The planning for our 2017 RV Trip to the great Northwest is progressing well. We are headed to Milwaukee to be there with Michelle when she has her hip surgery 19 Apr. We will stay through the first week in May and then return home, finish packing and depart on our RV trip on 12 May.
This year's journey will take us through 17 states west and north, and we plan to arrive back home on 1 October. We will camp in 27 campgrounds for 142 nights, traveling about 6400 miles from site to site with the RV. Based on 2016 we will more than double those miles on the truck with what I call "vicinity miles", the sightseeing and other driving we do with the truck once we arrive at each campground. We will definitely be scheduling an oil change out west somewhere!! This is about 1000 miles more than last summer, about the same number of campgrounds and four fewer nights camping.
The route was created by first identifying the locations of family, friends and sites we wanted to see. We plotted them out on a map and then figured where the clusters were which also drove the amount of time we needed to spend at each location. Using our iPhone apps and other tools we found campgrounds near those locations and proceeded to make reservations. This process started just after the first of the year. When we finalized the routes and camping locations, the map below was born! The black dots are the towns near our camping locations. Quite a few of the campgrounds, especially most of the the 13 military campgrounds we are targeting, do not take reservations this early, so exactly where we are camping is still "soft" in some cases, but we firmed up as many as possible and have reminders set to our calendar to tell us when we can contact a specific campground (60 days out, etc).
We have identified five major league baseball stadiums we will visit and we are fortunate that the teams will be home while we are there! 28 May Cards at Rockies; 14 Jun KC at Giants; 25 Jun Mets at A's; 9 Jul A's at Mariners; and 21 Sep Cubs at Brewers (depending on ticket prices/availability)
Now we are in the process of contacting friends and family that we will potentially see this summer so we can hopefully get on their calendars now. Doreen has been busy writing the various states tourist bureaus for information and maps.
I was station in Maine with Brad Herren back in the 70's. He and his spouse Beth are from Georgia, are retired and own a nice motorhome. We camped with them last year in southern Maine. This year they will also be traveling out west this summer also, and our paths will cross in the Denver area in May, so we are looking forward to that!!.
That's it for now. Thanks for tuning in. We will try to post updates before we leave as the trip planning progresses.
Ed and Doreen Schellhase
