It’s getting real. Last week, I made our first two reservations for 2024 and the start of our full-time RVing …which, of course, seems crazy, as we haven’t even purchased our rig yet. But the start of our trip will be in Florida, and from what I’ve heard, it’s nearly impossible to get into some parks in the sunshine state if you don’t reserve as soon as the reservation window opens.
In case you missed our first post, during the pandemic, we hatched this idea of retiring at the start of 2024 and seeing the United States in one epic trip. My original plan, laid out in an Excel spreadsheet, was called the Ultimate Road Trip. I later renamed it The Great American Road Trip, and that’s how Mrs. 123 and I refer to it today. The trip was supposed to start in June 2024, leaving Denver and heading toward Grand Teton and Yellowstone; then across the top of America; down the eastern seaboard; west along the southern border, and then up through California to Oregon and back to Denver.
The beauty of the route is that it creates a loop following temperate weather. As such, we could start the loop in any month we wanted. We later decided to shift the start of our trip to January, mainly because of health insurance considerations. (But that’s a blog for another day.)
As it stands now, we would drive our rig to our starting point in St. Augustine, Florida in December 2023, visit our family up north for the holidays, and then officially start the road trip around January 10. We’ve got the trip laid out day by day, where we will be and where we will stay. We’ve crafted a detailed plan of things to do, places to eat, and beers to drink.
There’s a bit of a trade-off planning trips this way. One of the major perks of living full-time in an RV is the ability to go wherever you’d like on a moment’s notice. On the other hand, going without a plan and without any reservations can add another level of stress. There’s the decision fatigue that sets in when you have to decide month after month, week after week, day after day where you will go next. There’s the stress of not knowing whether you’ll find a spot in an acceptable campground in the area you want to visit. And this haphazard way of travel – while undoubtedly romantic and appealing – raises the risk that you miss out on something you really wanted to see.
Now, that could still happen. RVs break down. Weather events happen. Family emergencies arise. But we decided we’d rather pay the penalty for canceling a reservation and hope for the best.
We’ve heard many full-time RVers warn about trying to pack in everything you want to do in a single trip. You can always go back and see things you missed. Moving too quickly can be stressful on its own. We’ve tried to heed that advice, extending the time we spend at each campground. We eliminated some destinations altogether and grouped destinations around a single campground. So instead of moving every day for four days, we could stay at a centrally located campground and visit those destinations in four day trips. That would involve some backtracking at times, but it would be driving our truck and not towing the trailer.
So my spreadsheet for the Great American Road Trip includes a page listing all the campgrounds at which we plan to stay, and the date their reservation window opens up. The first campground on the list was Jetty Park Campground in Cape Canaveral. I scouted out their website a couple of days before, including creating an account ahead of time. Then on the fateful day, first thing in the morning, I logged on to their site and tried to make a reservation. Within seconds, I got an error message.
It turns out that the weekend I was trying to book a reservation was a long weekend, and I was trying to arrive on Saturday. Most smart people had logged on the day before, and booked a site for the entire weekend, starting on Friday. The only remaining site was too small for our trailer. Just out of curiosity, I backed up my search by a day, and found a no-hookup site along the inlet available for four days. Since it was one of our first stops, it wasn’t hard to shift our schedule to arrive on Friday. So I booked it. Flush with the thrill of victory, I went ahead and booked the next campground in Everglades National Park as well.
The confirmation number for each reservation gets entered into the trip spreadsheet, and the email confirmation is stored in a separate folder for reservations.
As I said, it’s getting real.
