Jiggly Barebones Plan

We’ve done “fluid” travel planning before … figuring out what is of interest … waiting to put dates to activities until later. But never to this extent. I can see how being flexible on this road trip is important, though. So, although my fingers are itching to make more reservations, I am holding back on doing so.

I can’t really put a checkmark by our route planning, but at least a basic plan is now “in the can” ... so to speak.

Since I don’t have a project planning app that will automatically move dates around and track our loosey-goosey plans, I started out by entering the dates of our trip into Numbers — Apple’s answer to Windows Excel. Then I added our few reservations. “Let’s go here” ideas filled the gaps between the reservations. Notes went into another column. This turned out to be a great idea as I can move entire rows around to come up with different iterations of our route and a quick formula copy and paste re-organizes the dates.

Next step ... using the Numbers list, I put “placeholders” in the RV Trip Wizard (RVTW) web-based tool to get a better “visual” of what our road trip might look like. It’s easy to jiggle the placeholders ... add time here, take time away from there, eliminate stops entirely, add new stops, replace place holders with actual campgrounds (later).

I’ve got three iterations of our plan so far ... all look pretty much like the one pictured in this footprint ... and all allow for jiggles here and there depending on weather, road conditions, etc.

The problem with RVTW is that it requires internet for it to work. The good news? I can upload the whole trip into my RV Life app ... the premium features are included in my RVTW subscription. I can then use it for navigation offline. And because the maps are downloaded to my device, I can even make changes. That’s a good thing on this “fluid” trip.Read more