Tips and tricks from a full time RVer on how to plan RV travel days
We sold our house in 2018 and started full time traveling in an RV in 2019. One of the biggest concerns I had when first starting out was planning rv travel days. I wanted to make sure I was doing things in a way that would reduce the stress of moving constantly. I mean….if you have no idea if you have somewhere to go or not, it can be a bit stressful, right? 
The first thing I needed to figure out was how long I wanted to drive every day. When we first left Tallahassee, I only wanted to drive about 2 1/2 hours that very first day because I knew I was going to be terrified when we first left. After a few days of traveling I found out pretty quick that my driving sweet spot is around 4 hours. I have seen different schools of thinking when it comes to how long you should drive every day. One of them is the rule of 3(or 4). That is when you say you will stop by 3(or 4)PM and drive no more than 3(or 4) hours. I actually really like this way of thinking when it comes to planning an RV trip. After about 4 hours I am ready to be done driving for the most part, and stopping by 4 PM or so allows me to have a little down time after getting the campsite set up for the night. That being said, sometimes if we had a very long distance to drive, we blew right past these rules. This mostly happens when we need to drive across the entire country and don’t have much time to do it. The longest travel day we have ever had was around 11 hours or so. It was surprisingly easy…but that was just a one off event. I know if I did that on a regular basis, it would get really exhausting really quickly!
Another big concern that people have when planning RV travel days is exactly where to stay and how to find those campsites. First thing here is to decide what kind of campsite you want. Do you want to boondock, or will you want full hookups in order to get things like laundry done. Here are the steps I take to decide on where to stay. First, I look at a map and sort of estimate about where a four hour drive would end. Then I use something like mapquest to see if the drive time between those 2 spots is around 4 hours. If it is not, I adjust the trip until it is around 4 hours. Once I have the destination in mind, I start looking for a place to stay in that area. If we are only doing one night or maybe two, we may just boondock somewhere. To find a good boondocking spot, I use apps like iOverlander and Campendium. I check the area out in those apps and look for a good place to boondock. Then, I read the reviews on the site and see if it is OK for big rigs. If we need to have full hookups for a few days, I use services like AllStays…or I use one of our memberships like Passport America or Thousand Trails to find free or deeply discounted campgrounds.
Another very important thing to figure out when planning RV travel days is exactly how long to book the the site for! What I do is look at the things the area has to offer. Or, I will see if there is a national or state park I want to visit nearby. If there is something like that nearby, I may adjust my drive time a bit up or down in order to find a campground closer to the place we want to visit. When we first started out, we didn’t stay anywhere very long. This was incredibly tiring and we found ourselves feeling like we had left so many things unseen. So we decided to start staying places on a longer term and sort of setting up a campground as a “home base” while we explore lots of things in the area. If we are staying somewhere on a monthly basis, we may even just leave the rig and go rent an airbnb if there is a national park or something like that a short drive away, but still too far to go for just a day.
I know this sounds like it is a lot to try to remember. And, well….it is. I don’t ever remember it all. I like to try to plan at least a few weeks to even a few months ahead. I actually keep track of all of our travel plans using an excel file on my laptop. It has the name of the campground, arrival/departure date, any national or state parks in the area, the discount camping membership used for the stay, the park phone number, where or not we have already reserved the site, and any other important info we may need. keeping all of this organized in the excel file is a huge help when we are planning our travels. I can’t even remember how many times I have had to go look at my excel file to see exactly where we planned to be on a certain date.