To Plan or not to Plan

holstein13 wrote:

But I still need to plan on where I'll be in order to receive the mail once a month.

I guess I don't see the problem. Sometimes we land at an unplanned spot and once there, decide to send for our mail. We make the request and give them the nearby small-town general delivery P.O. address. We receive it Priority Mail in 2-3 days.

If you want the mail to be at that P.O. on the day of arrival, just make your mail request 3-4 days prior as you're traveling to that place. Pick up you mail and continue on.

We've never had problems doing this - even as we traveled to Alaska where we didn't make reservations. Even to Alaska, our mail arrived in 4-5 days max, sometimes shorter.

Good luck figuring it out. :)

The plan is be prepared to change the plan on the fly. For the most part no reservations here either except for major holiday weekends where we will hit a no reservations park on thursday & hole up for the weekend.

For events & appointments aim to be in the area a few days ahead of event to make allowance for a weather or mechanical delay.

Recently retired. Looking to take the easy route and go to places and spend some time without schedule. But on first winter trip south for a couple months discovered I was glad I still planned in some detail.
- Place where meeting friends only had one week open when they were there.
- State park where we were going to spend 5 days only had two vacancies.
- Discovered town where we were going to wander into had a major annual festival that involves 50,000 people
- Coming back on California coast parks were filling up.

Have joined RV Golf Club and will be making a couple stopovers with them.

OP here. For the record, I have a wonderful mail forwarding service called St. Brendan's Isle. I've got that totally under control and while I appreciate the suggestions on mail, I can tell you I do very well in that department.

SBI scans all my mail and I can either scan the contents, shred the mail, hold it or send it along. I receive my mail about once a month and it consists mostly of legacy correspondence, checks, magazines, passwords, renewals, parcels, and other pieces don't get sent via e-mail.

But I still need to plan on where I'll be in order to receive the mail once a month.

Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions on how to plan less. I will put the ones that work for me into practice. I especially like the idea of traveling less and staying longer at certain places. Several of you mentioned that.

I also like the idea of setting aims rather than goals. Just pick a direction or an area. Great stuff. Thanks.

Except for obligations put on me by family, and stuff like cruises and international tours, I quit planning at retirement. When I have free time, and not projects, I just go. If full timing, I would just go, with the general principle that I want to be where I can keep the windows open most of the time and not run either furnace or air conditioning.

Bills can be checked and paid online, an except for jury duty summons and the forms I need to file income tax (which come at a specific time) the rest is just junk mail accumulating in my P.O. box. I'll take off for two to six weeks at a time, mail coming to the house (junk, license renewal forms or jury duty summons) goes on hold until pickup, P.O. box accumulates.

If you are actually full-timing, all your mail needs to be going to a forwarding service, and you can arrange for that to be held until you tell them a new place to send it.

JAXFL wrote:
I am not full-timing yet so this is just my thoughts about the mail issue.. do you really need all those coupons forwarded to you?

Our bills are all auto-pay. However, there are some pieces of mail that we still receive, including magazine subscriptions. (No, we will not read them online. We enjoy 'handling' them. We're on a computer enough.) We have our mail sent general delivery approximately every 4-6 weeks. No big deal. It's much cheaper to subscribe to a magazine than to pay for it in a store - even with postage added.

We enjoy getting birthday and Christmas cards. We also enjoy reading hand-written letters that some of our friends and family still do. :)

However, in 16 years of full-timing we do not receive any junk mail and no coupons and no catalogs. It's very easy to get off all those lists. :)

C-Bears wrote:
Don't some full timers go by the 3-3-3 rule? Off the road by 3pm, stay at each stop for 3 nights, and I can't remember the last one.

I think the third "3" is 3 hours driving.

The hallmark from people, who have been fulltiming now in our 14th year, and I can fix virtually anything:

Paraphrasing from a major inclusion

Sorry I didn't get that inclusiob

Don't some full timers go by the 3-3-3 rule? Off the road by 3pm, stay at each stop for 3 nights, and I can't remember the last one.

Old-Biscuit wrote:

holstein13 wrote:

Old-Biscuit wrote:
If the CG didn't accept visitor mail we would find local PO that accepted 'General Delivery' and have it sent there.

What the what? There are Campgrounds that don't accept visitor mail? I hope there aren't very many of them. I do most of my non perishable shopping on Amazon and have been sending my packages ahead to the campgrounds as I knew where I'd be.

If there are campgrounds that don't accept mail, I'll be in real trouble because I don't even bother to check if they do or not. I just send my mail and packages there and assume they will accept it.

7 yrs. of FTng.
YES there are CGs that don't accept visitor mail.
We came across quite a few in our travels.
Same with Post Offices.....not all accept 'General Delivery'

Best to ALWAYS check/verify FIRST

Ditto X10!