Advanced planning is the key to a successful trip. Campgrounds fill up quickly and many National Parks require timed-entry passes. Competition for limited campground resources continues to be intense as the number of North Americans who are camping continues surge. A recent KOA research report indicates that the number of active campers in January 2023 increased by 2 million compared to January 2022.

A tremendous amount of upfront work goes into planning a multi-month trip: We need to know exactly when and where we are going in order to ensure we have a campsite and are able to get into the park we want to visit. This year, we had planned to leave on March 12 and be on the road for 31 days (2,500 Miles) before we reached our first National Park. Our itinerary was fully booked 70 days in advance and was planned to ensure that travel-day distances were a reasonable length, typically no more that 5 driving hours, and once at our destination we would have a place to camp and enough time to fully explore the area we were visiting.

Unfortunately, our plans had to change. A non-serious but time-sensitive medical issue arose and will delay our leaving by 3 weeks (No worries please, we are both fine). We could have attempted to maintain our same itinerary and push it back three weeks but that would have required rebooking 22 camping locations and entrance passes into a half-dozen National Parks. Instead, we decided to eliminate touring down the east coast into Florida and around the Gulf of Mexico. Here is our originally planned trip:

We now plan to make a beeline directly to Fredericksburg, TX (the yellow star in the photo above) and continue on from there. We will cover over 1,800 miles in 5 days (see the path below). This type of travel is wearing but necessary to put us back on schedule to visit New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. We will need to visit friends, family and former colleagues in Naples FL, New Orleans LA, and Austin TX, and see the World’s Largest Working Fire Hydrant next spring.

We now plan to leave in early April and will resume posting once we are on the road. In the meantime, perhaps you would be interested in reading or re-reading some of our favorite posts from last year: