im a planner and it makes him crazy.

How did anyone manage to go anywhere & manage to find their way home before we had the internet & cellphones? They must have traveled with a ton in weight of guidebooks & brochures. It also must have been much more difficult to simply 'wing it' as we do today traveling with no reservations, a bit of a plan A & a thought of a plan B.

if this forum offered a like button...id be punchin em all...so many ways to go RV ing..yea.. :-D

Why make it so complicated -- just go! If you need something there is always some store in any little town where you can get what you need, a Walmart around the corner, and a campground not too far away if you need water, to dump. There is also the sani-dump website with places listed to dump and at many you can also fill with fresh water. For an rv park or campground try rvparky.com or allstays.com which also lists flying j, rest stops, walmarts, etc. Life can be fun if you let it be.

oh so your a control freak ,,,,,thats a bigger issue than running out of water ....i promise you that when you get to new england ,,,especially maine ,,,, that seeing it should handle any fears you have . on 100 a in plymouth vermont ,,,almost across the street from calvin coolige house ,,,, there is a pull off with piped running spring water ,,,,the best water i ever tasted . its free ,,,,all you want . 100a is hilly,,steep,,,narrow . but can be done

Veebyes wrote:
Nothing wrong with planning. Just be prepared to chuck out the plans & change on the fly. You never know. There might be a mechanical problem. Weather may delay you. Somebody gets sick. In transit to someplace far away we do the Walmarts, Cabelas, small town CGs, even a regular CG for laundry, water, dump & WIFI every few days.

Oh, yes! I can't stress this enough. When we were on our 2 month cross-country trip in 2007, the first lesson we learned was that plans are just that--plans. They can go out the window at any time. Thankfully, our plans were pretty flexible so our issues didn't ruin the trip. We had no way of knowing that we'd have serious illness crop up, nor that we'd have a couple of less serious illnesses, a small accident, and a death in the family that required us to stop in our tracks a few times.

Might I suggest trying a "skeleton" schedule. When we were planning this trip we set out goals everyone listed 1 thing that we MUST do and 2 things that were Nice To Do If We Can. We attached very few actual dates to those goals and we made only one advance reservation(Yellowstone). We divided the trip into two parts. We knew we wanted to see certain things on the first leg of the trip and that we HAD to be off the road by July 2,so as to avoid the crowds. By keeping things a little loose, we were able to attain those goals. For the second half of the trip, we knew we needed to be in Yellowstone in mid-July for a family reunion and we had to be back in Atlanta by Aug 1. By setting those parameters we were able to see many things and meet those goals. By the time we got home we had done almost everything on our master list and nobody was stressed out. The only bad part was we missed being on the road, LOL.

FlyingJ / Pilot near my house has water at the RV pump lanes and at the truck lanes (Do not camp at the truck lanes getting water too long)

OP: what are your sources when planning a trip? Any favorite web sites other than the norm, ResrveAmerice, RVReviews, uscampgrounds.info, and such? Please share.

Nothing wrong with planning. Just be prepared to chuck out the plans & change on the fly. You never know. There might be a mechanical problem. Weather may delay you. Somebody gets sick. In transit to someplace far away we do the Walmarts, Cabelas, small town CGs, even a regular CG for laundry, water, dump & WIFI every few days.

Shari,

As I am a waterman and have often had the job title "Navigator", I too plan a lot. On the water, navigation is a full time occupation and flexibility is required. My answer on the road, even before we carried wire was to learn to use one of the navigator packages. I have never run Co-pilot and ran MStrips and Treets until I outgrew it and now do everything thing Street Alas and a GPS puck. Get one of those sets, learn to make it work for you and then go to the Discovery Owners Wonder Lists and collect the overlays for what you want.

Then, with a DC power adapter and your laptop, you can change the existing plan in a heart beat and still have confidence that you will be able to access what you need.

Matt