Retirement on the Road – Part 2: No Reservations
The first column in this series on retirement focused on trip planning for our cross-country RV adventure and planning ahead – which leads us to this month’s topic: the importance of reservations.
Even if you are not traveling in an RV, coordinating all your trip details, times, dates and costs can be a scheduling nightmare. At times, I worked backwards in making the park or tour reservations, as there were specific parks and tours I wanted to experience. But, in many cases, I had to wait for the reservation window to open. Knowing that window time frame was important. Some open three or six months in advance, others a full year.
It helped to have alerts on my calendar reminding me when a window was opening. In the popular parks, the reservations are gone in minutes. Once those “must have” reservations were made, I could then backfill other stops.
I found that many of the national parks required timed reservations to enter, so I made those as soon as I could. You don’t want to make the mistake of not having a reservation pass and get turned around at the entrance. We saw several cars make the “U-turn of shame,” as we called it, at Glacier National Park. Glacier’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, the major scenic drive in the park, is a three-day pass. Rates for the national park vary depending on time of year.
We also wanted to take tours within the park system, but found those reservations much harder to obtain. I wasn’t aware the tours were so popular and tickets would be hard to come by – a novice mistake.
One morning, while trying to get tour reservations for Mesa Verde National Park, we used both phones and two iPads to try to get into the reservation system the moment it opened. We even began hitting the online tour pass “submit” button a few minutes before the reservation system opened. No luck. Within seconds, the tickets were gone. We tried again the following morning with the same system, and finally were able to get reservations for one of the two tours we hoped to experience.
While on the topic of national parks, we found having a Lifetime National Park Pass made getting into parks easier and less expensive. The one-time $80 pass fee paid for itself in no time. A quick flash of your park card and ID and in you went.
We found that staying in state parks over private campgrounds was a money saver. Most state park fees were $25-$30 per night and were less crowded, with larger campsites.
When we weren’t staying in parks, we stayed at Harvest Hosts. These are exclusive to RVs only. The annual membership fee is roughly $100. Membership allows access to over 3,000 farms, breweries, wineries, museums and distilleries, where members can camp for one night. Most don’t offer any services, though some might have an electric hook-up for a small fee.
The beauty of Harvest Hosts is the host location will give you a tour of their specialty, and often have a store where they sell their local goods. We have found them to be very educational, and are our favorite places to stay. We have stayed at a lavender farm where we were gifted a dozen fresh eggs the next morning, an alpaca farm where we bought alpaca yarn after learning all about alpacas, a sunflower farm which produced flavorful sunflower oils, a distillery which stocked us up on gifts of bourbon and whiskey, and a regenerative farm where we learned all about composting. We highly recommend Harvest Hosts for an overnight stay.
Bottom line: to fully enjoy a trip with no reservations, make sure you have reservations.
By Faith Jones
Resident Community News
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