Why should we plan ahead for a trip?
Preparations
Why should we plan our trip out in advance? Plan it out ahead of time? It’s a silly question if you ask me. Of course you need to have some planning done in advance. Unless you are the type that just likes to “wing it.” Winging it is not the way to go. Planning helps you save time and energy in the long run. It gives you a sense of comfort knowing you have some sort of plan to put into action. It is less stress on your mind and your heart. When traveling anything can go wrong, believe Amy and I when we say we have been there, done that. Having a plan helped us to overcome so many obstacles and alleviated so much stress along our journey. Take our recent Out West trip for example. If Amy hadn’t spent the time to research campgrounds finding the closest ones to our destinations then we would’ve spent a lot more money senselessly on gasoline traveling back and forth. We wouldn’t be able to feel comfortable about arriving late at a campground (as we often did, lol) if we had no idea how it would be set up or if we were going to have full hook ups or if we needed to be prepared for boon-docking!
The first step is deciding on location. The second is how are we going to get there? Fly? Rental? Van? RV, camper or other mode of transportation? These articles we have written will be about traveling by vehicle. We travel in a 2022 Thor Scope 18M RV / Camper Van. It is also referred to as a Class B. It is 18 feet long, 9 feet tall, and less than 7 feet wide. So, depending on what you are traveling in or pulling behind your vehicle will depend on how much stuff you can take along with you on your journey. For us, we have to be a bit minimalistic when it comes to packing up the “Aloha.” That’s what we named our van by the way.
The third step, or maybe it’s the second step for you is how much time do you have to travel? Are you retired and have all the time in the world on your hands? Do you have a couple days or do you have weeks or even maybe a month? Or are you a full-time-I-live-in-my-vehicle type of person? It doesn’t really matter. You need a plan. Plans save time, money, and headaches later on, seriously!
Step four. Are you ready? Making checklists, a bullet list, a bunch of scribbled out notes, whatever you want to call it is a MUST. In order to plan and be prepared you have to start off with making some kind of list. It may seem like a pain in your backend but it will be so nice later on, the outcome is wonderful. It made our Out West trip so awesome! We had some hiccups and things go wrong, i’m not saying everything went as planned, but for the most part everything did! By having a plan ahead of time we were able to work more things into our itinerary. Some things we opted not to do on our lists. We didn’t have to sit around wasting time thinking about or researching what we could do when we got there! Oh heck no!
We wrote a list of topics we thought would lump everything into some type of organized thought process for us. Here they are:
Checklists
Planning & Research
Documents / Important Items
Knowing how to locate / properly use our equipment and resources (The same goes for your vehicle. Knowing how it operates, how to do small things like changing the oil, inflating / deflating the tires, how to change a tire, where the spare tire / tire jack is located, having a list of persons and / or places you could contact in case of an emergency.
Internet Options
Packing
Photography Gear
Journaling from the road.
We hope some or all of the information we have put together will give you ideas to help you plan your next adventure! These are just things that helped us make memorable journeys together. Remember, you got to have a plan. If your plan goes south, make a new plan!