Spending the holidays in your RV is a great way to spend time with family while still having the chance to travel. Whether you’re full-time RVing, traveling for vacation over the holiday season, or visiting family, there are tons of way to keep you holidays festive in a small space.
Last year, I filmed the video version of this blog post. If you’d rather watch instead of read, video is below for you!
When
spending Christmas in your RV, there’s no reason you can’t have a Christmas
tree! Albeit, it may be smaller than what you would have in a house, you can
certainly decorate one. We travel with our tree and ornaments year round. We
store them in the storage space under the couch so they’re always out of the
way, but easy to access when we’re ready to decorate.
Some
tips for decorating your RV Christmas tree:
Non-breakable ornaments
Keep it simple, don’t overdo it
Make sure it is something you can just lay down on a couch, a bed, or
the floor if you’re on the move
Other
holiday decorating tips for your RV:
Command strips and ribbon can be your best friend for holiday decorating
We place command strips on the inside of our pantry doors, tie ribbon to them and pull the ribbon over the front to hang our stockings. Use a pretty ribbon that matches the rest of your holiday décor to tie it all together
Keep your décor lightweight and easy to box up
Don’t forget to decorate the outside of your RV, too! Many RV parks have an RV decorating contest for Christmas.
One
of our favorite things about holidays in RV parks – particular in our winter
snowbird park – is all the holiday potlucks. If you’re traveling in an area
that has a lot of snowbirds, come prepared knowing there might be a holiday
potluck you can attend while you’re traveling. It’s customary to bring a dish
if you’re going to partake so don’t show up empty handed! Many RV parks host
these events for people who are traveling and won’t be with their family for
the holidays. It gives everyone a chance to come together as part of the RV
community and it typically gives you a chance to have a full holiday meal with
your family without having to cook everything. Everywhere is different, but our
current RV park actually provides the turkey and rolls for holiday potlucks.
All the RVers bring a side dish or dessert so you end up with a full meal at Thanksgiving
or Christmas without all the hassle of cooking all that good stuff in your RV.
I highly recommend searching for local holiday events wherever you find yourself. When we found ourselves in Gila Bend, Arizona for the Christmas season, the town hosted a little holiday parade a few weeks before Christmas. The RV park puts together a float for the parade and everyone not walking in the parade goes out to support the town and cheer on everyone in the parade. Many zoos also have night time events with lights around the zoo for the holidays so we always look into Zoo Lights options as well. There’s tree lighting ceremonies in almost every city in the country along with holiday plays, Christmas light displays, and holiday themed train rides depending on where you find yourself. There is so much to see and do and there are new things in every part of the country. Wherever you’re traveling, be sure to do some research on what they have going on in the area.
PS. Santa always finds you. Even when you’re out in the RV!
With so many RV Clubs out there, how do you know which ones are worth it and which ones aren’t? Depending on your travel style, the clubs that work for us, may not be best for you and vice versa. Here’s a rundown of the clubs we’re members of and the value we see in each of them. If you’d rather watch in video format, I filmed a video for Campers Inn about RV Clubs last year that I’m embedding below.
Good Sam Good Sam is what I consider the “catch all” of RV clubs. While not every park offers a Good Sam discount, a good majority of them do. The club is cheap to join and it gets you a discount on merchandise at Camping World which, truthfully, probably provides us more value than the discounts we receive at campgrounds for being Good Sam members. The campground discounts are almost like an extra perk of receiving the club member discounts at Camping World stores. The campgrounds that offer Good Sam discounts are normally only about 10% off and while that’s better than nothing, a $50/night only goes down to $45 with your discount which isn’t really that great of a deal. We don’t actively seek out Good Sam parks like we do some of our other memberships, but we will stay at a Good Sam park over another park if the rate is decent.
Thousand Trails Thousand Trails is the most expensive camping club to join, but if you use the club right, you can really save a ton of money. You can’t join this club for less than $500, but if you take advantage of some of their specials, you can get extra months added on, extra regions, and a variety of other things based on their deals that typically fall around holidays or new seasons (fall special, President’s Day special, etc.). If you’re attending an RV show, that’s always the best time to buy into Thousand Trails because you’ll get the best deals there. If you’re looking at buying into the club and there’s an RV show happening soon that you can attend to buy in, it is well worth the drive to the show and the cost of admission for the extra benefits and discounts you can get.
We don’t use our Thousand Trails membership as much as we
probably could, but when we do, we take full advantage of it. In 2018, we
stayed at the Hershey Thousand Trails park during the Hershey RV Show. The cost
to stay at any parks in the area were inflated because of the popular show;
however, we stayed our maximum amount of 14 nights there and that more than
paid for our cost of membership which we bought for 3 years. Now, for the next
3 years, anytime we stay at a Thousand Trails campground with our membership,
we’re staying for free and in the positive based on how much we paid for our
membership.
Thousand Trails does come with a few cons though that you
should be aware of before joining. If you’ve never stayed at a Thousand Trails
campground before, you don’t know what it’s like to get to your site. It’s something
like being a Gladiator. Fight to the death. Fight for your site. Do everything
you can to get the site you want or need. Drive in circles trying to find the
right site. Lay down on the ground in a site so someone else doesn’t take it.
Ok, kidding. That’s a little dramatic. We do love our Thousand Trails
membership, but I would go as far as saying – IT IS STRESSFUL to pull in and
not know if there’s going to be a site long enough to fit your RV, to not know
if there will be a full hook up site available, and everything that comes with
finding your site at their campgrounds. Read everyone’s reviews online before
buying in. Take everything into consideration. Test out checking in at one of
their campgrounds before buying into the membership. Make sure the stress is
worth the savings for you.
The other negative aspect of a Thousand Trails membership is
their 14 (or 21) night policy based on your membership level. When we stay at a
Thousand Trails campground over a certain amount of nights and up to 14 nights,
we have to be out of the Thousand Trails system for a certain number of days.
Ultimately, this just keeps people from living off the Thousand Trails system
and never paying fees, but it does make it challenging to travel solely using
their memebership. It’s still valuable, but sometimes you have to wait a few
extra days before you can check in using their system.
Honestly, I think Thousand Trails is most valuable if you
travel on vacations like spring break, winter break, and even weekends away,
but only if there are a bunch of different Thousand Trails campgrounds in your
close travelling area. Since you don’t have to deal with the “14 Days In” and a
certain number of days out issue if you’re only traveling a short period of
time.
Passport America Passport America is another great one we bought into because honestly, one night a year normally covers the cost of membership so everything over that first night each year puts you in the positive financially. Passport America campgrounds typically (from our experience) aren’t necessarily the nicest or newest campgrounds, but they’re great for one night stops during travel stretches. We typically use them for booking pull through sites when we don’t want to unhook the fifth wheel. They’re normally not in the most common of areas either so sometimes we have to drive a little out of the ways to get to our campground, but we’ve had times where we’ve paid only $10 to stay at a full hook up site with our Passport America discount. The discount is normally about 50% off, but it varies from campground to campground.
KOA Kampgrounds of America mostly referred to as KOA is one of our most used camping clubs – truthfully, because of the convenience and the almost guarantee of a nice campground. We typically will book most of our stays from location to location at KOA Journey campgrounds because they are normally within about 2 miles of the interstate (if not closer). We will pretty much book a KOA without even seeing pictures if we know it is in a good area – simply because we trust the KOA name and brand. While this isn’t always my recommendation to book sight unseen, we’re willing to do that with KOA campgrounds. The discount itself is only 10% off the regular nightly rate, but you can earn rewards with them that can be redeemed for free nights or additional discounts. If you stay enough with KOA, you can become a VIP with them which brings additional benefits like a reduced or eliminated cancellation fee which is normally about $10, but is eliminated most of the time when you become a VIP.
The truth about KOA for us is we simply trust their campgrounds and know each campground goes through rigorous reviews each year to continue meeting quality standards of the brand. We love KOA so much that we’re not only members, but we’ve been workampers with them in several locations and have been for a few seasons. We were KOA loyalists prior to becoming workampers and that’s just fueled our love for their campgrounds even more – say hello to some great amenities – especially in the KOA Holidays and KOA Resorts.
We get so many questions about trip planning and how we go about setting our route for our RV travels. We recently did a video for Campers Inn RV talking about how we plan our trips and you can watch that here or keep reading for even more details.
Whether you’re living in your RV full-time or you’re simply hitting the road for a vacation, trip planning plays a huge role in the success of your trip. With proper planning, your trip can have the upmost success; however, if you don’t plan properly, it’s easy to get overwhelmed on the road while trying to figure out where to go next. We always spend lots of time planning ahead as we’re planners more so than “go out and stop at the next campground” type people – not that there’s anything wrong with. I envy those who have success with that, but my Enneagram type 1 personality comes out and doesn’t let me do that. I’m a natural planner.
And by planner, I mean, we have a giant physical map, a Sharpie, and a bottle of Goo Gone. We start by sketching out places we’d like to go on the map and then we bring in an online trip planning tool called the RV Trip Wizard to help plan out our exact campgrounds based on the route we want to take. This tool is such a gem for us. It costs about $40 a year and it’s the best tool I’ve found for trip planning.
You enter your information such as average distance on a tank of gas
for your vehicle, RV height, and how long you like to travel in a day. The RV
Trip Wizard takes all of that into account when showing you what campgrounds
are in the area that you’ll end up staying based on your driving distance
preference.
The app warns you about clearances that are close to your maximum height.
The tool even provides information on gas stations along your route which
is particularly helpful for larger rigs like ours. Since we prefer to hit truck stop style gas
stations like Love’s, Pilot, Flying J, and Travel America, the tool helps us
plan how far we’ll go before we stop for gas and even the exact gas station we’ll
stop at during our travels. This helps alleviate any uneasiness that sometimes
accompanies travel days – particularly in rural areas where you don’t know
where the next gas station might be located.
Because
we work from the road, cell phone service is imperative for us to have and is a
huge part of our trip planning process. We use an app called Coverage and it
displays all the major carriers in 1 map for you. This is great for us because
we utilize multiple carriers to cover more land area with cell phone and data
hotspot coverage. This app lets us pull up the map for our multiple carriers at
one time instead of having to flip back and forth between carrier websites. We
pay a yearly fee for the premium version of this app, but you can definitely
use the basic version of the app for just the app purchase fee of a few
dollars.
We
also really like the State Lines app (which was created by the same team that
created the Coverage app). It lists each state and the various laws you might want
to be aware of.
Examples include, default speed limits, whether you are allowed to
right turn on red, emergency phone numbers beyond 911 like highway patrol
numbers, maximum tow lengths and speeds, whether or not you’re allowed to
triple tow, rest area overnight rules – that’s an important one to know whether
or not you’re allowed to sleep at rest areas or not
You
can actually purchase those apps as a package deal. You’ll get 3 apps if you
purchase the package and it also includes a public lands map which is great if
you like to boondock. We personally always need full hookups due to our work so
we don’t use this app, but we have it in case we ever need it.
On a more fun note, let’s talk food apps. I love the TV Food Maps app and website. While the app infrastructure is a little slow sometimes, it shows you if there is any food in your area that has been featured on a tv show on channels like Food Network, Travel Channel, or the Cooking Channel. Since we love watching these shows so much, we love this app. It helps us find unique places to eat that we likely wouldn’t have found without the app.
A big thing for us is checking the weather. We mostly utilize Weather.com for that. We check both current temperatures and historical temperatures, rainfall, and anything else we may need to know about an area. This is definitely important for trip planning especially if you plan to be somewhere for a significant amount of time. Do you have the equipment and the rig to stay warm in below freezing temperatures? More importantly, do you want to be in below freezing temperatures? While the weather might not be totally predictable, you can at least see what the average temperature is like before you get to an area.
What
else do you use to plan your trips? Be sure to let us know what you use in the comments
and tell us what we should be using if you think we’re missing something. We’re
always looking for new trip planning tools just like you. We’d love to know if
we missed anything that you love to use!
It is no secret that we prefer smaller towns instead of large cities, but since we were out west, we knew we had to visit Seattle. While we saw some great things like Pike Place Market and the original Starbucks, we weren’t huge fans of the city of Seattle. It was way too crowded with excess traffic and noise. Sure, it had some great moments, but the city of Seattle in general just isn’t our thing.
The campground we stayed at wasn’t really our thing either.
Big City = Overpriced
+ Crowded
+ Noisy
+Traffic
Give me the beach or a lake or the woods over the city any day of the week.
Maple Grove RV Resort doesn’t have any amenities even though they call themselves a “resort.” They are very much a very basic RV park with nothing more than a laundry room and a bath house.
The campground was very small and not accommodating to larger rigs. We have a 43 foot 5th wheel and it was VERY tight. It was so tight in fact that when our neighbor went to leave, we had to move our truck because it would have been 100% impossible for them to pull their trailer out without hitting our vehicle. The spot next to us was empty so we moved it next door for a whopping 5 minutes so they could pull out and leave. The owners (who aren’t very friendly I might add) came over yelling at us telling us that we didn’t have to wait to get into our spot when we arrived and someone else shouldn’t have to wait to get into there spot either. Yes, we completely agree. No one should have to wait for someone to move their vehicle to get into their spot if their spot is open when they arrive. Quite frankly, the owner got rude about us moving our vehicle so it wouldn’t get HIT by another trailer leaving. When we said it was a little tight and he couldn’t get out, he got very defensive telling us it was the fault of RVers for having such large rigs now a days and that they would lose money if they had to make the spots larger. Sorry we brought it up – actually, we aren’t. To the couple running this place, try being a little nicer to those staying in your park. We immediately grabbed the keys to move the vehicle because they had just pulled out, but YOU chose to verbally attack us and condemn us for not letting our truck get hit by our neighbor. We don’t fit in every RV park and we ensure we tell each person how long our rig is when booking our reservation. They told us it was no problem to stay there and sure, we got in fine, but every single person in this place was crowded and many rigs were even sticking out into the roads. We would not stay here again mainly based on our poor experience with the managers of this park.
Beyond that experience, the bath house and laundry room were very nice. The bathrooms seem to be fairly new and the showers were nice. There was a large amount of washers and dryers in the laundry room so that was nice. We did have someone put a couple pieces of laundry in one of our loads (EW! Someone please give this person RV park etiquette 101 lessons), but that isn’t the fault of the RV park.
The location was not even super convenient to downtown Seattle like we thought it was going to be. It was the closest, decent looking park that could fit our RV length in the area. We’ve heard people with longer RVs have trouble finding location to park in Seattle with full hook ups and we agree with everything these people say. We felt like we had to stay here to get to Seattle in less than an hour, but that is mostly due to our length of 43 feet.
I also drove the Gypsy Hauler for the first time too! I was surprised at how not scary it was to drive nearly 60 feet of vehicle!
And with cornfields, comes great responsibility. The responsibility to wear a cornhusk on your head while running around a gas station parking lot yelling “Go Big Red!”
But, before we could even make it to Nebraska, we had to travel through Iowa and Kansas. Guess what we had to replace? The other tires. All of them. We purchased a total of 5 tires in 4 days to start the trip. Two different technicians told us they believed the tires were faulty. A piece inside completely stripped out just like the first one. After spending 3 hours at a truck stop in Iowa, we were finally on the road again (cue the Willie Nelson soundtrack).
We didn’t make it too far before crossing the Nebraska state line, home of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Welcome Center. We try to stop at most of the welcome centers and this is one of the most unique ones I’ve ever seen. With interactive displays and replicas of items that would have been found on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the welcome center was both interactive and educational.
One of our stops in Nebraska was a little town called Gothenburg, home of one of the original Pony Express Stations. We had to make a slight detour off the interstate to get there, but it was well worth it. While this is not the original location of the building, the building itself was a Pony Express stop. It used to be 2 stories tall, but as the years went on and the building deteriorated, they moved just the top portion to this new location for restoration. Many artifacts from the Pony Express era are located in the building including this entertaining job advertisement poster.
The other stop was a highlight for me. I found this place online one day on RoadsideAmerica.com (an awesome website for random, kitschy tourist stops across America).
Behold the glory of Carhenge. This stop is a complete gem. It is a complete replica of Stonehenge built out of cars. And only American cars are allowed. There’s a graveyard in the back for a few cars that were non-American made. These cars were taken to their death and received a gravestone, but not until one of them was paraded through the town in a funeral procession first.
For my RV friends out there – here’s a review of Grand Island KOA in Nebraska. While we only stayed here for one night, it is definitely a nice little area I wouldn’t mind coming back to. It doesn’t seem like there is much to do in the area and we were simply passing through so I can’t speak to the surrounding activities. We pulled in at 8:00pm and left the next morning around 6:00am. We pulled in just in time to order a pizza with campsite delivery service – definitely a plus! I wasn’t actually able to enjoy the pizza as there are no gluten free options, but my parents definitely benefited from this park amenity. This was a huge plus as there is not much around the park other than cornfields.
There were 2 shower areas, but I was only able to make my way to one because we were there so briefly. The shower had the best water pressure I’ve ever had at an RV park and the water was so hot I couldn’t turn the heat all the way up! The showerhead was even adjustable with different massage levels. This was probably one of the best bathhouse shower facilities I’ve ever seen.
For those with kids or dogs, there is a pet walk area and a playground for the kids. As well as pool for everyone. It was gorgeous at night as the sunset over the cornfields and the lightning bugs came to life. They danced everywhere through the night. I ended up not getting much sleep as I stayed up way too late watching the lightning bugs chase each other around.
The staff was incredibly friendly and provided a golf cart escort to our site to ensure we fit properly and had the proper placement on our site. They even made sure to take our pizza order before we drove our camper to our site as we arrived right before the pizza shop was closing. They made sure to let us know that before even getting us checked in.
All in all, Grand Island KOA is a nice RV park for passing through Nebraska or for a nice peaceful getaway. I would return to this campground for some relaxing time in the country.
Oh, and we’ve never seen a water hook up like the above before. (Update: apparently, it is a mid-West thing as our next campground had this kind of water hookup, too.)
Freeway Gypsy 