6 Easy Steps to Plan Your Camping Trip
Many years ago somebody taught me the 6 P’s to success. “Previous Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.” Your family fun camping trip needs proper planning to have success. Plan today and have fun tomorrow!
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A couple years ago we loaded the minivan with our four young children and took a family camping trip. Our destination was only 20 hours away and we hadn’t reserved anything for the entire week.
We eagerly arrived at Rocky Mountain National Park ready to explode out of the van only to have the receptionist say, “What! You have no reservations and your staying the week! We have no openings for the week!”
I didn’t know if I should cry or scream!
After 20 hours of bumping and thumping from driving and who knows how many hours packing the van with every essential needed to hear sorry we have nothing for the week!!
Thankfully, “We have no openings for the week” meant they didn’t have one campsite that we could stay in for the entire week. We learned that week how to change campsites without taking your tent down, aka turning a tent into a RV and walk it to the next site.
Needless to say we learned our lesson to plan our camping trip.
Four years later, it is February and we have already planned and reserved four weeks of camping! We learned and we want you to learn from our almost disastrous camping trip.
National Parks and private campsites around national parks, as well as state parks fill up fast. Generally, you can reserve a national park campsite 6 months in advance.
Planning your camping trip 6 months or more ahead makes the trip the priority. If you wait until summer to plan a trip generally it will never happen as schedules become too full. Instead, plan early then others have to work around your schedule.
We do these 6 Basic steps to plan our camping trip
1.) PRINT off a paper calendar of the month you are thinking of camping. We use i-calendar thus it has all events on it.
2.) LENGTH: Decide how long you want your vacation to be roughly start to finish.
3.) WHERE: Next decide where you like to vacation? Do you always vacation around family? Great then think outside the box. This last year we were headed to California from Chicagoland and went via Waco, Texas. It was a little further but we made that part of the trip.
4.) MAP OUT: Now pull out the computer and use your favorite mapping system and see how long it takes to get to wherever you are going.
5.) DRIVING TIME: Decide how many hours a day you want to drive? Start writing on your calendar. Is the plan to get to the destination pronto or take your time getting there and see things along the way to break up the drive. Start writing in the calendar. For example, if you want to drive 8 hours a day and if we leave Saturday that will get us to point A. Then we still have 4 hours of driving and so we could arrive in the afternoon on Sunday at the destination, which gives enough time to set up the tent in the light. Also you must consider if you are camping the nights you are driving to your final destination, if so allow for time to pack up and take down your tent each day. Or if this one night you want to spend money to stay in a hotel if it will save you time on the road doing more driving than setting up and taking down camp.
*Note: Our family usually drives 10-18 hrs. a day and our son corrected me with this as I was reading it to him. : )
6.) RESERVE: Next with driving time decided you know how many days left to be at the destination. Get on your computer and start seeing what campgrounds there are and when you can start reserving (usaully 6 months in advance). We do a quick search once we find a campground if anyone has written anything about the campground, but don’t spend a lot of time doing this. As well a lot of national park campgrounds have camping that is first come first serve. First come campsites are an entire new camping paradigm you need to learn and know that many popular campgrounds fill up before 8 a.m. during the summer. See our article here entitled, "How to Get a Campsite at a Popular National Park Campground."
Most every time we plan a camping trip we use these 6 basic steps to plan our camping trip. I say most because as you read sometimes we skip the last step and don’t reserve anything but hope for the best, not suggesting this.
Get planning your next family fun camping trip! We have roughly planned out our family trips for the next couple of years. Do you use these steps in planning your camping trip? Is there any step you would add to the list or thing to think about in planning your family fun camping trip?
