Planning a Camping Trip

So now that we're married, my husband and I have a tent that we want to use very badly. But it isn't quite warm enough yet, so we just get to make all our grand plans for the future use for it.

And it's driving me crazy. Not the waiting, the trying to plan a camping trip.

You may never camp yourself, but those that do, do it a fair amount. So the campgrounds tend to be pretty full. Combine that with the ability to reserve sites a year in advance for most places, and planning in April for that summer is awful. Some places have walk in reservations for the day of, but I'm also not good with leaving it all to chance. Who wants to pack up an entire car to go camping, drive to the campground you've been daydreaming about for months, and find out all the sites are taken?

So I'm left at reserveamerica.com, trying not to pull my hair out. First of all, you can't sort the campgrounds the search returns by distance. You also can't search them for amenities, like showers (I'm sorry, but any trip longer than 3 days requires a proper bath house. Judge me now, I don't care.) You can't search for multiple weekends at once. You're limited to "specific dates" and flexibility for "two weeks ahead" or "four weeks ahead." But the flexibility will return any night campgrounds have an opening, including during the week which most of the time isn't helpful. Also, back to the not sortable search results, I can put in that we want to travel near Sioux City IA and get results from upwards of 200 miles away.

When you finally find a campground that looks great, you go to reserve your dates. Now, my husband works a normal job with semi normal hours so we are looking primarily at our holiday weekends (Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day). I put in that we want 2 or 3 nights, find a campsite, go to book it, and suddenly then reserveamerica.com tells me that there are stay requirements. And the requirements are all different. And not posted on the website before you make it to the reservation process. Some require you to stay 3 nights, some require 5 (Kansas, I'm looking at you. 5? Who gets 5 nights off for three day weekends???), some require you to stay Friday if you want Sunday. Some require that if you stay a Friday, you have to stay at least one other day past Friday.

I'd like to report that we are done. Our reservations are made and I survived without throwing my computer out the window. But we aren't. We have two weekends out of three, and a plan for the other one. But then one may change because did I also mention we have 3 weddings to attend this summer?

I may end up just putting the tent up in my aunt's backyard and calling it a day.