A week off is not seven days of national park. It is two driving days and five real ones, and the single decision that determines whether the trip is good is how much of those five you spend behind the wheel getting somewhere further away.
That decision gets made badly because the map lies. On a map, three parks in a week looks reasonable and the drives between them look like an afternoon. In a rig they are not an afternoon, and the drive is not really the cost anyway. The cost is the day the drive eats on either side of itself.
This is a method for planning the week so the person doing the driving still likes everyone at the end of it.
One park. Maybe two.
Every park you add is not one more park. It is a moving day: break camp, dump and fill, drive, check in, find the site, back into it, level, hook up, find the grocery store. That day is gone. You are not seeing a canyon on it.
With five usable days, one park is a proper trip — enough time to have a slow morning, do the big hike, drive the scenic road, and still be somewhere long enough to know it. Two is doable if they are genuinely close and you accept that one of the five becomes a moving day.
Three is a week of parking lots.
The instinct to add is strong because a park you skip feels like a park you might never see. It is worth resisting anyway. Nobody comes home from a week and wishes they had seen one more place in less depth.
Book the campground before you plan anything else
The itinerary is downstream of what you actually got, and what you get is decided well before the trip by a booking window you do not control.
Reservations at the popular park campgrounds open months ahead and the good loops go fast, so the order is: know your dates, be ready when the window opens, take what you can get, and then build the week around the nights you hold.
Two things to check before you book:
- Site length. Sites carry a maximum length and it is not advisory — the pad is that long, the turn into it is tight, and the trees have been there longer than your rig. Measure yours with the hitch included and believe the listing.
- Hookups. No electric means generator hours, and generator hours in a park are limited. That changes how you cook and how the evening goes, so it is worth knowing before you arrive rather than at dusk on the first night.
If the park campground is full, the usual answer is a private campground outside the gate and an earlier alarm. That is a perfectly good week. It is just a different one, because now the drive to the trailhead is part of every day, and the plan should say so.
How far is too far
RV forums repeat a rule that goes 200 / 2 / 2: no more than 200 miles in a day, off the road by 2pm, stay at least two nights. Argue with the exact figures for your own rig and your own tolerance. The shape of it is sound, and each third is doing real work.
A mileage ceiling because a large vehicle is more tiring to drive than a car at the same speed. You are working the whole time — crosswinds, mirrors, grades, the truck that came past too close. A distance that is nothing in a car is a full day's work in a rig.
Off the road early because everything that goes wrong at a campground goes wrong in the dark. Backing into an unfamiliar site, finding it is not level, discovering the water spigot is on the far corner: all fine in the afternoon, all a fight at night.
Two nights minimum because the first evening is setup and the morning you leave is teardown. A one-night stop is two half days of chores with a sleep in between.
On a one-week trip this mostly resolves into a single question: can you get there in one day? If yes, you have a real trip. If it needs two days each way, you have four driving days and three at the park, and you would have a better week going somewhere closer.
The day you arrive is not a park day
Write the moving day into the plan as its own day, with its own items, and let it be about moving.
Drive. Check in. Level and hook up. Find the dump station, the propane and the grocery store, because you will want all three and they are never in the same place. Eat something you did not have to shop for first.
The reason to write it down rather than assume it is that somebody in the vehicle is quietly expecting to see the park that afternoon. If the plan says the day is a moving day, nobody is disappointed by it. If the plan says nothing, everybody is.
Do the fuel arithmetic before you settle the route
Fuel is the one cost fully determined by a choice you make on a map weeks earlier, which makes it the one worth working out first.
The arithmetic is miles ÷ mpg × price per gallon. Run it on the route you are considering, then run it on a closer alternative, and see what the difference buys. It is often the guided day everyone actually wanted.
Use your own economy rather than a generic figure — the spread between rigs is wide enough that an average is meaningless. Set your vehicle's mpg in your travel preferences and MyTripLogix works the estimate for a route from that and the current gas price in the region you are driving through, showing the assumptions beside the figure so you can see what it was built on.
Log what you spend while it is happening
Costs on a week away are easy to track as they occur and genuinely hard to reconstruct afterwards, when the receipts are out of order and half of them went through as card payments with unhelpful names.
Log each one where it happens — the amount, the merchant, the day, and the thing in the plan it was for. Fuel on the driving leg, the campground on the stay, groceries on the day you bought them. It takes seconds, it tells you mid-week whether the guided trip on Friday is affordable, and it leaves you with a real number for what this trip cost when you are deciding about the next one.
Decide about the book before you leave
One week is exactly the right size for a book — one trip, one set of days, one story with a beginning and an end. About a hundred photographs across roughly thirty pages is the shape of it.
Deciding in advance changes what you shoot. You start taking the picture of the rig at the site instead of the eleventh version of the overlook. You take one of your father actually doing something rather than standing in front of something. You photograph the morning it rained and everyone stayed in, which is the picture that will mean the most in five years and the one nobody takes.
The sorting is not your job. Photos carry the time they were taken and usually the place, so against a plan that already knows there was a drive on the Monday and four nights at the campground after it, each one lands on the right day and the right stop. What is left is choosing which hundred were worth keeping, and putting them in order.
The short version
- A week is two driving days and five real ones — plan it that way
- One park, maybe two; every extra park costs a whole day of moving
- Book the campground first and build the week around the nights you hold
- Ask whether you can get there in one day; if not, go somewhere closer
- Write the moving day into the plan so nobody expects a park out of it
- Work out fuel with your own mpg before you settle the route
- Log costs as they happen
- Decide about the book before you go; it changes what you photograph