Reservations - 5 to 7 day minimum??

Sea Dog wrote:
There is your problem!
Aside from a general direction, always subject to change,
we seldom have a destination.

My sister in law plots their entire trip, meal stops, things to see, overnight stops etc.

This would drive me nuts.
One time we sarted out for a weekend in northern Ontario, ended up in Banff, visited Mt Rushmore and Sturgis on the way home!

I look forward to the day we can travel like that - with no real plans other than a general direction. But as long as we have jobs and kids in school, we'll be constrained by vacation schedules. For now we are forced to have specific departure & return dates, and travel during the peak summer season.

I've tried to split the difference between having plans and staying flexible. We do the following every summer: We have reservations for every night of our 4-week trip, and we have plotted routes, activities, and points of interest for every day (sometimes multiple options for each day). But we're not locked into that plan; it’s just a list of options that keep us generally moving in the right direction, and ensure we never run out of things to see and do.

We often find other things to see and do along the way, and we adjust our plans accordingly. Sometimes we'll stay a day longer in one place, or leave another a day or two early and forfeit a paid night in a campground. The idea is that we have a general timeline to make sure we see everything we wanted to see, we arrive back home by a certain date, and we’re never bored. But we adjust as we go.

Those adjustments usually only affect our overall plans by a day or two, but one year we decided to take an entirely different route home, which changed the last 10 days of the trip. We cancelled some reservations, and were able to make new ones along the new route. It cost us a few cancellation fees, but it was worthwhile.