How to Plan Your RV Travel Route
Planning your RV road trip is one of the most important things to do as a full time traveling family. However, it can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start or how to plan your route well.
Late night planning session.
We probably have more travel days than a lot of full time RV families. Many families we’ve met on the road say to stay put for at least one week in any given area, and we heard the rule that you never stay just one night at a stop. We agree that this is ideal, especially when homeschooling and working full time so that “normal” routine days are scattered around the more adventurous days. And there’s little more frustrating than setting up just to turn around and pack up again in the morning.
But we had some personal things happen at our home base of Colorado that pulled us routinely back to our hometown.
And as you can imagine, when traveling across the country, it’s quite the trek to get back.
So we planned a route that involved quite a few travel days and some single nighters as we worked QUICKLY through our travel bucket list. Don’t let what others say you have to do influence what you need to do. The beauty in the more flexible travel life means you can customize it however you need to.
How to plan your RV travel route
Decide on your general areas of travel for the year, usually determined by your bucket list
We had a fairly extensive list of everywhere we wanted to go and the things we wanted to do across the country.
2022 was our first year actively on the road, so we mapped out four general areas for travel.
The West (Colorado, down through New Mexico, Arizona, then up through Wyoming and Montana)
The Midwest (Wisconsin for family and friends, Illinois, Indiana)
The East (from upstate New York to Vermont, Massachusettes, and down through Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington DC)
Florida (and Texas on our way to Florida)
We considered each of the these areas “phases” of trips, and dove into one at a time, booking the closest days FIRST as well as Florida (one whole year in advance!).
Map out your rough route across the country
We do this both on Google Maps, as well as The Dyrt app.
The Dyrt app is a great way to put in your campground and RV park preferences, and map out your route based on the RV parks they suggest.
The initial information you give it will map out the RV parks based on how many hours max you want to travel in between stops and the amenities and price point you prefer. This usually gives me a great first idea about where we’ll need to stop, how often, and the general areas of our route.
I then do Google Searches for RV parks in those general areas. The downside to The Dyrt is that some RV parks just aren’t included in the app. So often we’ll find more options utilizing Google. But we can’t begin to search for those parks on Google until we know where to look! So both work well together.
We also ALWAYS cross reference our routes with an RV safe GPS so we know we can travel that way.
If the park is “big rig friendly,” you know there’s a way to get to it safely. So we’ll often leave that up to the day before we hit the road. However, if there’s a stop of interest that might take us off the interstate, we’ll look it up to make sure it’s possible for us to drive to it with the fifth wheel in tow.
Decide on your activities
Before I book anything, we figure out what we want to do on our trip.
Sure, there might be a great RV park in the middle of no where that’s exactly in the middle of our main destinations… but maybe if we drive an additional 30 minutes, we’ll get to see another National Park!
So we start researching things to do in the area of our roughly plotted route, and make a list of everything we want to do.
This also helps determine our length of stay. Maybe a one-nighter turns into a two-nighter so that we can do something we really want to do.
The activities, sites, friends and family, and National Parks always dictate exactly where we go and where we stay.
Decide on your RV park and campground destinations, and book it!
Now that you have your general mapped out plan, activities, and timeframe, you can start to choose where you’ll stay.
Here are some of the ways we find RV parks, campgrounds, and boondocking locations to camp:
The Dyrt, as mentioned, but with adjusted destination settings at this point
We do the classic search on Google Maps for “RV parks near…”
We look for unique spots on Campendium and often cross reference what we find to see the reviews and make sure our rig actually fits
We have a Harvest Hosts membership that allows us to stay for free at a lot of interesting places, so for the one-night stops on a route, we try to find a Harvest Host
Search for affordable Community Parks with the RV Parky website. Yes, these can come up on Campendium, too. But for whatever reason, this search tool gives us a lot more options and has been a home run for us several times. It’s worth mentioning!
Make your RV park list and create a plan of action
I keep a working Google Doc of our dates and stops, and put action items highlighted in yellow.
This might look like “NOT BOOKED, need to call to reserve!” or “on their waiting list, find a backup plan.”
Click to see the details of our Google Doc itinerary. The map is a screenshot of the route from The Dyrt.
It can be so hard to keep tabs on everything. So keeping notes and knowing what you need to do next is critical.
Once the place is officially booked, I’ll add the dates and contact details to the Google Doc and include special notes.
The special notes might look like:
Whether we paid in full or just made a one night deposit
Special arrival instructions we received when we booked the site
A site number if it’s been provided
Anything out of the normal terms, such as cash only (that does happen!)
Any amenities we might not have (such as no sewer or no water so we know how to plan ahead of time)
Travel instructions (sometimes RV park owners will let us know about the best way to get there)
Anything additional required of us, such as calling ahead prior to arrival, checking out early, etc.
Also, we make sure to share this document with our loved ones just in case we don’t make it to a destination.
If they haven’t heard from us, they can contact the RV park directly to check, and if we’re missing, they can give someone a starting point.
The hard truth about planning your RV route
You won’t just schedule everything online exactly as you’ve intended. Especially in popular and touristy areas.
Our advice for planning your routes
Build in the most time you can for each stop and each leg of the trip.
You’ll start to get tired being constantly on the move. I remember we arrived at one location with a long list of “must dos,” just to spend three whole “down days” to recover from the brutal travel schedule I had us on. Take your time, enjoy the journey, try not to be in any rush.
Give yourself a time limit for planning your route.
We could spend COUNTLESS hours calling around to find a place, and end back up at square one. I’d end up exhausted, frustrated, and wanting to give it up all together. Set a time limit of how much of your day you devote to booking sites and researching RV parks. You’ll feel refreshed tomorrow when you start the process again!
Don’t hesitate to call the RV park.
While booking online is super convenient (and what we prefer), sometimes you’ve just got to call the RV park. And more often than not, they’re friendly, accommodating, and helpful. If the reservation form online is just a “request for booking,” CALL instead! The online form always delays the process since they’re typically slow to email you, and you’ll just have to end up calling them anyways.
Also, there are often last minute cancellations that won’t be reflected online. Never hurts to call and check!
Tag team the booking efforts.
If you’re a couple, one will naturally be more of the planner. However, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged, and just flat out confused sometimes when you’re juggling so many bookings (and running into so many dead ends).
Assign one location for your partner to book. Yes, this requires you to ask for help (sometimes really hard to do, I get it). But taking one thing off your plate can often make all the difference.
If things just aren’t panning out, try again later.
People cancel, bookings open up, you magically find an RV park you didn’t see before. Be okay with trying again later, and having faith that it’ll all work out how it’s meant to. I cannot begin to tell you about the immense frustrations I’ve faced with booking our sites, and yet thinking back on all of our experiences so far, I’ve loved (almost) every single place we’ve stayed, and thought they were all perfect for the time that we had.
Our travel day schedule
Traveling the country full time means we spend a lot of days moving our RV to a new location. We call these days “travel days,” and we’ve got them (almost) down to a science. It involves getting packed up and hitched up, ready to move our 42 foot fifth wheel, hours in our truck as a family of four (plus our two big dogs), and then setting up in our new location.
We try to give the travel day a routine and make it productive for both work, homeschool, and down time. There's a lot that happens from the co-pilot seat, and of course the driver and head of the household does his very best to get us to where we need to go!
Here is what our general schedule looks like.
7:00 am: Rise and shine, and start packing
Some of the prep happens the night before, but first thing in the morning we clean and adjust things around the RV to get it ready for the slides to come in, and for us to hit the road. Our #1 priority: put items in the best places so they don’t move while traveling down the road.
9:30 am: Hitch up and head out!
Hitting the road around 9 gives us plenty of time for a good breakfast, showers, getting ready for the day, everyone in the truck and accounted for, hitched up, and ready to pull out.
It’s rare we leave earlier, but if we have a short travel day, we’ll leave a little later to allow for a slower more productive morning (especially if we need to get work done).
9:30 – 11:00 am: Homeschool and work in the truck
For John, it’s just DRIVE. But for the rest of the clan, we dive into an adjusted homeschool schedule that includes flash cards, reading aloud, some independent workbook work, and sometimes a lesson on the state we’re visiting.
I (Melody) usually have time to get work done when our son plays video games on his handheld for an hour and our daughter snacks or plays with toys.
11:30 am: Fuel stop and lunch
We can usually last around two hours on a tank of fuel (250 miles). We plot out our fuel stop ahead of time using the Open Roads App (for discount fuel), and try to make sure we’ll have room to eat after filling up. Sometimes I’ll pre-make sandwiches so that it’s all ready to go, other times we’ll need to get everything out and make the lunch when we get there.
This is honestly one of the best parts about traveling with our RV. Our own healthy food, our own bathrooms for a potty break, and the ability to stop and relax (almost) anywhere. We usually stop for around an hour.
2:30 pm: Second fuel stop
After lunch our daughter usually naps and our son passes the time however he sees fit while Melody works and, well, John continues to drive. Again, we can usually last around 2 hours (or 250 miles) before having to stop again.
If it’s a second fuel stop kind of day, it means we’re probably traveling over 4 hours to our destination. We try to keep our trips around 3 hours, though, so usually we can make it to our destination with only the one lunch stop, and then set up camp, and John will run to a gas station to fuel up for the next day (if we’re hitting the road again right away).
3:00 – 4:00 pm: Arrive at our destination
We check in, and if everything goes smoothly (our reservation is found, our site fits us, and it’s level enough for our auto leveling system to handle it, we can be fully set up, out of the truck, slides out and dinner started within half an hour of arriving.
Ideally we like to arrive before or around 3 to give everyone time to decompress from travels, get work done, and give the kids some time to stretch their legs and play outside.
For a look at our routine travel day, check out our YouTube video!
Planning your RV travel route only gets easier with time. Using some helpful apps, best practices, and booking in advance allows the process to go smoother. You’ll learn what to look for in the places you stay ahead of time, what the best way is to find those places, and YOUR ideal system for planning the route that’s right for you and your family.
