The RV Road Trip Travel Rules
Easy to follow, but timing is critical...
There are 3 sets of RV Travel rules that can be used to plan a great road trip. Great and easy to remember but it requires that you include more travel days to the trip and not all people can or will do that. Many RV travelers set up a schedule that is go, go, go and not so much stay, stay, stay. They make reservations along a route that has a lot of miles in between and don’t always take into account the time required or the places and sights that might be bypassed in the process. This is simply a mistake. If you follow one of these 3 rules, you will see more, do more, rest more and have a lot more fun. If you don’t...well you have been warned.
So here we go with the RV rules:
The 2-2-2 rule for RVing means you limit your travel to 200 miles a day, check in to your campground at 2 pm, and camp for no less than 2 days. This is the minimum travel time rule.
The 3-3-3 rule for RVing is a guideline that suggests driving no more than 300 miles per day, arriving at your destination by 3 PM, and staying at least three nights. This rule can help ensure you have enough time to rest and enjoy your trip. I have a video on my YouTube channel that explains in more detail how these rules work so don’t hesitate to take a look at it.
When you have more time to rest and explore a new area after driving, you will likely have more motivation to drive those extra miles to get there. If you follow the 4-4-4 rule, you drive 400 or fewer miles per day, arrive at each destination before 4 p.m. and stay at each destination for at least four days.
**There is a 4th rule of sorts and that is the extended stay option, which is to boondock on public land, usually BLM areas like the LTVA sites in southern Nevada and areas in Arizona. This is usually only an option for a seasoned RV traveler or full time RV’er.
Over the years I have come up with a formula that I use to calculate total estimated road time based on the planned number of miles to travel in between point A and point B. Basically using an estimated travel speed of 50 miles per hour. Now I know, you are thinking wait….the speed limits 75 miles per hour. Yes, but you cannot safely go that fast in an RV and many states have a slower speed limit for trucks towing a trailer. Now this estimate helps include rest stops, gas stops, food stops or just plain old stretching your legs. Sitting for too long can lead to quite a few medical issues so I include stops every hour or so even if I don’t need gas.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Google Maps will use the posted speed limit to estimate travel time, NOT the your speed of 50 used in the travel time formula.
So, using an estimated speed of 50 miles per hour give us the following: the 222 rule yields 4 hours drive time from point A to Point B (destination), 333, 6 hours and 444, 8 hours. Now that can vary a bit based on road type, geography and weather but it really does work out pretty much to those amounts of time. If you read each rule, you can see that the benefits of more rest and overall enjoyment of not only the road trip but your destination. These rules and the timing formula do allow for a lot of travel over a longer period of time without the stress and fatigue that super long travel days and one stop overnights can and will bring to your road trip.
It is NOT a race! If you don’t have enough days for the plan then you have to change the plan to fit better with the number of days you have to travel. You are setting your self up for a lot of stress and misery and this can lead to making the fateful decision to abandon RV travel altogether.
The next article will entail deciding where to stay and camp, how to set up camp and critical items that you must do to help breaking camp as easy and timely as possible. Take care. The Captain.