Ask what a week in an RV costs and you get an average, which is the least useful number available. The spread around it is wide, and nearly all of the width comes from three decisions you make before you turn the key: how far you drive, where you sleep, and whether you cook.
None of the three feels like a decision at the time. All three are, and they are worth making deliberately, because together they matter more than anything you do once you are out there.
Here is how to work out your own number in advance, and how to keep track of the real one while the week is happening — which is a different job, and the one that pays off next time.
Where the money goes
Five lines cover most of a week away. Their sizes vary enough between trips that quoting figures would be misleading, but the shape holds and the shape is what you plan against.
- Fuel. The line that scales with the route, and the one that surprises people. It gets its own section below because it is the one you can settle in advance.
- Campgrounds. The widest spread of anything. A park campground, a private campground near the gate, a resort with full hookups and a pool, and dispersed camping on public land are four very different nightly figures for the same night's sleep. Across a week that difference is the largest single lever you have after the route itself.
- Food. Where the RV earns its keep. You have a kitchen, a fridge and a table, so the default is cooking and the week's food can look like an ordinary week of groceries plus a few meals out. The failure mode is drifting into restaurants because nobody planned dinners, at which point you are paying to eat out while towing a kitchen you are not using.
- Park entry and activities. Entry is charged per vehicle. If you are visiting several parks in a year an annual federal pass is usually the cheaper route, so it is worth checking the current price against your plans before you pay at the first gate. The variable line is the guided things — a rafting day, a boat trip — which belong in the plan rather than arriving as a surprise.
- The rig and the small things around it. Renting dominates everything else and you already know the figure. Owning still means propane, dump fees where they are not included, laundry, firewood, and the thing that breaks. Carrying some margin for that is realism.
Do the fuel arithmetic before you settle the route
Fuel is the only line fully determined by a choice you make on a map weeks earlier, so calculate it first and let the answer argue with your route.
The arithmetic is miles ÷ mpg × price per gallon. Run it on the loop you are considering. Then run it on a closer one and look at the difference — it is frequently the guided day everyone actually wanted, bought by driving less, which was already the better call for every other reason.
Use your own economy. A rig is far thirstier than a car and the spread between rigs is wide enough that a generic figure tells you nothing. Set your vehicle's mpg in your travel preferences and MyTripLogix estimates the fuel for a route from that and the current gas price in the region you are driving through, with the mpg and price it used shown beside the figure so you can see what the number rests on.
It is an estimate and it says so. It is still the right number to choose a route with.
Estimate before, log during, and let the estimates get replaced
This is where trip budgets usually break, and it is a structural problem rather than a discipline one.
Before you go you estimate: the campground nights, roughly this much fuel, the tour on the Thursday. Then you leave and start spending, and now you have two sets of numbers — what you guessed and what you paid — and the obvious ways of combining them are both wrong. Add them and you have double-counted everything you both estimated and paid for. Drop the estimates and your total quietly excludes everything still ahead of you.
The fix is that an actual should replace its estimate rather than sit next to it. Put the estimate on the thing in the plan — the campground night, the driving leg, the boat trip. When you pay, log the expense against that same thing, and the estimate steps aside.
That is how the budget in MyTripLogix works, deliberately. The projected total is every expense you have logged plus the estimates for everything planned and not yet paid. A campground you estimated at $180 and then paid $180 for is $180, not $360. The number starts as mostly guesswork and converges on the truth as the week goes on, rather than drifting further from it.
Watch planned, not just spent
Mid-week, the reassuring number is the one to trust least.
You are four days in and you have spent less than half the budget, which feels comfortably ahead. But the guided day is unpaid, the last two nights are the expensive ones, and the drive home has not happened. Spent is a rear-view mirror. It tells you where you have been.
Look at both figures together — what has gone out, and what is committed but unpaid — and at what the two project to. That projection answers the question you are actually asking, which is not "how much have we spent" but "can we do the thing on Friday."
MyTripLogix shows spent, planned and the projected remainder together for that reason, and lets the remainder go negative rather than hiding it. A budget is a plan you are entitled to break. It is not one you should be able to break without noticing.
Put ceilings on the lines that run over
Fuel and campgrounds are the two that get away from you, and neither does it in one shocking transaction. They do it in a series of individually reasonable ones.
Set a limit on those two and let the rest float. A trip starts with Lodging, Transport, Food, Activities, Shopping and Other already in place, and item estimates find their way into them by type — a lodging item's cost lands in Lodging, a driving leg's in Transport — so the categories fill as you build the plan rather than needing separate bookkeeping. When a projection crosses a limit the category is flagged. Nothing is blocked; you are told, early enough for being told to be useful.
Log it where it happens
A week's receipts are easy to capture as they occur and genuinely unpleasant to reconstruct afterwards, out of order, half of them showing up on a card statement under names that mean nothing.
Log each one at the moment: the amount, the merchant, the day, the category, and the thing in the plan it belonged to. If two people are covering different parts of the week, record who paid while it is still obvious — that is the detail impossible to recover later and the one most likely to produce a slightly tense conversation at home.
Crossing into Canada works the same way: log what you paid in the currency you paid it in, and give it its converted value so it can join the totals honestly.
The number is the point
Do this and the week ends holding something better than a vague sense of what it cost: a real, itemised figure for a real trip, in your rig, at your mpg, on your route.
That figure is what you will want next spring, when the question is whether you can go further or stay longer. An average cannot answer that. Last year's actual can.
The book at the end is a known line too, rather than a surprise. A hardcover is $49.99 with twenty pages included and $1.50 for each page after, so the thirty-page book a week usually makes comes to about $65 plus shipping. Put it in the budget with everything else. It is the only line still worth something in ten years.
The short version
- Three decisions set the cost: how far you drive, where you sleep, whether you cook
- Work out fuel as miles ÷ mpg × price before you settle the route
- Use your own mpg — an estimate is only as good as its assumptions
- Estimate on the plan item, then log the real expense against it so the actual replaces the guess
- Judge the week on projected, not spent
- Put ceilings on fuel and campgrounds; let the rest float
- Log at the pump, including who paid
- Keep the final number; it is how you plan the next one