck.

[Kim Gass]

There is a downside to reservations on long trip planning.. Weather delays or mechanical breakdowns.. Our bearings seized. We wound up in a small town for an extra day.. If we had had reservations they would have been non refundable

We usually reserve about 1 pm on the day of arrival and it sure is not on the web. We call the campground directly.. So far this has worked well as its quite quicker to find out that nothing might be available so keep looking.. Yet though our first choice has sometimes not been available we have not had to park at Wal Mart or a rest area or a truck stop.