Road Trip Planner Apps

I used Microsoft Streets and Trips for years, then it would no longer long on my laptop. So I have been using Roadtrippers.com. Chris

RV Parky along with Reviews Both free.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but for overnights and boondocking I recommend Overnight RV Parking. It is a good deal more then just walmart locations. It maps to the approved overnight parking locations with comments from the last person who stayed there.

Yosemite Sam1 wrote:
This is how I want to to it.

I hope you don't mind if I copy.

I was a strategic planner in my corporate world and have done so far with our European, Asian and all our camping trips so far. But it's pain with the domino effect of cancellation.

I want to be spontaneous and flexibility -- like when we used to do it weekends.

And thanks for that wonderful insight!

That's the funny thing about planning, isn't it? Some people spend so much time planning during their day to day lives that the thought of having to stick to a rigid plan sounds horrific. And I'm with you on the domino effect.

On the other hand, I see people who absolutely love planning every aspect of their trips. I think that for them the act of planning builds the anticipation and is practically as enjoyable as the trip itself.

I'd much rather be spontaneous. We miss out on things once in a while because we hadn't booked something or researched in time, but that's a chance we're willing to take.

On our big trip last fall we had a very short list of scheduled constraints:

- We needed to make it to the mountains above Taos to meet some family members for Labor Day weekend.

- We had to get out son to Denver after that to fly back to start school.

- We needed to get to Sandusky, OH by the following weekend because Cedar Point amusement park was only open on weekends after Labor Day.

- We had to be home by a certain date in October because we had tickets to see Peter Frampton's farewell tour with friends.

Everything else was spontaneous and flexible. I would have added another week or two onto the trip if we didn't have that firm commitment at the end. We really had to high-tail it home from North Dakota and the weather had turned bad. We made it through the heavy winds in Wyoming (blew out our bedroom window) and the snow in Nevada and managed to have one buffer day to catch our breath in Bishop up in the Sierras before we met our friends on the Central Coast in CA.

The trip was a blast and I don't regret many things about it. And even as long as we were gone, I wish we could have spent more time in places we didn't expect to love so much (southern Indiana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Wisconsin).

dedmiston wrote:

Yosemite Sam1 wrote:

dedmiston wrote:
I used RV Trip Wizard for our 11,000 mile trip last fall with no real complaints. It was perfect, but it was pretty great. I'd use them again for our next big trip.

I'll try the demo in planning for the coming camping trips.

I like the range grid as I'm following a 300 or 3pm on unto my next campsite.

I just noticed a typo. It should be "wasn't perfect".

The developer is a solo shop and he had trouble with his server a couple times during our trip. It wasn't the end of the world though.

The configurable range circles really helped a lot. My wife and I aren't big planners at all. She hates planning. I don't like planning either, except that it's pretty important to me to know what my destination is when we're on the road. So our method was something like this:

The day before a travel day I would ask her to pick a general compass point. That's all I wanted to know: which direction are we driving tomorrow. As a bonus, sometimes she'd mention a tentative destination.

Armed with a direction, I'd pull up RV Trip Wizard and look at my rings and see what was between my min and max on the highway we'd be on. I would quietly check out the the parks and camps on that highway within that range and try to remember the nearby towns and/or the brand of the destinations (county parks, KOA, etc.).

Then sometime after lunch, I'd ask my wife if she'd picked out a destination yet (knowing she hadn't). When she would open her iPad, I'd mention "I think there's a nice looking place just outside of Shelbyville" (or wherever). She'd look around on her iPad and then call someplace and book the site.

My wife is lovely, but she'll make me nuts if I let her. Scoping out a couple of spots and having an estimated destination helped keep me sane. :B

This is how I want to do it.

I hope you don't mind if I copy.

I was a strategic planner in my corporate world and have done our the planning in our European, Asian and all our camping trip. But it's pain with the domino effect of cancellation of reservations.

I want to be spontaneous and flexible -- like when we used to do it weekends.

And thanks for that wonderful insight!

RVTrip Wizard now has a beta site up. All of your existing trips are available on either the beta or normal version. I'm using the beta right now and find it much improved and a lot faster.

Yosemite Sam1 wrote:

dedmiston wrote:
I used RV Trip Wizard for our 11,000 mile trip last fall with no real complaints. It was perfect, but it was pretty great. I'd use them again for our next big trip.

I'll try the demo in planning for the coming camping trips.

I like the range grid as I'm following a 300 or 3pm on unto my next campsite.

I just noticed a typo. It should be "wasn't perfect".

The developer is a solo shop and he had trouble with his server a couple times during our trip. It wasn't the end of the world though.

The configurable range circles really helped a lot. My wife and I aren't big planners at all. She hates planning. I don't like planning either, except that it's pretty important to me to know what my destination is when we're on the road. So our method was something like this:

The day before a travel day I would ask her to pick a general compass point. That's all I wanted to know: which direction are we driving tomorrow. As a bonus, sometimes she'd mention a tentative destination.

Armed with a direction, I'd pull up RV Trip Wizard and look at my rings and see what was between my min and max on the highway we'd be on. I would quietly check out the the parks and camps on that highway within that range and try to remember the nearby towns and/or the brand of the destinations (county parks, KOA, etc.).

Then sometime after lunch, I'd ask my wife if she'd picked out a destination yet (knowing she hadn't). When she would open her iPad, I'd mention "I think there's a nice looking place just outside of Shelbyville" (or wherever). She'd look around on her iPad and then call someplace and book the site.

My wife is lovely, but she'll make me nuts if I let her. Scoping out a couple of spots and having an estimated destination helped keep me sane. :B

dedmiston wrote:
I used RV Trip Wizard for our 11,000 mile trip last fall with no real complaints. It was perfect, but it was pretty great. I'd use them again for our next big trip.

I'll try the demo in planning for the coming camping trips.

I like the range grid as I'm following a 300 or 3pm on unto my next campsite.

I hate to say this, but such is no longer available.

My killer criteria was that the package had to be stand alone and not need internet access to do anything when underway. SA and S&T were the last.

I have tried RV Wizard demo on more than a few occasions because I really wanted it to work. I could never get it to do the whole plan for both EOD and Fuel. I just hit it again and it is now not an active online demo. Maybe I can do better.
Just spent too long trying again. If you want canned trips, I guess this is OK, but it is not how we travel. It so lacking of the essentials that I won't bother with buying a year.

There is another that is free to use but again, as a web app, you better be sure you have your data plan full charged or you will burn it down. It does do everything we need and doesn't steer you to specific campgrounds. It runs on Google Maps, but I haven't been able to get GM to collect Lat/Lon from a GPS.

Oh Well

Matt

We use RVParky. It has been very helpful and is pretty easy to use. We had 3 trips planned but thanks to the Covid-19 had to cancel all 3.