Here are some resources and inspiration for your RV trip from picking your park and camp spots to top mistakes rookie RV Campers make.
The whole experience was very new to us and took about a day to adjust. Its adventure on its own and requires no preparation, makes "figuring things out on the road" a lot of fun.
1. Cruise America Compact SUV
We rented RV from Cruise America. I highly recommend to go that route because you will get a clean RV that is professionally serviced. If you think its tacky and not for you, watch this video below. If you ever done camping, RV camping is much more comfortable. You have AC, kitchen, refrigerator, sink, shower, toilet, beds and a comfortable dining table.
Upon arrival to Cruise America, they offered us a free upgrade from compact to standard size RV and since we are only 2 adults and a child, we decided to stick with a compact size. The standard size RV is longer and offering more space, but for us mobility and being able to easily maneuver the RV on small roads was more important. If size of RV is too big you won't be able to so some of the drive through parks. Thanks to the compact size we picked we were able to easily maneuver our RV. Our son loved it. He was heart broken at the time of the drop off. He wanted to forever live in it.
I do recommend to go up north where the weather is cooler because camping in 110F is quite difficult even with AC. Its nice, but RV Camping in the forest like Redwood National Park would be much better in the summer. Desert is better in spring or fall. But if you've gone no options, even summer is in the desert is a great escape. Things I would still visit on RV in summer would be Antelope Canyon, Zion National Park, Monument Valley, Arches National Park. You would just need to get all your hikes done before 11am and rest of the day do the drive in between. That is exactly what we did during coronavirus lockdown.
2. Arizona's Best RV Camping Destinations
See, I wasn't sold on the idea of RV Camping right away. A few of my friends did a family kids trip and they reported it a huge success and a great family time. Its only when I saw this Campandium Video Featuring a lot of cool Arizona Parks and best places to camp is when I finally decided this will be a lot of fun and it will be much more comfortable than tent camping. I would even call it glamping, because you have everything you need. Your packing is really minimal.
3. Campandium app and website.
I asked a friend as to how they were finding spots in the desert and what did they look like. She sent me this app. I started researching what campsites looked like in the desert. Their app is amazing. Not only it has all the public and private campgrounds, but it also has photos of sites (including lifestyle so you can imagine yourself having fun), cell reception, hookups (like water and electricity for your AC) and dumping stations which I discovered way later.
Once I saw a few pictures of the camps I would want to stay at, we decided we should go! Another cool feature of this app is it gives you all the BLMs that you can stay at in case you could not get a campsite at a park. BLM is a public land where you can just stay near the park. Usually it entails dry camping (no hookups, water, etc) but if you in the RV you have all that anyways. I would much rather do dry BLM Camping than RV Park (which we have yet to experience).
4. Top 10 Arizona Boondocking Sites
Here is another great video talking about campsites specific to boondocking. We did not boondock but we did visit one park on his list. Boondocking means your RV is attachable and we are just not quite there yet :)
5. Top 10 Beginner RV Mistakes
In preparation for our RV trip we watched a lot of beginner mistakes that RV rookies make. Well, some of them helped but some we just had to break into ourselves. No matter how many videos we watched, we still had an issue figuring out how to dump for the first time. We did over-flood our shower and had issues mounting our bikes. Word of the wise, leave yourself the first day to figure out how things work in an RV. Don't go somewhere remote the first day, stay closer to civilization.
Once you are ready head out to the wilderness. But really, the getting up to speed takes abut 1 day, or you can read the manual and watch the videos, before arriving to the rental office. But if you are like us, like to argue about things on the road and keep your blood pressure up to make trip more exciting, you can simply wing it. At the end, there is youtube "how to" for everything. One more advantage of Cruise America is that they have a help like you can call. Response is immediate, even during a full lockdown they helped us by walking us through how to solve our issue which was simply emptying the black and gray water. Both of the videos below are a good resource to watch the night before or the first hour of driving.
6. Kids Snake Prep
If you are headed to the desert there is a good chance you will encounter a rattle snake. If your kids are older than 2 and love to run around or from you like my son you would want to give them a little onboarding video prior to take off about the dangers of snakes. Talking to them about running into bushes, picking rocks and other activities that could potentially get them to face venomous snakes is a good idea. That was always my worry during our trip to Arizona because my son loves to run away from me and being mischief. It seemed that the video I showed him really helped. Here is another article on safety of children during hikes in the desert.
7. RV Packing List
Last but not least and my personal favorite is what to pack with you to make your trip most enjoyable. I will publish a new article with my own list soon bu for now I am posting this video that I found helpful. One thing I do want to mention is: when you pack for tent camping space is an issue because you have a lot of equipment and little space to store it all. When you pack for RV camping you have all the space, in fact all your gear already come with RV such as the stove, the fridge (no cooler needed), the sink, the toilet, but what you want to conserve is fresh water. So getting paper and plastic utensils is ideal so you don't have much to wash is what you want to optimize for.
Remember, space is not the issue, water is.
We hope your first RV trip is as enjoyable as ours was and don't forget to comment below to tell us how was your first trip and what are your favorite parks that you visited!
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