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When it comes to route planning – I’m big on doing it myself. I want to be involved in the myriad of little decisions that are part of making a trip plan. Our trip plans germinate with a discussion between my DW (Darling Wife) and I during which a trip concept is established (basic direction we’re going to head in, reasons (if any) for the trip (i.e., we’re going to Arizona to hide from crummy MI winter, we’re going to Colorado to sightsee and maybe visit our high school pal Mary, etc.). The concept also establishes a target duration of the trip – including a general departure date … and a desired return date.
Armed with the trip concept – it falls to me to plan an itinerary. I use Google maps to plan our high level route. My approach to route planning takes lots of things into consideration …. what points of interest, friends and/or relatives happen to be along the way?, have we been this way before?). I carve the trip into “driving legs”. Once I’ve got a handle on that – I use RVParky to identify campgrounds we’ll plan to stay along the way. Potential campgrounds for short stays (overnights, 2-3 day stays while enroute to somewhere else) get a cursory look …. campgrounds for stays that are longer in duration get vetted much more carefully via sites like http://www.campgroundrs.rvlife.com.
I keep my DW in the loop as I piece together our plan – asking for her input when there’s not a clear choice of which campground to stay at – or if part of the driving plan deviates from our “preferred” approach to driving (i.e.,. a day that’s less than 150 miles … or more than 300 miles. I’m of course gathering details about daily driving distances, planned arrival / departure dates at each stop, anticipated campground costs, etc.
The details feed my trip planning spreadsheet (a custom designed spreadsheet that takes an itinerary and some basic assumptions regarding fuel consumption and anticipated fuel prices – and generates a monthly budget that forecasts fuel costs for the coach, the jeep, campground fees – and all our pure travel expenses) so that we’ve got a reasonable understanding of what the trip will cost us in total – as well as when will the expenses hit.
From there – I make campground reservations. I get zero joy from “flying by the seat of my pants”. If I know I plan to arrive somewhere on a given date …. waiting until the last minute to find out if I can get a site in the park I want – makes no sense to me. This is especially the case when we’re talking about “monthly long” stays in warm climates during the winter months. A 5 month long trip to Florida for the winter without making reservations well in advance is a recipe for disaster!
Finally – I use Microsoft OneNote to capture all our trip plans. I create monthly calendars for each month we’ll be gone – which shows where we’ll be each night of the trip, clearly identifies “travel days” (and their associated mileage). I capture our itinerary – which depicts our planned route (printed out of Google Maps), Links the campground websites where we plan to stay, copies of reservation confirmations, etc. I include a tab that lays out our trip budget by month (it’s one thing to ignore what a weekend trip is costing you with a “I’ll sort it out when we get home”. I don’t have a big enough pile of money to do that for trips that are expected to be 6-8 months long. My Trip Plan in one note also includes several lists …. there’s the list of Trip Prep “To Do’s” (the stuff we need to get done before we leave), then there’s our trip packing lists (which we’ve been refining each trip over the 10ish years we’ve been doing this).
The best part about OneNote is that I’m able to develop my plan while working on my laptop – with a big screen monitor and a real keyboard and mouse – and then sync the plan to both my wife’s and my iPhone. We both have ALL the trip details available to us on our phones for instant reference. Even my technically challenged DW like the fact that she can be talking to friends and know in an instant where we’re planning to be on any given day of the trip.
I have zero doubts that I could generate a trip plan using AI – but it’s nothing I’d be interested in – because the reality is – I feel the need to be an active part of making the myriad of little decisions that are part of planning a trip (especially the places I chose NOT to go, and the campgrounds I decided NOT to stay at!
