How to plan a memorable RV trip in the midst of a pandemic?
For generations, travelers far and wide have enabled civilizations to exchange ideas and knowledge. In the past decades travel & vacation has become the stuff of inspiration & rejuvenation which is perhaps why most of us in this fast-paced world consider traveling regularly as a norm as opposed to a luxury.
Enter 2020! The ongoing pandemic has hampered travel plans of millions forcing us to make a trade-off between safety and sanity. Staying at hotels / airbnbs still remains risky at best (at least on most of our minds). One day we (me & my wife) started wondering how cool it would be if we had our place everywhere we go and that’s when renting an RV popped into our minds. The Recreational Vehicles (RVs, also know as caravans), with their mini movable home with bed, bath and kitchen facilities seemed like a great choice for socially distanced road trips.
I have to admit, this isn’t a new discovery. We were obviously aware of RV renting much earlier but always put it on back burner due to apprehensions of size, cost & on-road maintenance. We always gawked at these humongous creatures while passing them on highways or campgrounds but the current pandemic forced our hands. As they say, desperate times need desperate measures and we decided to take a plunge & give it a try!
We ended up doing a 1000+ miles trip across California, Nevada & Oregon visiting beautiful lakes and waterfalls while staying in isolated campgrounds. As a first-time RV-goers, we found a lot of great tactical resources on the driving/operating the RV & the campgrounds on YouTube & Google but, there wasn’t a lot of content on best practices to plan a successful, fun trip. We found our trip so unique & exciting that I decided to write this post to share are some tips and tricks we used/learned during our RV trip.
I hope this will a decent primer to anyone looking for an exciting RV get-away. Here are 5 things that worked for us —
Have a strong conviction about WHY to rent an RV
Renting RV is expensive (we spent upwards of $1000 for a 4N, 3D trip) and you better make it worth every dime! Having a goal for your trip seems very obvious but it’s the single most important aspect that gets bang for your buck.
People travel in RVs for plethora of reasons : some seek the experience, few want to unwind in campgrounds, some literally live out of RVs. We met an old couple in our trip who have been RVing for a few week across the coast in search for their retirement home (what an awesome trip goal we thought!). For us, the goal was to breakout of this lockdown by going on a long drive without having to stay in hotels or airbnbs. So we were totally prepared from the start to spend more time on the road as opposed to chilling at campgrounds.
Identify a “north star”
This is mostly relevant to folks who’re renting an RV for a few days like us. Identifying north star is pretty much defining your trip radius, the further most point you would want to reach on the map.
We had decided to go north of bay area since it is more scenic and offers numerous points of interest. After some quick debate we landed on crater lake as our north star, this choice was mostly driven by a previous trip to crater lake that we had to cut short so we obviously wanted to go back. This was extremely helpful since we immediately started looking at cool places that we could hit along the way and campgrounds away from civilization.
Use the opportunity to go “remote”
We strongly believe in “disconnecting” often as a way to recharge our body and minds. But, it’s always hard to find airbnbs and hotels away from civilization and this is where RV offers a huge advantage! Like us, if you really want to travel far and disconnect then I recommend choosing campsites away from a city, typically bang in the middle of national/state parks.
Campendium offers a comprehensive list of campsite across the US and turned out to be a precious resource in our search for campsite. When used in conjunction with dark site finder you can find campgrounds located in remote places with least light pollution. These locations were fantastic for star gazing (& we are night sky enthusiasts). Most campsites also had full hookup facilities (aka electricity and water) which was ideal and stress free for beginners like us. All the campground we stayed at in Norcal and Oregan offered us pristine view of the skies often surrounded by woods or river with our very own fire ring for campfires.
Don’t over plan your trip, choosing options on the fly can be pleasantly surprising!
Traveling with a home means you don’t have to stress about booking your stay in advance. However, finding good campsites may be harder than you think especially during peak camping season. We followed a 50:50 model i.e. booking the campsites for first half of our trip and keeping it open ended for the second half. This enabled us to update our travel plans on the fly.
Without this flexibility we would have missed visiting two beautiful waterfalls (Toketee and Burney ; Toketee’s pristine looking trail was a bonus) making this entire trip less exciting. To search for campsites on the fly, we used Campendium to find the sites, checked google maps for review and mostly booked online, allowing us to finalize the size late in the night if necessary. However, beware of penalties for late check ins in certain campsites.
Research, research & research! for your peace of mind
The intimidating aspects of RV wasn’t just the length or size but also the complexity of operating all the systems like the generator, water pump, battery, sewage! However, given our desire to explore new ways to travel in this pandemic we were sufficiently motivated this time around to overcome our fears.
We spent decent time looking at tutorial videos of RVs, RV camp & started to get a hang of it even before we had the keys. As soon as we rented the vehicle, operating systems and driving the vehicle seemed like muscle memory thanks to our research. This made our trip very pleasant since we knew exactly what to do under most common situations.
The trip was so memorable the we ended up making a short video to share our experience with family and friends. You can watch it here :
Hope this will inspire you to plan your own RV trip during this pandemic. Travel safe & maintain distance!
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Some tactical resources that were helpful in our research :
