Jason & Lisa McEwen

7 Tips to Make Sure You Have an Enjoyable RV Trip

Jason & Lisa McEwen
Duration:   5  mins

Description

Any kind of travel can be stressful, tiring, and even a bit overwhelming. So, to curb the frustrations that often come with travel RV trips, the McEwen family shares some tips they’ve learned over the years to help them keep each adventure fun and upbeat.

1. Everyone packs

Packing for an RV trip can take some time, and it’s tough if it all falls on one person. Ask everyone in the family to get involved.

2. Stay close to home

If you have a short period of time to travel, try to camp closer to home. Towing an RV means your travel time is a bit longer. And, if you have kids, you’ll probably make a few stops along the way. When you factor in time to set up, the day you arrive at a campground is often a lost day.

If you stay closer to home, your travel days are easier and faster. The McEwen family stays within a two-hour radius if they go on a 2-3 day trip.

3. Don’t over plan

When you’re in a new place, you might be inclined to fill your days full of activities and sights to see. And, while you should explore the area, problems arise when you over plan, especially if you have kids.

Consider doing activities in the morning and taking the afternoon off, or plan a big day and then plan a day to rest. In other words, rest should be just as much of a priority as your excursions.

4. Try to find campgrounds with on-site activities

When you book an RV trip, try to find one with on-site activities. For instance, the McEwen family recently stayed at Huguenot Memorial Park in NE Florida, which has a beach just feet from the campground. You don’t have to go far for entertainment when there’s an amenity like this on the grounds.

5. Get everyone’s input

Are you the family’s trip planner? There’s one in every family, but to make sure everyone enjoys the trip, let everyone have some input on where you go and what you do.

6. Give everyone some space

When you’re traveling, you naturally spend a lot of time together. But, after spending the entire day together, it’s okay to give each other some space. Let the kids have a few minutes on their tablets, walk alone, or read a book outside. Sometimes, a little solitude can go a long way toward creating an enjoyable trip.

7.Document the trip

You want to ensure that you’re not only enjoying each day of your trip but can also enjoy it for years to come. Make sure you capture camping memories. Aside from taking pictures, consider keeping a camping journal.

RV travel is a great way to see new places, but that’s not to say it’s not stressful at times. To minimize those frustrating moments and make your trips more enjoyable, give them tips a try.

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Hello RV. Ers, I'm Lisa mcewan. Thanks for watching RV, Lifestyle and Repair. As you all know, we are big fans of taking trips in our RV. We think it's a great way for our family to travel.

But over the years, we've learned a few tips along the way to help us make sure that every single trip we take is enjoyable because let's be honest, any kind of travel can be frustrating, overwhelming. You know, there are some moments where you might lose your patience, am I right? So to help everybody kind of curb those frustrating moments and make sure you're getting the most out of every single trip. We have learned some tips that we want to pass along to you. Here.

They are, get everyone in on the packing packing for an RV trip, can take some time and it's tough if it all falls to one person. So we found it's best to get everyone involved in the packing process. Jason takes care of packing outdoor items, for example, and the kids pack up their clothes, stay close to your house. If you're only traveling for a handful of days and nights, try to find a campground reservation that's fairly close to your house. If you're towing an RV, it usually takes a little bit longer to get there.

If you're traveling with kids, it probably means you're going to be making a few extra stops along the way too. By the time you factor in all of that, plus the time it takes to set up that travel day is sometimes a lost day. If you stay closer to home, your travel days are easier and faster for our family. If we're headed out for a 2 to 3 night trip, we try to stay within a 2 to 3 hour radius of our house. Of course, this varies for everyone.

But if you're short on time, shorten the miles that you travel don't over plan, we know how easy it is and how tempting it is to go ahead and take a look at all the activities and excursions that you can plan when you're visiting a particular site or city and don't get me wrong. That's half the point of going out on an RV and traveling. But if you're traveling in a short time, you don't have a lot of time to spend there. You need to make sure that you're not over planning, especially if you're camping with kids because that's when problems arise, right? If you try to cram too many things and too short of days people get tired, they get cranky moods, start to go south and if that happens and everybody feels cranky and tired and everybody's at each other's wits end, it can really put a damper on your overall mood of the trip.

So few tips we have learned along the way, consider making sure that your activities are planned for the morning, but give yourself the afternoon off or if you have a really big day full of activities, make sure that the next day is a rest day. Do something simple. Keep it simple around the campground, right? Make sure that you have fun as a family, but nothing that you have to go out and do the whole point here is that you need to factor in rest just as much as you need to factor in those activities. Keep it simple and don't over plan.

Try to find campgrounds with on site activities when you book an RV trip. Try to find one with on site activities. For instance, we recently stayed at Huguenot Memorial Park in Northeast Florida, which has a beach just feet from the campground. When there's an amenity like this on the grounds, you don't have to go far for entertainment. It takes little effort to wander to the beach, play for a bit and wander back when you're ready for a meal or ready to call it a day.

Get everyone's input. Are you the family's trip planner? There always seems to be one in every family for sure, but to make sure that you have a more enjoyable trip. Consider getting everybody's input. Ask everybody what they'd like to see where they wanna go or some of the activities that they would like to try.

When we search for new spots to explore, we get the girls involved. We narrow down the area we plan to visit and give them some choices. They might pick between two cities to explore or have a say in which activities we do when they get older and they can understand how to calculate the cost of trips. We'll let them have even more input. But until then giving them simple choices is best give everyone some space.

The whole point of going on an RV trip and traveling as a family is to spend time together, which is great. But after a really long day of spending time together as a family, it is perfectly ok to let everyone have a little bit of space. So the kids play on their tablet for a couple of minutes, consider taking a walk by yourself or even curl up with a book for an hour just so that everyone has a few minutes to themselves. It's perfectly ok to give everybody a little space. And when you do feels like it's a little bit more of an enjoyable trip for everyone.

Document the trip. You want to make sure that you're not only enjoying each day of your trip, but that you're also enjoying it for years to come. So make sure you capture some memories for a holiday gift. We gave our girls some digital cameras so that they could capture some moments too. Aside from taking pictures, consider keeping a camping journal.

We use this book which was purchased on Amazon to write notes about each campground. And we add a picture for each trip RV. Travel is a great way to explore new places as a family. But that's not to say that those travel days and those camping days can't be a little bit stressful at times. So to help make sure that you have an enjoyable trip, give some of these tips a try until next time.

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