Trip Planning

Now that we are in our fifth season of traveling and are already planning ahead for seasons six and seven, we want to share with you how we plan long trips. We’ve learned a thing or two along the way. Our hope is that you can pick up a tip or two from how we plan our six months or so each year on the road. We’ve broken it down into 15 steps.

Step One: Come up with an overarching theme or main goal for the trip.

For us, Season One, Crisscrossing the Country (YouTube playlist), was about following our daughter around the country as she performed at Drum Corps competitions. Season Two, Colorado In Depth (YouTube playlist), was at the start of COVID, so we did lots of short loops around Colorado, coming back home for laundry and groceries in between. The third season was Make Maine by Fall (YouTube playlist). Alaska Bound (YouTube playlist) was Season Four. Our current season, Season Five, is Southern States (YouTube playlist). We’re already in the process of planning Season Six: West Coast and Season Seven: Europe.

Step Two: Decide on a rough route.

When getting a rough idea of the route, keep the time of year in mind, determining what states you will pass through. Look at a big map. For Make Maine by Fall, we made a big loop, starting out north, trying to reach Maine for peak fall colors, then follow the colors south through the Appalachian Mountains down to the Smoky Mountains. For our West Coast season, we’ll start out in Southern California in the spring, working our way up to the state of Washington during the summer, then returning south to California in the fall.

Step Three: Make a wish list of things to see and do in each state.

To come up with our wish lists, we usually look for the national parks and state parks in a state. Then we turn to planetware.com. We’ve done internet searches before on lists of things to see in a state, but we keep coming back to planetware.com. We don’t know how they come up with their lists, but we usually like many of the items on them. Since we like to hike, we may also look at AllTrails for where some of the best hiking is in a state. For the Alaska Bound season, we extensively used the Milepost for ideas. For Europe, we’ve always been a big fan of Rick Steves’ travel guides.

Step Four: Make a Google My Maps of your wish list.

We put the location of the items in our wish list in a Google spreadsheet, then import it into a My Maps. Then we can see where all of the items are on the map. The map makes it easier to identify a logical route through the state, hitting a majority of the items. The map makes it easy to see where some items are clumped together and where a single item may be way out of the way from the others.

Step Five: Identify the order of the items per state.

This is where we start narrowing down the wish list. Remove the out-of-the-way items that don’t seem worth it. Try to envision a route that minimizes the driving. Keep in mind what state you will be coming from and what state you will be entering next. Sometimes the best route is a wavy line from one side of the state to the other. Other times it is a loop.

Step Six: Start an itinerary list in a spread sheet.

We use Google Sheets again. We put each location on a separate line of the spreadsheet. This itinerary includes the whole season, all the states we’ll be traveling through.

Step Seven: Refine the itinerary by looking at the distances between locations.

We use an AppScript and formulas in separate columns of the spreadsheet to calculate the distance and driving times between locations. We’ll combine some locations together that are not far apart. We’ll add a stop in-between two locations if they are too far apart. We try to keep our travel days to four hours of driving or less. We’ve made a Sample Itinerary Google Spreadsheet available so you can see the AppScript and formulas we use.

Step Eight: Start setting dates for each stop.

If there is anything in your itinerary that has a fixed date, start by setting those dates first, such as a festival or a family event. Then work from there in both directions. We have always stayed a minimum of two nights at a location, so we never have two travel days in a row (at least not in the original plan). Lately, we’ve been moving even slower, staying a minimum of three or four nights. If there are a lot of things to do or see at a location, extend your stay there to five nights or more. However, we rarely stay at one location for more than five nights. We generally copy our itinerary to a paper calendar. This helps us visualize how long we are staying at each location. Add a column that calculates the number of nights at each location by subtracting the arrival date of the following location from the arrival date of the current location.

Step Nine: Find places to stay at each location.

We generally use Campendium to find the campgrounds we stay at. Not only do we look at their ratings, we also read some of the reviews. Our preference is staying inside National Parks and state parks as those are usually places we want to see and hike in anyway. If we think we’ll need to run our AC, we’ll pick out a campground with electrical hookups. Otherwise, a camp site without hookups is our preference. We don’t mind camping in a place without toilets, water, or dump stations, but we don’t want to do that too many nights in a row as we do need to fill and dump on a regular basis. Our last choice is a private campground, since they are usually more expensive and the sites are closer together.

Step Ten: Research when reservations open for each campground.

We don’t always stay at campgrounds that take reservations, but we like having them so we don’t have to worry about showing up to a full campground. We prefer to spend the time during our trip seeing and doing things, not worrying about where we will be staying at night. Different campgrounds have different reservations windows. Some are rolling six month windows. Others open up the whole season on a particular day.

Step Eleven: Set calendar reminders for when reservations open.

Once we know when we can make a reservation, we don’t want to miss it, especially some popular locations that fill up in minutes or seconds (like some popular national park campgrounds). We set a calendar reminder that pops up a reminder when Ann is on her laptop and sends her an email the day before.

Step Twelve: Make campground reservations when possible.

As we make campground reservations, we add that information to the itinerary spreadsheet. Things like site numbers, how much we paid, and how much we still owe. We use colors in the spreadsheet to draw our attention to items. Green means the reservation is made. Red means we need to take some action. If a campground is first come/first serve, we note that in the spreadsheet. That way we’ll try to arrive a little earlier than usual to make sure we get a spot.

Step Thirteen: Consider reservations for excursions and attractions.

Generally we wait until we are on the road to plan out our activities for each day. However, some things need to be reserved ahead of time. This is something we need to get better at. Many national parks now have timed entry reservations. Boat tours can sell out. We’ve missed out on some things because we realized too late that we needed a reservation or advanced ticket. When we do make reservations or purchased tickets, we add that information to the spreadsheet as well.

Step Fourteen: Plan laundry stops.

We carry enough clothes with us to last about ten to fourteen days between doing laundry. Our first preference is to do laundry at the campground. It is usually cheaper and more convenient than driving over to a laundromat. We’ll research what campgrounds provide laundry and mark them on the spreadsheet. For stretches without campground laundry, we’ll look to see what towns might be a convenient stop for a laundromat. We don’t always follow the plan of our laundry stops, but referencing the spreadsheet comes in handy. We’ll know if we need to get laundry done before we leave a campground because there is not a good place to do it the following couple of weeks.

Step Fifteen: Add info to the spreadsheet as needed.

If you haven’t already figured it out, our spreadsheet itinerary is our main tool. We add columns for any additional info we want to remind ourselves of and we reference the spreadsheet as we travel. If we hear about something cool to do at one of the locations, we’ll add it in a notes column. We share the spreadsheet with our two adult children so they know where we plan to be. If we need to change plans while we’re on the road, we update the spreadsheet and let our kids know. We’ll make sure the spreadsheet is available off-line so we can view it without an internet connection. Along that same vein, the driving miles and driving hours formulas try to recalculate every time the spreadsheet is opened, so we copy the values over to new columns so they are available offline. That means that those value columns need to be updated if the itinerary changes.

So there you have it. That is how we plan our travel seasons. We hope you were able to find at least one good golden nugget to use for yourself. Happy travels!

Check out our related video: Trip Planning

(Ann)