Trip Updated

I have spent the weekend attending a two-day online RV Summit called Hit The Road. It has been awesome. It's an annual thing, and brings together some of the more famous RV-ers in the industry, as well as sponsors and RV parks around the country. There were a few sessions that I didn't sign up for, as I don't really want to know how electricity works, or the pitfalls of the propane system. I will leave those topics and issues to my amazing hubster.

One of the sessions was on planning and routing your adventure. I learned about several tools that are going to make our lives so much easier for the next year of travel. The following websites are products of a company called RV Life.

www.campgroundreviews.com

www.rvtripwizard.com

In addition to those great sites, RV Life is also the name of an app for your phone that allows you to access the trips you created in RV Trip Wizard while you're on the road. The app also has a GPS feature, which actually gives RV-friendly directions. This will be pretty important when we are traveling through mountains or in sketchy areas. I will try to run both Google Maps and RV Life simultaneously :)

The RV Trip Wizard is fantastic. Very similar to Roadtrippers, but with some additional features. For example, you can input your estimated cost of camping, meals, misc, gas, etc..for each stop/campground and track total costs for the trip. As you have probably seen in my earlier posts, I have split our trip into nine legs/segments, and named them based on the area or the last stop for each leg...

1. Bakersfield, CA.

2. Mukilteo, WA.

3. Coalville, UT.

4. Sheboygan, WI.

5. Outerbanks, NC.

6. New England

7. New Orleans, LA.

8. El Paso, TX.

9. Coalville, UT. - Home Sweet Home!!

Here are my most current updated maps/routes from RV Trip Wizard...

My apologies for the awesome quality of those photos. For whatever reason, I can't get the full maps to pop up so I can screenshot them. Anyway, you get the gist of the journey. These maps only show the RV parks, rather then all of our stops. Highly recommend both apps, Roadtrippers and RV Trip Wizard.

With respect to the booking process, I have about 95% of our current total of 74 stops booked. Whew!!! There were several RV parks that aren't taking reservations that far out, so I will need to stay on top of those. For example, there's a campground at Flagler Beach, Flagler-by-the-Sea, which sits literally on the beach. If I'm going, I'm going to have a beachfront spot, even if I have to call the lady who works there every day for a month to get it. Ha.

Another awesome thing that I have tapped into is a company called Harvest Hosts. They have standing agreements with over 2,000 entities all over the US, including wineries, breweries, farms, and golf courses, who provide a camping spot for RV-ers out on the road and perhaps in between RV parks FOR FREE (Note: membership with Harvest Hosts is $70/year). You can only arrange to stay there for one night, and you are strongly recommended to support the hosts in some way, which in most cases means buying something at their place of business. Now, let me just recap, so I get this straight. You are going to let me stay at your vineyard, most of which are delightful places, but I am going to be forced to buy wine? Bahahahaha. What's the catch?!

On the topic of wine/wineries, I have booked several throughout the trip, including a couple in Grand Junction, Colorado, one in Denver, and one in Buffalo North Dakota. I'm a big wine drinker. Love it. Beau? Not so much. I'm hoping that he will join in the fun and discover that he actually doesn't hate it. Lol. Or, alternatively, I will go to the wine tastings and drink the wine and buy the wine, and he can drink his Bud Light.