Quiet Back Roads and a Truck Camper

Our travel plans are no travel plans. Less than 200 miles a days and stay for 2 days. We can't always follow this rule but we like this travel guideline. There's some really easy phone apps that help finding off the grid travel stops.

burningman wrote:


Ha! Yeah! I do this lol... I also sometimes sit in the garage in my ‘55 Chevy that I’ve had since the ‘80s, just playing the radio.
I’m one of the “I gotta work to pay for all this” people, I haven’t got the time to take forever to get wherever.

Patience, patience, your time will come.
I had my years when driving a car was counting daily distance in crossed timezones. Than I drove commercially for couple of years and even I am "born to drive" I started to hate it.
But when finally I can take off on the road in June and not worry if I will not make it back by September, things got whole new meaning in life.

DutchmenSport wrote:
Yep, even dragging a 41 foot 5er,

Wait, what?? I remember your old signature pic... when did you upgrade to a 5th wheel?

covered wagon wrote:
Sometimes life can drag you through mud and can't always get away, but time and responsibility don't exist inside my camper. So I go in there occasionally for coffee or sleep for a night. Afterward everything is all right. Funny how conditioning equates my camper with fun and relaxation. It's a 'cool tool' in that way and causes me to start planning for another trip.

Ha! Yeah! I do this lol... I also sometimes sit in the garage in my ‘55 Chevy that I’ve had since the ‘80s, just playing the radio.
I’m one of the “I gotta work to pay for all this” people, I haven’t got the time to take forever to get wherever.

Sometimes life can drag you through mud and can't always get away, but time and responsibility don't exist inside my camper. So I go in there occasionally for coffee or sleep for a night. Afterward everything is all right. Funny how conditioning equates my camper with fun and relaxation. It's a 'cool tool' in that way and causes me to start planning for another trip.

Since we are showing off here, this is campground right off main highway between Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Even it is only 150 miles from our home, we often stop there for 1st or last night of the trip. Most of the time no more than 3 campers overnight. No cellphone coverage, but I found it relaxing once in a while. Yes, there is river down there and yes, they have hot showers.

DownTheAvenue wrote:

covered wagon wrote:
Have anyone else also discovered the very pleasant experience of traveling the quiet back roads of America?

John Steinbeck did over 60 years ago and wrote about it in the book Travels With Charley.

I read Travels with Charley in high school back in 1964 and he instigated the "nomadic bug" in me that long ago. Our YouTube channel is named after and inspired by the book. My favorite quote sums up so much

“When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from here seems broad, straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, chose a direction and a destination. And last, he must implement his journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only that newcomers to bumdum, like teenagers in new-hatched sin, will not think that they invented it.”

Before we discovered RVs, Yoly and I traveled for 3 years camping out of the back of our Ram 1500 with a simple ARE shell on the back. One year we made a coast to coast trip of 6,500 miles exclusively on back roads. Of that about 200 miles were necessary Interstate. The 3.6L V6 Pentastar was a fuel economy champion at the time and we average 22.6 mpg for the entire distance mostly because of the very sedate speeds. I remember taking it up to 60 on the road heading down to Big Bend NP because at the time the speed limit there was 80 mph and I didn't want to pose a safety risk going too slow on the narrow road. We drove the 106 mile distance at that speed and weren't passed by a single car :B

That's the only camping I do. TRs (and a lot of other stuff) here .

We love back roads and dry camping.

I don't know if quiet roads that I would like to travel with my camper exist in USA.
Last year I fulfil my long time dreams and after years of putting as many daily miles as I could "to get there" I took early retirement and my time spending 9 weeks on the road whenever I feel like.
The best part was coming from FL to New Orleans.
Instead of zooming on the freeway in 4 hr, we took 3 days to drive small highways along the coast and discover very accommodating cassino resort "in the middle of nowhere" in Mississippi.
But that was fall already and I believe taking those highways in summer season would put you in very heavy traffic, with 5 mph average speed.