I like to have the first night booked. Might seem trivial, but in all the running around getting ready to go, it puts my mind at ease to have one less thing to deal with on the road. Generally the roads I’m driving the first day are somewhat familiar and I may already have an idea where my gas stop is going to be as well.
Once on the road, we figure out the route for the next day in the evening. Sometimes turn by turn and sometimes general. Once it gets to be lunchtime, we start looking for a spot for the night since we have a better idea of how far we’ll get. If we are looking in campgrounds, we check availability. If there seem to be openings we’ll hit the road and maybe book a site later in the day. If sites seem tight during our lunchtime search, we may go ahead and try to find something we can book then or expand our range.
What I really try to avoid is finding out after 8 hours on the road that there’s no place good to stay, but 100 miles back there were plenty.
We are still fairly new, so we are still learning the process.
We had to improvise a few weeks ago when we got caught in traffic from a truck accident. We lost almost 3.5 hours. It was 7pm when we started moving again. Middle of nowhere. We asked a deputy sheriff if there was someplace we could camp nearby and he directed us to an old motel that had 7 RV sites behind it. Just 3 miles away and we found no hint of it in any of our online searches.
