Look at what your friends have, what you like and don't like about them (the RVs, not the friends). Visit dealers and look at RVs, and RV shows if the search goes into show season. What you are looking for is "how would we live in this?" Or "are we going to live in this or just sleep in it" because our family's first travel trailer, early 1960s, handled our whole family for sleeping only; living had to be outside.
You also probably have a budget to fit, and an idea for a tow vehicle the RV has to match. If you want more RV than you can tow, the budget has to include an adequate tow vehicle. My 2004 search, almost a year and a half, established that my wife wanted more room to live in than could be handled by our mid-size SUV (6000 pound max but more like 4500-5000 with family along), so enlarging the budget to include a larger tow vehicle opened the possibility of motorhomes as alternatives, and that turned out to be the less expensive solution and a better fit to how we wanted to use it (road trips).
When the family I grew up in got down to Mom, Dad and 3-4 kids, they got rid of the travel trailer we had used for road trips and got a tent camper for camping at the state parks and recreation areas for long weekends and 1-2 weeks at a time. My experience is while you can use almost any RV any way, motorhomes work best for road tripping, popups can be a lot of extra work putting them up and taking them down daily, so thus more suited to longer stays, while towables work about as well for either use.
I'm at the edge of the Flint Hills (only down here they are the Osage Hills) and most of my road trips have either been into cooler parts of the Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan) or west (Colorado, New Mexico, West Texas, Utah) in autumn when it is getting cool, or to Mississippi and Texas Gulf Coast in winter. Road trips were to places my wife and I were interested, mostly historical. Your road trips should be to places you and your family are interested in, not what interests someone else. But for ideas, you might look at regional travel books, what you might find in Missouri, Eastern Oklahoma, Eastern Nebraska, Western Iowa, Eastern Kansas. About a 200-300 mile radius from where you live for a day of travel each way, or if really road tripping, about 800-1000 miles if you have a week, 1500-2000 miles if you have two weeks. On the longer trips, I've always worked out loops within that travel radius, so we saw different things on the way back than we saw on the way out.
For weekends and a few days at a time, a lot of trips to nearby campgrounds (mostly Corps of Engineers) on the reservoirs in the Arkansas River basin. Most of these are in NE and North Central Oklahoma. In Kansas more of them are state parks, or city-county fishing lakes.
Tom Test
Itasca Spirit 29B
