Planning the big loop - e2w&back

We did an extended trip this spring/summer. We had two goals,1) High school graduation in Great Falls,MT.on June 1. 2) A wedding on 5 July in Rapid City.
We left home on May 24 and were back in driveway 12 July. 49 days and 7072 miles. Only made 2 reservations during the whole trip and set no mileage limits for a day.
We did not route plan with a planning program,used an Atlas, and only used our GPS when we were close to Portland,Or to help find our campground. We did not get lost,run into roads we could not travel on, no low clearances,etc. This is the way we always travel. Good luck to you.

Thanks for the imput everyone. I was in sales in my working life and drove 60k+ a year. Everyone teases me now since I have a 3 hour limit and I stop. Takes me two days to get to Myrtle Beach, (300 miles), but I'm retired, whats my hurry? I want to plan this trip around the idea that after about 3 hours, I'll be in an area that has a place to stop. Other than that I have no plans other than direction.

I used Streets and Trips to do this, trips I made, trips I planned, fantasy trips for my sisters.

I have DeLorme Topo (Street Atlas is in and under this) and am trying to learn how to use it to do the same thing. Big change in interface, and because it probably does more, is more complex. The last version of S&T is hard to get, so I need to learn a new tool :(

Online tools, I used to use MapQuest before getting S&T. I switched to S&T because I could set my daily limits, time between stops, start and stop times with margins, and almost instantly revise stops and see the whole trip readjust. Version I have used the Woodalls directory.

The big advantage for me was shifting from "miles per day" into a "how do I use the time" framework. On a trip like this there may be travel days grinding out 600 miles and touring days when you might move 50-200 miles.

All my trip plans were starting points. Sometimes the original plan was good for a week or so, sometimes I blew it off in the first or second day I would turn a travel day into a play day. But the whole point of having something on the laptop, at the end of the day I could look at "what does this do to the rest of the trip" and "how does it change tomorrow."

Since it is a RV trip, I suggest playing with the Good Sams travel planner, see how it works for you. The database is not limited to GS parks, it is probably the most extensive listing of RV parks and RV-capable campgrounds that cater to the public, might represent almost half of what is really out there.

I seldom carried travel planning as far as making reservations. Unless I have some hard time-place targets like a wedding reception. graduation, anniversary or a family reunion weekend, my road trips are ad hoc, planned but flexible.

We totally agree - don't plan - just go. You can have a general idea of what you want to see but definitely don't lock yourselves into reservations or you'll go bonkers trying to keep up with them. Take your time, get off the interstates, especially when you reach the western states, and just go with the flow. It's much more enjoyable. We travel that way and even did it on our Alaskan trip.

While applauding your plans and wishing you the best, I don't know that I'd try to pre-plan all the nightly stops so far ahead of time. Number 1, it eliminates the serendipitous stops, side trips, and extended visits that make a vacation all the more memorable. And Number 2, an unscheduled delay can throw off all the rest of the time, perhaps forcing you to cancel or cut short some other visit.

It's great to have a list of the places/things/people you want to see, and a general outline of what direction you want to be going in, but there's so much between Virginia and Flagstaff. I-40 is fine, but there's honestly not a whole lot to see or do between OKC and Albuquerque. Coming home, it depends on how far north you plan to go before you make your right turn. I-70 through Utah and Colorado is not to be missed, but from Denver to St Louis is pretty much deadly boring, IMO, and sorry to offend natives. I-80 is not a whole lot better, but it it were me, I'd probably make a left at Denver up I-76 to I-80 in Wyoming and go east along the old Platte River Valley, through Iowa and then down from the Quad Cities area towards, say, Charleston WV along various routes.

The problem with planning along interstates is that they may be the FASTEST way from place to place, but rarely are they the most INTERESTING, and almost never are they the most scenic. A lot also depends on what you might want to see in the Central Time zone just west of you - if you've toured that area already, then you can buzz right through it and spend more time in the Mountain TZ.. :)

We use the Delorme map program on our computer - no internet needed - to plan out our route. Then we transfer it to the Garmin while we're driving. On Delorme you can use various settings such as how many miles you want to drive per day or how many hours you want to drive. You can also set it to avoid certain types of roads, i.e., interstates, secondary roads, forest roads, etc. You can also put in your own vias if you want to get off the route to see something special. We've used it for over 20 years and love it.

I use Microsoft Streets and Trips to plan my route, then use several other sources such as RVParkReviews.com to find campgrounds in the area where MS&T suggest I stop for the evening.

I then update my route with the campground stops in MS&T.
Of course Microsoft has decided to not provide further updates for this product, so it will become out of date over time. But for this type of planning, it will continue to function as long as they don't rip up any of the major highways in the meanwhile. I don't rely on it for detailed directions, instead I use my GPS with up-to-date maps.

Edit to add: MS&T allows you to set various parameters that affect the time estimates such as your speed relative to the speed limit on different types of roads, the frequency/duration of rest stops and start/stop times for your daily drive. All of these combine to allow MS&T to determine where you should stop for the night. I find that most of the time I can drive further than it estimates, but I would rather have an extra hour or so in a campground than to be trying to setup or find an out of the way campground in the dark.

Good Sams has a routing service, so does AAA and Coachnet. I don't know about finding you a CG every night, ask them.