Camping with no reservations

agesilaus wrote:

We like knowing we have a reservation so we don't waste a 500 mile drive

Who does 500 mile drives? We averaged 189 miles between cg this summer and anything over 200 miles was a 'long drive' day for us. And we operate backwards from you, we plan a day's trip and then look for cg at the end of that day. Not the other way around unless we are going to a NP or some other major spot that we wanted to visit.

And we spent almost a month in CO, 2 weeks at South Fork, about a week near Gunnison and a few days at Grand Junction. Not a single full cg in sight. And we camped in south west WY and northwest WY, no full cg there either. Sure if you camp near a major city on a weekend you will find full cg. And maybe closing every other site in a cg might cause it to be 'full'. But that's why we avoid camping close to major cities, unless it's an overnight transit spot. And as noted above we avoid the dark blue states for the obvious reasons.

So I do not know how we avoided all these full cg, we do not camp at pricey resorts for one thing, but I do pick spots that have good ratings on CG reviews.

To address some of your points:

We do 500 mile days to get where we're going and I always have reservations so we don't arrive to find everything closed. We did that once - pulled into Minneapolis on a summer Friday night and all the RV parks were full. We ended up driving to Albert Lea to find an empty spot.

Tucson to Tampa was 4x500 mile days. Most of our destinations are at least 500 miles away. This summer we RZR'd in Marysvale Utah (population 408), which is almost 600 miles from Tucson. We normally do that in one day but this year I had to close down our RV show so we couldn't leave until noonish, so two days to get there. We next went to Silverton, CO (population 650). Notice these aren't big cities. Marysvale and Silverton are off-roader destinations and the RV parks fill up fast with campers pulling side-by-sides. We wanted to stay longer in Marysvale and Silverton but couldn't get a few more days due to incoming campers.

I'm a professional motorhome driver and am used to driving up to the max of 11 hours per day.