Author: Easin' Along

If you want to accelerate the activity in your life, plan a three-month trip.  We’ve done a fair amount of extended travel, but never more than five weeks.  We started planning this trip about nine months ago, and I thought we would be ready, but the “to do” list keeps growing and the pace of life has picked up considerably.

Fortunately, we downsized a few years ago and now live in a home that we can leave and have little to worry about.  The grass will get cut and our great neighbors will alert us if anything looks out of sorts.  We signed up for a mail forwarding service and can check that off the list. Cable TV, landline phone, and internet service are cancelled, and we will see what we want to do about that when we return.  So far, I love Dish TV and will use it in Lucy during the trip. I will probably renew internet, but the landline phone is history. Our taxes were filed earlier than I can ever remember.

Helen (adorable wife and social animal) finally realized that she will have only me for conversation for three months and has spent the past week in front of every warm and breathing body she can find to talk to.  I expect that to continue right up to the moment of departure. She loves her friends and certain to miss them.  I predict she will be on the phone a lot.  I will miss our church and our gifted minister, but our Sunday services are online, and we can watch them while we travel.

As of today, we still have one more load of laundry to do, one more trip for a few groceries, and a jug or two of adult beverages to buy. This weekend we plan to hug some friends, and family, and entertain a few neighbors before Lucy is hooked up to Bert. Once all of that is complete, Lucy heads westward. To say we’re excited is an understatement.

With internet cancelled and Wi-Fi spotty at times, I don’t know exactly when we will have Easin’ Along up and online again.  Hopefully soon.  In the meantime, I’ll be taking notes and pictures and plan to publish something by the time we reach Biloxi, Mississippi, even if it is short.

Please come back, this should be a fun journey and we look forward to sharing the discoveries we make along the way. Until next time…we’re Easin’ Along.

Last week I outlined a few of the necessary steps required in the early phase of planning an extended RV trip. Most of those steps involve logistical matters like route planning, reservations, distances traveled per day, as well as a few items on the home front like mail forwarding and canceling phone and internet services. My purpose was to highlight some of the tools we use in this effort. This week, I thought I would share the method I use to organize that information and point out some of the resources we use to enhance our travel experience once we get rolling.

Spreadsheet

In the previous post, I mentioned that we use RV Trip Wizard and MilitaryLiving.com to plan a route and to locate campgrounds approximately 250 miles apart along that route. At the beginning of this process, I create an Excel spreadsheet and list the preferred campground stops along that route.  I type in the phone numbers of each campground, the desired reservation dates, and the distance from the previous stop. Once I complete that list, I begin making phone calls to secure a reservations.  If I am successful, I enter the confirmation number in the spreadsheet and other pertinent data like costs and site number (if known).

More often than not, Military campgrounds will not accept reservations for retired personnel until 30 days or less from the desired date to give active duty service members priority, a policy I agree with completely. Therefore, the spreadsheet is always a work in progress and is revised often throughout the planning stage. If the military campgrounds are full, we try to find a commercial campground or state park close by, but a route change may be necessary at times, requiring more revisions.

Once the spreadsheet is at or near completion, I place a copy in our trip binder and give copies to family members so they can keep up with us. A spreadsheet can be a bit time-consuming, but it is valuable information.  I store a copy on my phone in the Dropbox app and refer to it often when looking up the arrival dates for various destinations.

Trip Binder

On our first retirement trip up the East Coast, I compiled a binder with tabs for each overnight stop along the way. A trip binder is now a part of every trip we take. Within each tabbed section, I place a print copy of the reservation confirmation along with other information like magazine articles, newspaper clippings, etc., that I gather about tourist sites or events like festivals or concerts in each area. I also place notes or emails from friends if they have visited the area and what they recommend for us to see and do (and eat).  Finally, I add a few sheets of loose-leaf notebook paper at each tab to write down information about our visit to share with friends or Easin’ Along readers in blog posts. The spreadsheet mentioned above is usually the first tab. I have all of the binders for past trips…mostly to re-live some of the memories.

Tour Books and Reference Material

Helen (adorable wife) has the job of planning the activities at each stop.  She brings me along to drive, cook, and wash dishes. There are a lot of resources out there for information about cities and restaurants anywhere in the country and we use a lot of them like Trip Advisor and Fodor’s.  Sometimes, a Google search will give us more than we can take in, but that is a good a place as any to start. Trailer Life Magazine does a great job of pointing out information to RVers from other RVers about travel to certain destinations. As soon as our spreadsheet is nailed down, Helen pays a visit to the local AAA office to pick up the latest Tour Books for each region along our route. These travel guides are updated often and are an excellent resource for restaurants, “must-see” attractions, and historical information about a particular city or town. She brought home a haul for our next trip.

RV Manuals and Checklists

Ok, we’re on the road and the awning gets stuck or a light on the refrigerator starts blinking—now what? When we purchased Lucy, the RV dealer gave us a binder filled with the manuals for all of the appliances, warranties, and other moving parts.  I used that binder to organize, as well as add, additional information on maintenance procedures for RV equipment like the generator, fifth-wheel hitch, and portable gas grill.  I also inserted checklists for critical procedures like hooking and unhooking the trailer and a checklist for preparing the trailer before departing for the next stop.  The owners manual has a section that outlines the hookup procedures, but I found that some of the necessary steps were either omitted or not clear enough for a novice like me and I created my own. I keep a copy of the checklist in the RV reference manual stored in Lucy and a laminated copy near the RV control panel. We secure the departure checklist to the refrigerator with a magnet.

Let’s Roll

The plans and the preparations are wrapped up and we’re ready to roll. Even though we love it here, we’re eager to move on to someplace a little drier and bit warmer for a few months.  We’ve had more rain in Tennessee this winter than we’ve had in years. Two weeks to go and we’ll be Easin’ Along once again. I hope you’ll stay in touch…this trip should be a lot of fun.

There is one aspect of RV life that caught us surprise…you gotta plan ahead…months ahead. With baby boomers retiring by the thousands every day and taking to the highways, RV travel is becoming very popular. In the fairly recent past, RVers could hit the road and there would be a campsite available wherever the traveler chose to spend a night or two (or longer).  Those days are over.

We learned this lesson last winter when we planned a trip to Florida with the intention of staying for a month or longer and as far south as possible on either coast. I began making calls in early December to RV resorts in Naples, West Palm Beach, Winter Haven.  About the only response I got, besides laughter, was that the park was full and that I could make reservations for the 2019 season in May 2018. I then tried state parks only to learn that those reservations are made online if you stay up until midnight eleven months to the day ahead and try to book a site before the internet crashes under the volume of hits. Experienced RVers know the tricks and Canadians and Northeasterners are pretty determined when it comes to escaping their winter doldrums.  They know how to work the system. Eventually, we obtained reservations in the Florida panhandle and as far south as Tampa as well as Jekyll Island, GA and had a wonderful experience although in weather cooler than we wanted.

This year, we said “Shuck Florida”, we’ll go to the Southwest.  An online blogger friend, Ingrid (Live, Laugh, RV), began posting some beautiful pictures from Arizona which drew us in.  We passed through there in our inaugural RV trip in Sherman, a rented motorhome, and wanted to return when we could stay longer. Ingrid suggested Lost Dutchman State Park in Apache Junction, AZ as one of her favorites.  I began making calls in April, and was very fortunate.  In addition to Lost Dutchman for eleven days, I secured Dead Horse Ranch near Sedona for a week, and Lake Havasu State Park for the following week. So, eleven months out, Arizona was booked for a month, but it’s still a long way to Arizona.  Where do we stay on the way there? Where do we stay coming home? When do we come home?

Through my short experience with RVing, I have developed a few rules of thumb regarding travel which I applied in planning this next trip we named “Lucy Does the Desert”. The first rule is that four hours of driving is enough driving, and, at the recommended speed for towing of 60 miles per hour, our range of travel is about 225 to 250 miles, stop to stop. Second, To recoup and smell the roses a bit, we try to stay two nights at every stop until we reach our destination. Two nights allow us time to stretch our legs, shop for any essentials, gas up and move out early on the day of departure.  We will break this rule a time or two on the way home, but rarely.

Using those two rules, we planned our route.  I use RV Trip Wizard, a great online tool for route planning. Without getting too far into the details, this tool asks for the starting point (Knoxville), the destination (Apache Junction, AZ), your preferred daily travel distance (250 miles), and preferred travel speed (60 mph), and then provides the user a choice of routes.  The website will point out every RV park, and state or national park with details on each site within that 250-mile range.  RV Trip Wizard will also calculate fuel costs based on the mpg of your vehicle, but that’s getting too far in the weeds for this discussion.

I also rely heavily on MilitaryLiving.com to choose RV campgrounds on Military Installations. We love using military facilities for their affordability, security, laundry facilities, and proximity to commissary and exchanges for food shopping. On our trip southwest, we will use military installations for 14 stops out of 30.

Using those two tools, Helen (adorable wife) and I planned a route across the southern and southwestern part of the country, taking about three weeks to reach Arizona. Stops along the way include Montgomery, AL, Biloxi, MS, Alexandria, LA, Galveston, TX, San Antonio, TX, and White Sands, NM.  With RV Trip Wizard, online research and the suggestions of others, I made all of those reservations over the past nine months. Using pictures borrowed from Google Images, I have posted a few pictures of many of our destinations throughout this post.

Once we booked RV sites in the destinations above including Arizona, we next needed to decide whether to return home after our time in Arizona or do a little exploring while we were out there.  We voted to stay longer and explore.  Our son and his family live in Southern California and we can’t pass a chance to visit them so we booked a week in San Diego, and another in Seal Beach, CA—close enough to camp with them for several days without taking Lucy into the congested Los Angeles Area. This stop will be big fun!

Next, we decided that we might we well put Las Vegas in the itinerary to have some fun and see some of the Grand Canyon.  We’re staying at Desert Eagle Campground on Nellis AFB. After Vegas, we travel to Zion Canyon in Utah for hiking around the red rocks of the desert before we travel to Page, Arizona and some time on Lake Powell. Our final stop in the desert is in Moab, Utah near Arches and Canyonlands National Park.

By the time we reach Moab, it will be May and we have traveled for two and a half months. I’m certain that Helen will be ready to dump me and get back to pickleball, but we have a stop planned in the four corners area of Colorado to see two couples of dear friends we met over forty years ago on our first Army assignment in Germany. One couple lives in the area and another couple will fly in for a reunion.  We can’t wait.

Besides route planning, a three-month trip requires a look into the calendar and taking care of personal business long before the departure date.  Right now, we are finishing up our taxes, something I rarely do early.  We also have to plan for any medications we receive through mail order and make arrangements for receiving them on the road.  The mail itself is an issue to deal with as well.  This past week I learned about a mail forwarding service called US Global Mail that will relieve family and friends the task of doing this for us.

We also plan (there’s that word again) to switch from cable to satellite tv.  I’ve seen plenty of RVers with satellite domes beside their campers and looked into it.  Satellite service is less expensive than cable for the plan we want and, for a monthly fee of only seven bucks more (and the cost of the equipment), we can add service to Lucy for the time we’re gone and cancel when we get back.  We’ll use Dish TV as the provider and the installers arrive on Friday. Hopefully, Tennessee Volunteer basketball will make a deep run in the NCAA tournament and I couldn’t miss it.  Masters Golf is also a must-see.

In addition to the above, we’ve decided that it doesn’t make sense to pay for internet and home phone service that we won’t be using, so we’re cutting the cord. We will have access to Wi-Fi on the road so we can continue to access the internet once we move out.  In the interim, we’ll make use of cell phone hotspots (sparingly).  If you don’t see Easin’ Along in the next week or two, that’s why, so please don’t give up on us. We’ll be back, we promise. If we are online next week, I want to share a few tools that keep us organized on the road. So Ease Along back here.

That’s the plan and some of the planning details. We’re not ready to hit the road yet. There are still decisions to make like what clothes to take and food for the fridge and pantry, but we’ll get to that soon enough. Helen has a “can’t-miss” gal-pal trip to take next week, and Lucy needs a little primping before she goes to work, but the day of departure will arrive soon.  We’re excited and we hope, and would love, to have you Easin’ Along with us. So, let’s go!

P.S. If anyone has suggestions for things to see and do, or restaurants to try in or near any of the places mentioned or pictured above, please send them along in the comments section below. We want to hear from you!