We drove through 11 states, over miles, visited 14 major destinations, including 7 national parks and made endless memories! With so many people choosing to travel domestically this summer, I thought it might be helpful information. A little backstory, we are a family of 5β¦ my husband, myself, and 3 kids ages 16, 13 and 8 at the time we traveled.
We live just outside of St. Louis and love to experience new places as a family. Several years ago we began discussing the idea of renting an RV for a couple of weeks and hitting up as many national parks in the western US that we could. We knew that we wanted to plan it for a time when our kids would hopefully remember the trip and be able to easily adjust to life on the road. We tend to loosely plan out our vacations a couple of years in advance it is my job after all and the summer of looked like the perfect time to do it!
Once we had a pretty good idea of where we wanted to go, I found a website called Roadtrippers www. This was so helpful because it gave me a better idea of where everything was located and how long it would take to get to each place. We were then able to come up with a loose plan and remove or add places until we were happy with it.
Then we knew we needed to finalize a few details. First we had to decide what dates would work for us. I knew I wanted to try to go as soon as our kids got out of school in late May so that we would beat the summer crowds and heat.
We also knew we had about 2 weeks to work with, so from there we decided that we would plan Saturday, May 25th thru Sunday, June 9th. The next step was to research different campgrounds. Campgrounds inside of or near national parks can book up anywhere from 6 months to a year in advance, so this needed to be done as soon as possible. When booking a campground, you have to double check to see if they have spaces for RVs your size, as some do not allow the larger ones.
