18 Campground Reservations

 Location: New Rockdale RV Park; Mansfield, Louisiana

This is part four of the "how I plan a trip". I'm still taking the planning slowly, since the start date of the trip is June 11th which is a little less than a month away. Talking about taking it slow, some of ya'll professional procrastinators out there will appreciate my logic about not doing some non-essential modifications to Liberty2. Of course I have to have something to do during boring periods on the road so I have "saved" those mods for those times. Pretty good, uh? I may have moved up a classification in the procrastination rankings with that one. Another reason is that it has been raining on and off for a couple of weeks and this campsite is not one of the best drained ones in this campground. When I arrived a month ago, there were only two vacant sites and beggars can't be choosy. 

I have completed the reservation phase by making reservations at 18 campgrounds, including the site of the FROG rally at Goshen, Indiana. There are 7-State Parks, 5-Corps of Engineers, 4-TVA's and 2-County parks.The total towing distance is about 1,800 miles which works out to about 100 miles between campgrounds, which is good. The average length of stay per campground is about 3 1/2 nights, which is good. The average cost per night is about $25.00, which is semi-good. This cost is higher than my normal but I expected it and accepted that fact when I decided to explore the TVA and use some of their campgrounds. Based on these reservations and using COE's as a baseline, TVA and State Park campgrounds are about twice as expensive as COE's when using my senior pass. But, I doubt that I'll be back in this area and I have high hopes of seeing some "Wows" on this trip.

This is the screen shot from RV Parky showing the reserved campgrounds. The other park of the program, not shown here, lists the campgrounds with mileage between each. There is also a place for notes about each campground, such as campsite number, cost and anything special about the area. I really like the program.

This is a screen shot of the other program I use during the campground reservation phase. The name is Allstays. It will show the campground locations broken down into categories. This picture shows "all public lands". They have a free version of the program and is worth checking out. 

The next computer phase of planning is to find interesting things to see and do along the route. I have abandoned the idea of seeing the Ark in Kentucky. Things just didn't work out and I took that as a sign, so I re-routed. I haven't gotten too deep into this phase yet and I could actually wait and do it spontaneously along the route (yeah, right). As I used to say in my career prior to becoming a traveler, "you got to have a plan". I believe having a plan makes the inevitable serendipitous events along the way even more special. Ut oh, I'm using some big, fancy words in this post, I may need to check on my medications.

Ok, time to post this so I can get ready to go see my granddaughter as she performs in a skit and talent show at her school. This is one of the things I miss when traveling.  

Ya'll take care of each other. Maybe, I'll Cya down the road.