A couple months ago I finished “roughing in” a plan for our 2025 RV travel that takes us up the East Coast, dips into Canada briefly, then heads back down to Florida for the winter months.
Reservations (…or not!)
There have been some adjustments to the initial plan, but I’ve been working through making reservations a little at a time, with my own informal order of importance:
- Peak times like Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Labor Day
- National parks & forests
- State parks
- County parks
- …followed by private RV parks
For the national/state/county locations, I have an Apple Reminders App list going where I’ve entered the dates when we are allowed to book the ones we can’t book yet. So I get a reminder when the reservation window opens. Thus far it has been working pretty well.
But this approach overall isn’t very “plans optional.” Watching YouTube RV’ers it often feels like they’re somewhat flying by the seat of their pants. Several have explicitly said they don’t like to make reservations too far in advance because it limits their ability to stay in a certain area longer if they’re really liking it.
Obviously if I am making reservations for our entire 2025 plan, albeit a little at a time, my current system is not in keeping with a more flexible approach. Even during our time in Florida this winter there have been two occasions when I’ve had to change our plans and I’ve always been able to find a spot for us. And if those kinds of changes can happen at the last minute in Florida in the winter, then odds are we’d have flexibility elsewhere also. But you can’t usually book a week in a national park at the last minute, so there would likely be a downside if we didn’t book in advance.
My husband and I discussed the issue and potential approaches. We decided that for 2025 while we’re still pretty new at this and while we’re planning to stay on the East Coast, which is known for being a little more restrictive to campers versus the wide open spaces out West, that the current mode of making reservations works for us. Thus far, it has been helpful to have a plan for where we’re going and it hasn’t felt restrictive. In fact, once the plan is set and reservations are made, I’d even go so far as to say it is a bit freeing, because then you can just focus on excursions or fun things along the way.
Travel Time and Length of Stay
There’s a balance between how long we drive, how long we stay, and how much ground we want to cover. During our winter in Florida we’ve been staying at our locations longer than we did when we were bouncing around the Midwest in Fall 2024. This has given us an opportunity to try it both ways & decide how to approach 2025.
From the map, which is still somewhat tentative, it’s clear we have a lot of stops. We decided that in most places we’re going to stay for around a week. So far that’s felt like enough to see an area, hit the high points. There are a couple times in the itinerary where we’re kind of “passing through” and we’ll have a shorter visit, but almost all of the stops are between 7-10 days.
We want to try to limit our drive between campgrounds to around 3 hours in most cases, although there will be a few exceptions where it creeps up to ~4.5 hours. We did a 5 hour drive between sites once and it felt like about the limit to what we’d want to do comfortably.
Those two parameters combine to get us all the way up the East Coast and back down.
No matter what, it is going to be an exciting year! I’m sure toward the end of it we’ll look forward to coming back to Florida, which already feels like home.