Advanced trip planning? Yes or no?

deprived wrote:

How much advance reservations to most of you do? As RVing becomes more popular, are parks becoming more difficult to get in to? Do you plan every move ahead of time?

Or do you prefer to wing it and press your luck?

It's a tough balance between spontaneity and spending the night in the parking lot of a Flying J.

Old chinese proverb : Lack of advance planning-- you have every thing to loose and nothing to gain"

we limit our reservations to places that are heavily visited...like yellowstone, custer state park, yosemite, grand canyon, etc.
if you don't need full hookups, there are LOTS of campgrounds to choose from.
if you stop a bit early...like 3 or 4 p.m., you will find better sites to choose from.
if you are not absolutely against overnight stops at rest areas, walmarts or flying j truck stops, etc. then you're free of the worry of not finding an acutal campground for the one night stay.

Let me ask you something, you might be able to wing it going to a popular area at a popular time but you certainly won't save any money and you very well might not find a spot where you want to be. So how important is it to you to be where you want to be and how happy will you be if you have to pay double to go somewhere else or sleep in a truck stop because places are full?

Maybe it will work out, maybe it won't but I wouldn't take a chance.

It depends a good bit on what area you are traveling to.
We visited National Parks and popular attraction area's last year.
We would not be inclined to head to popular areas without reservations.
We are in our 2nd year of full time rv travel, moving often to see this amazing country we live in.
For us, planning and research campgrounds and rv resorts in advance has worked very well. We generally make reservations for travels from April until October, leaving gaps in areas we want
some flexibility.
Id suggest reservations during that timeframe in any popular area's.

For our winter state park stays in Florida, we start making our reservations 11 months ahead of time the moment the reservation windows open. The private park we stay at the longest in FL, we'll make next years reservation when checking in this year to insure getting a site we prefer. For other parts of the country at other times of the year, we only make reservations at popular destinations and/or for holidays. Everything else is pretty much call as we go, or at most a day ahead of time.

Reservations for Memorial Day, 4th of July, Labor Day, way ahead of schedule because people go out on those weekends in the PNW. For a lot of the rest of the summer, we do membership parks, so we just pick weeks, match with which park we want, and get out site online. When traveling through an area, we only do 200-250 miles a day and try to stop by 2:00 pm. Usually call about noon or 1:00 pm to see if they have room, almost always not a problem because we are ahead of everyone else stopping for the night. Stopping early also means we are all set up and get to watch everyone else try to jockey to get in - we can watch rather than be part of the afternoon entertainment. :W

We never pull into a campground without a reservation BUT the reservation may have been made that morning from the road!! We don't plan too far in advance as we often find neat things to do in an area and stay longer.

As far as advance reservations go, we Always make them for high traffic venues and around holidays (Memorial, 4th of July etc). You'll also want to take into consideration Spring Break in the area you will be in as that often makes nice RV resorts less available so you'd want to plan ahead. We've been on the road for 2 1/2 yrs now full-time and this has worked for us.

TexasShadow wrote:
we limit our reservations to places that are heavily visited...like yellowstone, custer state park, yosemite, grand canyon, etc.
if you don't need full hookups, there are LOTS of campgrounds to choose from.
if you stop a bit early...like 3 or 4 p.m., you will find better sites to choose from.
if you are not absolutely against overnight stops at rest areas, walmarts or flying j truck stops, etc. then you're free of the worry of not finding an acutal campground for the one night stay.

This is about the extent of our planning too.
We also do a lot of dispersed camping on public land.

You stated you began in July and had no problems finding sites because you stayed away from tourist spots.

So.... you're leaving in April and are concerned? What will you be doing differently? Will you now hit the tourist spots? If you do what you did in July you'll have no issues.

We didn't make reservations for our 16 years of full-timing unless we definitely had to be somewhere at a specific time such as visiting family. Honestly, we never had a problem and we even went to many national parks and up to Alaska.

If you're flexible as to where you stay and if you don't need to be where the tourist go then you'll do just fine without reservations.

Plan to travel Sunday through Wednesday and have your weekend spot on Thursday. Never try to move on a Friday or weekend.

For the major 3-day holidays, pick places with absolutely no water such as rivers, lakes, pools. That's where the vacationers will be. Find a nice quiet off the main roads RV park or a public campground. If you're in the western states there is plenty of public lands to boondock - national forest and BLM lands.

Try it. You'll be surprised.

No plans is how we plans , that way there are no disappointments ! You will not miss something that you never had ! All plans fall by the wayside at the first red light !
In mid-January we hope to head west on highway 84 , where to ? Maybe Natchez then south into Cajun country . No real plans , we will just see what pops up . Keeping the south safe from all those infiltrating Yankees , thousands of em !