Planning our first 8-week summer RV escapade was A LABOR OF LOVE. There were times that I wanted to walk away, times that I couldn’t see straight, and other times that I felt seriously giddy envisioning daydreams coming to life as the pieces of our plan came together. One of our dear friends gifted us a copy of RV Vacations For Dummies, and trust me, we needed the help.
Around 2 years before our trip, I started polling our family. Pie in the sky, where would we go if we could go anywhere? With National Parks largely dictating the route of our journey, our family began to put together a punch list of the places we were each hoping to visit. Brady had been dying to visit Yellowstone; Hayden, Arches; Grace, Yellowstone and the Utah Parks; and Justin, the Grand Canyon, which I was surprised to learn he had never visited at age 40. Quinn, typical fourth child, just said he would go “where anyone else wanted to go.” I had always dreamed of visiting Glacier, Banff, and Lake Louise, and longed to venture into Canada to make this happen. Given the distance between the parks and the combined wish list I now had in front of me, it was clear that hitting all of these places in one trip would make it a LONG one, but I had these reference points as my initial route markers.
To build our route, I used a website called Roadtrippers. Both a website and an app, it allowed me to plot our destinations, many of which were added as I determined which national parks in the western states I hoped to show my family. Once I plotted our trip’s destinations on Roadtrippers, it optimized my route and created streamlined directions from one destination to the next. I was able to add in stops to visit some family and friends along the way, which were also critical lifelines for us as we attempted this long journey. Roadtrippers even suggested points of interest in each of our destinations, many of which we were able take advantage of. When all was said and done, my map showed that we had over 35 stops on our journey for the Summer of 2019.
I also knew that we did not want to just “wing it” on this journey. With four kids in tow, visiting our nation’s most popular national parks in the peak season of Summer, I knew that making detailed plans and reservations ahead of time would allow for a smoother trip, and one that would hopefully allow us to stay in the most ideal locations at each point on our journey. How long were we going to stay in each of these 35 destinations? How long would it really take to travel from one destination to the next, in an RV? How was I going to build in buffer time, in case we had any issues or unforeseen problems? How was I going to run away every week or so when the kids were on each others’ nerves and I just needed a mental break? LOL. All these questions were equally important to consider, and thus the challenge of piecing together the trip – day by day – began.
I spent the next year making detailed plans and reservations for our trips. Let me tell you, there were so many challenges that I encountered. First of all, the national park campgrounds do not have a uniform advanced reservation timeline for booking. Some allow you to book a year in advance to the date (and for many of the most popular parks, you NEED to do this in order to score an ideal spot in the park); others, six months to the date; and, others, no published timeframe whatsoever, but “first come, first served.” Just perfect. I began frantically researching every stop along the way, coloring my calendar with appointment reminders for each of these reservations so that I had an “on the fly” playbook for making sure I didn’t miss any reservation windows. I spent hours online and on the phone many of these days, sometimes with multiple computers and phones at once, as many of the reservation lines were flooded the minute they opened the reservations. I even made my kids late for school one day, while I was online attempting to make a reservation. The tardy was well worth it, as I wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to stay at the best campground in Yellowstone.
Another snafu that I encountered was that the Canada Parks also had a differing system of specific dates, broken out by Province, for when lodging reservations could be made for each of their parks. Again, just perfect. An entirely different set of rules to contend with. More and more appointment reminders colored my calendar.
One by one, over the year and a half before our trip, I slowly coordinated the plans for our journey, one reservation at a time. Some were easy to book; others were extremely time-consuming and stressful. Regardless, slowly and sometimes painstakingly, the trip began to come together.
While making the reservations for our lodging in each destination along our journey, I was simultaneously assessing the things we planned to do in each location. This largely determined just how long we would stay in each place, and was critical to the timing of the itinerary. Hiking and exploring were a given for most of our stops, and obviously in the national parks, but I wanted to make sure that we had plenty of other options for activities to keep the kids engaged. After all, my kids are relatively good hikers, but at least one if not a few are likely to complain at length if we do it too many days in a row. I added in some diversified fun along our route to “pepper” our days – rodeos, river rafting, cave exploring, fossil digging, pig races, boat rides, and gondolas – to hopefully keep our days interesting. While I knew that interacting with the natural beauty surrounding us would be our primary goal, I also knew that inevitably, especially for my kids, a vista is a vista is a vista is a vista. I had no doubt that my kids would make sure I was reminded of that.
The spreadsheet that I developed for our first summer-long trip was insane. It is entirely too lengthy and detailed and overwhelming (so overwhelming, in fact, that I won’t even show it here), but it was invaluable to me to have a place where I kept every detail about the “ins and outs” of our itinerary, day by day. With columns for our location each day, and others for our lodging, ideas for activities and excursions, helpful websites, and restaurant and shopping recommendations, it was like the physical representation of my brain after having worked on researching these stops for a year and a half. It had notes of information that I took from blogs, magazine articles, travel books, and from friends and family who had traveled to some of these locations. It was “my bible” for our journey, and has continued to morph over the years as the kind of “playbook” I still need to keep our trips as low-stress and fun as possible. As my dear friend put it, “putting in the work up front will keep the trip as relaxing as it can be given you’ll be on the road with your four children for eight weeks.”
18 months after I began to put the first steps in place to plan our first summer-long adventure, we were departing from our home in the Bay Area for eight weeks on the road in an RV. I wasn’t nervous, because I had my roadmap. I knew that we’d encounter some challenges along the way (and, boy, did we ever), but I was ready for the adventure to come to life.
