How We Plan a Trip

April 29, 2019 P-TParaD Comments 0 Comment

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

I’ve had several folks ask me on social media how we plan our trips. Since we are part-timers, we try to squeeze out as much as possible from our time off. I will say that my technique is probably overkill. I work through a lot of details that quite often we don’t use once we get to our destinations because we run out of time. However, I like this because I’ve done research to know our destinations and we have flexibility when Murphy takes a swing at our “search for paradise.”

When you’re out in your RV like Bill Murray’s character in Stripes, John Winger, you have to be flexible when the plan falls apart…OK, maybe he didn’t have much of a plan. Unlike PV2 Winger, we like to have a solid plan.

Building the Initial Concept

What a surprise. Buffalo National River is such a gem. Of the 31 National Park Service units we’ve visited, very few haven’t amazed us and made us wish we had more time to explore them – Buffalo National River

To figure out what we want to do, I spend a lot of time surfing RVers that are on YouTube, other bloggers, and other RV camping media outlets. Also, the kids love the National Park Service’s Junior Ranger Program, so I use the National Park Service’s national map (73 MB Download) to start blending trips ideas together.

As a trip comes together, I start piecing together a rough idea on the map and how long we could make the trip. I do this so I have a bunch of plans on the shelf to pull off a 2-day, 3-day, 4-day weekend trips. That way, when work gives me a 3-day getaway, I have a plan ready to go. Through this post, I’m going to use a 4-day trip I planned to Buffalo National River and Hot Springs National Park as my example to reference.

Friends of ours wanted to float the Buffalo River with us, but they only had Friday and Saturday of Labor Day weekend to meet us. So we knew we were going to be in Arkansas for two days. I noticed that Hot Springs wasn’t too far away and plotted it all out on Google Maps. It looked doable for a four day weekend. That gave me enough to start putting some details into this initial concept.

Side note – Several folks have noted on social media that we drive a lot. Instead of picking one spot to see, we usually find two-four spots to explore (or 16-20 on our upcoming summer vacation!) on a trip. 6 hours on a drive day isn’t necessarily our favorite, but it’s something we’re accustomed to.

Adding Details

The things to do section on NPS pages is a great starting place. Many State Parks have similar pages, but I find they aren’t as complete as the NPS.

Once I figure out where we’re going, I dive into researching everything about the destinations. The “Things to Do” section of most National Park Unit pages are pretty great. They usually give a great overview of activities. I normally use this reference to narrow my research into reviews on specific trails, activities, ranger programs, etc.

To find more details, I usually loop back to the RV and travel bloggers I mentioned above. They usually have some insight on some nugget or an activity that didn’t quite hit the mark.

Now I have to find spots to stay. Again, for a National Park Service unit, the “Places to Stay” section is a good starting point. From there, I’ll again reference RV and travel blogs, but I’ll also use sites like Campendium, Campground Reviews, Free Campsites.net, US Campgrounds Info, etc.

During this portion of planning, I’m spending a lot of time on Google Maps, Google Street View, and Google Earth to confirm what all these references are telling me. Google’s sites aren’t always the most up to date either, so everything is scrutinized for accuracy.

The imagery is 5 years old and no street view. A storm had closed the campground for several weeks earlier in the year, I had to dig up a lot from bloggers and the NPS’s site to look at more recent pictures.

With this information, I start to build a pretty solid concept of a trip. I know where we’re going. I know what we want to do.

Reservations

Now that we have a solid plan and I had a weekend available to execute, I started working on reservations. With a ranked list of 3-4 campgrounds at each destination, I start working websites and the phone to get the spots that we want. I typically have pretty good notice with work when I’ll have time off, so reservations are usually pretty easy (unless you want to reserve a campsite in Custer State Park around 4th of July…a bit of foreshadowing there for a future trip). I also work on reservations for activities.

For our Arkansas trip, we reserved 2 nights at Buffalo’s Point Campground within Buffalo National River and 2 nights at Hot Springs KOA. My friend owned the boats we were using and was familiar with some outfitters on the river. He helped the process and made our reservations for floating and transportation post-float.

Execution

OK, now we have everything packed and we know what we’re going to do every day, right?

The finished product, a plan on Google Sheets. I use Sheets so I can share to others traveling with us. I print out a copy and pin it on the RV fridge so the kids know what’s next.

Well sort of. Even though we go through all of these plans, things change. If the weather turns bad, we’ll pick the activities that work or move on to the next spot. In my considerable research, I always earmark the cancellation policies. That way we know what time we have to cancel without as severe of a penalty. Sometimes we just don’t feel up to it. On this trip, I felt ill on Sunday. So instead of hiking all day as planned, we had a lazy day in the campground. This flexibility has made our plans work well.

This is a lot of work and probably more work than the average RVer spends. However, all of our preparation helps us understand more about our destinations. So when we get thrown a curve ball, we know more than enough information to make a good decision to adjust our plans. All of this effort doesn’t let Murphy spoil a trip and keeps us on that search for paradise.