It’s hard to believe we are already on our 8 week camping trip. It was time to leave our icy, wintry Michigan and drive across several states to reach the warm west. So to answer the question were we and are we ready? Absolutely.
We’re sharing how we plan, prepare and pack for our multi-week camping travels. Our longer-term, camping trip planning basics cover packing attire and gear, cost management, logistics, resources and camper care. Other considerations include planning for food and meals. By having a plan, we don’t need to think as much about the details but rather savoring the time while we’re away.
In addition to trip planning tips – the reality is we’re traveling to explore, have fun and enjoy what the open road brings our way. So before the packing and planning for the trip logistically – the big question is? Where do we want to go and what do we want to do?
If you look at the featured photo above, that’s Dave, my hubby firing up the grill, cooking a great burger, enjoying a glass of wine and yes, playing a few tunes. That photo IS what our camping trip is about. Getting away, not thinking about the details but living in the moment.
Sheen Watkins
Camping Trip Planning & Living: Our Brief History
Before we dive in, here’s some background. Our first camper is a Tab 400 Boondock 2021 from nuCamp. Since buying our camper (nicknamed “Sheen’s Bean”), camping in our Boondock is our preferred way to hit the open road. In 2021, our first camping trip (ever) was 6 weeks across 9 states.
Our friends thought we were a bit crazy at first. However, the experience with Sheen’s Bean? Positively delightful even when considering the hiccups along the way.
Related read: Buying a Small Camper for Lifetime Adventures
Since our first trip last year in the west, additional multi-week vacations covered our home state of Michigan, the midwest and southeastern states. We learned many good and not-so-good lessons along the way.
One of our best learnings is how to logistically plan for extended camping trips while keeping all happy. Plus, how to balance planning while allowing for flexibility. We’re in this for adventure and fun, in addition to finding inspiration for my own body of work.
Spontaneity and enjoying life’s moments is a must requirement.
8 Week Camping Trip: 9 Planning Tips
This year, a factor playing a greater role is managing our costs more closely. The prices at the gas pump continue to increase and fluctuate 30 – 40% higher than last year. Additionally, rising costs of food, supplies and general living expenses are also in a state of flux.
To stay within budget and continue our vacation plans for eight weeks, we’re watching camping location costs, food and gas. These all factor in to our logistics, resources and camper care.
Another important element in success is planning our trip together as a family. Let’s take a look at the 9 planning tips:
# 1 Reality Check on What & How to Pack:
A huge lesson learned on our first trip? Not to overpack. Filling drawers, shelves and cabinets until cramped and full creates tight and irritating spaces. Nine times out of ten, we use only 2/3 of the clothes we bring anyway. Items tucked away in the abyss hide, forgotten, until arriving back home. Clear or sheer packing cubes, zip loc bags help keep like items together and easily accessible.
Baskets, baby organization storage cubes, plastic cubes make it easy and efficient to keep things together and tidy.
Stop the overpacking madness!
Example? You’re tossing clothes trying to find ‘the’ pair of hiking socks. Because the drawer is packed to the brim, you pull out many items to locate your socks. Then, it’s repack the darn drawer. Or, our items in the drawer come out squished, messy and wrinkled. Packing with the basics that cover the must-haves only first helps manage space.
Then, when you add the ‘want to have’ items, there’s space with room to spare. Do we really need that extra pair of jeans? Hmmmmmm.
“The journey is my home.”
– Muriel Rukeyser
#1A Technology and Preventing Cord Chaos
While planning what to pack, technology plays a huge role in our lives. Cords, computers, hotspots, cameras, drones, smart watches, smartphones and the list goes on. We keep a technology center area for all cords, battery chargers, hot spot and earbuds. Since it’s a grab and go situation, they’re in open bins within hands reach. We use hairbands, twisty ties, rubber bands to keep cords separated and tangle-free.
#2 Balancing Road Travel Time with Down Time
On camping trips, we intentionally give ourselves shorter drive times and longer times at stopover locations along the way. Before camping, our approach was to drive longer distances in a given day to reach our destination sooner.
Now we try to limit the majority of day travel time to 4 – 5 hours. With shorter drive times we stay sharper on the road, enjoy more sights and views along the way.
We treat the majority of our stopovers as an experience destination along the journey. A fun travel perk is Harvest Hosts locations. We defray camping costs while creating enjoyable stops along the way.
With shorter drive times, we really take time to enjoy our meals, see local sights and relax in our cozy camper in the evenings and early mornings.
#3 Determining Our Camping Trip Route
The shortest distance to fun is not always a straight line. We determine our routes using 3 factors.
- Family or Friends Stopover: When planning our trip, we look for locations that make it easy to stop and see family. We visit my Dad for several days on the way out and on the way home. It’s 16 hours to reach his house on roads we know very well. We usually camp one night along the way using Harvest Hosts. However, since leaving Michigan in the throes of frigid, icy winter, we’re using a campground on the way down that has water. De-winterizing is taking place at my Dad’s house in Arkansas.
- Route Destination(s): There’s only one defined stop for camping on this trip as we head out. (Last year we pre-scheduled 5 locations). We’re heading to Patagonia Lake State Park Campground in Arizona for several days to camp and meet up with friends. However, we’re giving ourselves two weeks of camping in diverse locations and travel time along the way to Patagonia. This is where the flexibility, additional fun and planning comes in to play (pardon the pun). We’re also using locations along the route that are easy to access without a lot of extra mileage.
- Creating the Journey: Dr. Seuss’ quote of, “Oh the places you will go,” rings so true when it comes to camping. With two weeks of flexibility on the way and more on the backside of our trip, we use Google Maps, Harvest Hosts’ route planner and Campendium to explore the possibilities.
#4 Planning for Efficiency, Flexibility & Safety
When creating our routes last year, we planned several locations and stopovers before we left. This included Harvest Hosts stops, state campgrounds, KOA and local, full service campgrounds.
The difference this year is more stopovers using Harvest Hosts combined with boondocking on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land. We’re locating land areas that allow dispersed camping in addition to basic campgrounds using the BLM website and Campendium.
The detailed reviews share details about dispersed and fee camping locations. As safety is always top of mind, we also research reviews of other close by locations. This is to check if there are any safety, noise and crowd concerns that could bleed over into our location.
Our Tab 400 Boondock allows us to live in our camper for a few days without connecting to electrical and water. In addition to enjoying going off the grid, it helps defray costs while enjoying camping the local area. The maximum number of consecutive days in boondocking mode at this point for us is five.
Safety tip: Boondocking in dispersed camping? Share your GPS coordinates with a family member just in case. We typically take a photo and video and share it with our closest friends and family. It’s not until after we leave a dispersed camping site that we share the location on social.
Route planning recap:
- Harvest Hosts locations en route to destinations. We use these locations as our entertainment and/or eating out to support the hosts. Each venue is so different. From farms, wineries and unique and artsy venues – each stop is a fun and interesting surprise! Their route planner makes it easy to see options along the way. (see below)
- Destinations include more state parks (lower rates versus full hookup campgrounds).
- Boondocking on BLM land in destination areas (free). Use Campendium as the specific reviews and GPS coordinates help guide dispersed camping and small campground decisions.
- Fewer camping nights at full service campgrounds overall.
- Choosing locations where our hiking, birding and photography locations are close without a lot of excess driving.
#5 Packing Food Supplies for our 8 Week Camping Trip
Food and meals also makes the camping experience special.
We enjoy our breakfasts and dinners at the campsite – both indoors and outside. While we don’t plan every meal in advance, we bring our favorite foods and ingredients to include in our meals. This include rices, potatoes, grains and legumes. For dairy, it’s our greek yogurt, cheeses, farm fresh eggs.
Once we get to our locations, we buy local, in season produce and meats for grilling. This ensures we have fresh food for cooking with minimized waste.
As we’re hikers, we also buy our trail food items in bulk. We keep diversity top of mind with our trail food too so we keep a wide combination to avoid food boredom! Much of our trail foods work dual duty too with breakfast cereals and yogurts.
We purchase the majority of our food basics at Costco here locally before leaving. For those items we buy in volume and consume almost daily, we research to find a Costco at some point to restock. It’s a big savings on the food bill at home and on the road.
#6 Packing our Kitchen, Toiletries and Household Items – Less is More
Managing space helps maintain family harmony. After our first long trip last year, we set a few guidelines for living in the camper for several weeks on end. These guidelines keep open spaces ‘open’ for family living without feeling cramped.
We learned very quickly that over-packing in drawers and cabinets makes living harder than it needs to be. Instead, every drawer and area in the camper has some, non-used room. This provides real space to live and move items around for convenient use.
For example, in the bathroom, we secure all of our toiletries in easy to pack and go bins. Our bins keep everything protected and secure. However, we leave a large area open on the shelves for living space. (see image below)
By having open shelves, we quickly pull out the items we use frequently and leave out until time to move to our next destination. If we instead filled all shelves with overstocked bins, and had to move the bins all the time, the bathroom’s open feeling goes away quickly.
This approach applies across kitchen, cleaning, linen and other items.
We pack our common used items securely on top shelves or in front of drawers. We store less used items or bulk items under the bed, seats, harder to access areas until needed.
#7 Prepping the Car for Living Too
Just as we pack the camper, our SUV is part of the living space too. We organize the SUV in areas of cooking, extra shoes, and exterior camping supplies (ex. our Webber Grill) that are too large for storing in the camper. Once at our site, we unload outdoor items. We place shoes, extra clothing items for easy access or moved in/out of the camper when needed.
For our most used shoes, we have a weather sealed waterproof bin that we keep outside our camper door. This also prevents critters and bugs from getting into our shoes.
#8 Camper Prep for Safety & Travel
When traveling significant distance with our campers, there’s wear and tear. Plus, many of us in cold climates store our campers in winter months. These few steps are necessary for living and safe travels.
- Re-packing Wheel Bearings – When traveling many miles with your camper, check with your dealership on their recommendations for this needed maintenance. Most guidelines suggest once a year using milage as an indicator of frequency. 10,000 miles or once a year for larger trailers. 2000 miles for smaller travel trailers. Check: nuCamp’s YouTube video of How Often to Repack Your Wheel Bearings on their recommendation.
- De-winterizing & Sanitizing the Camper – Our blog of How to De-Winterize and Sanitize Your nuCamp Tab 400 walks through steps of getting our camper’s water system ready for the road.
- Systems Check – Before leaving last year, we confirmed all systems are ready to roll and working properly. This includes water, electrical, propane, appliances, battery charge. This year, our systems testing is in Arkansas due to frigid conditions.
#9 Emergency Planning for our Camping Trip & Activities (Bonus Tip & Very Important)
Benjamin Franklin’s quote of “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail,” always sounds so ominous. Yet, it is so true. We experienced pet emergencies last year, Dave had a cut and I’m a severe migraine sufferer. We keep the following with us in the camper, car or in our backpacks:
- First aid kit: Take the time to inspect contents before packing, know the contents before you need them. We waste precious time if a remote medical situation occurs and we’re searching for needed items.
- Meds (people and dogs): Know where refill options are available. We use national pharmacy chains for accessibility.
- Extra gallons of drinking water when boondocking. Take more than you think you need!
- Dog health records (stored on the phone too) and contact numbers on collars. Always keep your dog on a leash! There are too many stories of bad things happening to owners and their dogs. Nine times out of ten, at least one dog was not on a leash.
- Personal protection (i.e. bear spray and other items).
- Emergency roadside kit: Review and Inspect roadside kit items. Verify your knowledge of how to use the items before you need them. Just as in a first aid kit, if an emergency is in progress, time is of the essence.
- Fix-a-flat, cordless tire inflater, hydraulic jack that fits our camper in the event of a flat tire. Campers travel to remote areas, some without cell coverage. We need to prepare for tackling basic roadside issues just in case.
- Tow strap: With remote travel, a quick pull by a friendly passerby is easier and more likely when you supply the tow strap.
Ready for the Road
It’s go time! We’re on the road and enjoying our journey. It’s a-ok when we miss or forget items. We’re camping! Living with less and with what you don’t have is simply part of the experience.
2 comments
I enjoyed the trip (planning)
Thank you so much!
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