Family across country road trip

rxcoug wrote:
We are planning a cross country road trip from Colorado to the outer banks of North Carolina next summer. We have a 2012 Toyota Tundra pulling a 31ft TT. I have lots of questions.

I don't want to have this trip booked down to the minute but want to find a campground (koa, good sams, etc) every night. Do I need to make reservations for each night or can we drop in?

We are thinking that it will take about 4 days to get there. I will only run about 60 mph or my gas mileage is horrible.

What advise can you give us?

Having done many long distance trips ourselves when our boys were younger my view is that while reservations are comforting to have they're also restricting in that it puts you under pressure to be at a certain place on a certain date. At first we did reserve as much as possible but over time less and less, eventually only reserving over long weekends and during the busy summer months in popular tourist areas such as Myrtle Beach or Yellowstone NP, etc. Our trips always consisted of interstate "travel days" which were designed to get us the longest distance in the shortest amount of time and "touring days" which were mostly slower two lane highways where we'd stop regularly to check out local sites of interest. On travel days we'd almost always overnight at KOAs that were clean, safe, and conveniently located not far from the interstate and always offered a pool which was most welcome after a long day of driving. On touring days we'd usually stay for several nights at a time in a state park, national park, COE, county park, etc, reserved only when we felt it necessary, otherwise we just winged it and over many years never found ourselves stranded without a place to camp.