Planning a travel route on paper makes an easy-to-follow guide — and a great conversation piece.
By Chris Christensen & Jean Powers, F420774
March-April 2025
My wife and I have enjoyed living year-round in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, for 27 years. Eventually, the summer heat and humidity started to get to us, and we decided to become “sunbirds.” We’d leave our south-west Florida home in May and return around October.
Unlike our snowbird friends, we do not own a house up north. Upon our retirement in 2010, we wanted to see, I mean really see, the United States and Canada. The best way to do that? RV!
Jean and Chris document their previous motorhome travels on this color-coded multiyear map. Chris utilizes other maps to plan their upcoming excursions.
In 2010, we knew little about RVing. But, boy, did we learn! Our first RV was an older, entry-level 34-foot Class A motorhome. Our inaugural “round the country” trip, in 2011, got us as far as Georgia. What a disaster! After returning home, making numerous repairs and enhancements to the RV, plus acquiring lots of RVing knowledge, we planned a trip for summer 2012. That one went great, and we never looked back.
To organize a long RV trip around the country, staying at 40 to 55 different campgrounds, requires a lot of planning. Thank goodness for the internet. If you want to get the best sites, at the most popular campgrounds, at the best prices, you better plan way in advance — sometimes by as much as a year.
I found old-fashioned paper maps to be invaluable in planning our trips. We use maps from AAA. They’re up to date, quality made, available for every U.S. state and Canadian province, and easy to read. They’re free to AAA members.
I use a U.S. map as well as state and provincial maps to plan our long-distance trips. After drafting a possible route, I mark the route on both the U.S. and the appropriate other maps with a highlighter. We take them on our trips. If my wife asks where we’re going, it saves a lot of time to just open a map and say, “Here.”
As many RVers know, your plan is only good until you get out of the driveway. Things happen and routes must change. In such cases, I update my marked-up state and country maps with the new routes. I always take along a blank U.S./Canada map. Once we’ve completed a route, I mark up that map. After returning home, I carefully copy the completed routes onto our multiyear map. Sounds like a lot of work, but it really is not. Further, it can be fun.
When friends ask where we went, we just point to our map and say, “There!” That usually triggers a lot of map finger pointing and comments: “We’ve been there, too,” or “We always wanted to go there,” or “You really are anal-retentive aren’t you?”
I taped the multiyear map onto a 26-inch-by-40-inch white placard board readily available at many stores. It’s easier to grab the board than deal with a map that’s blowing in the wind or underneath a ceiling fan. It also avoids the hassle of unfolding the map, pressing out the creases, and looking for a table on which to spread it out.
People who see the map are impressed with the different colored routes. The colors make it much easier to distinguish one route from another.
Over the years, we’ve been asked, “How many states have you camped in?” “How many national parks have you visited?” “How many miles have you driven?” I can just point to one or more of the little data tables I’ve taped to the board. I update these lists each year as I update the map after trip completion.
One of the frequently asked questions is, “Which was your favorite trip?” Again, we can just point to one of the multicolored routes. “When did you do that trip?” We look to my little list taped on the right side of the board. The route color corresponds to the year.
A marked map such as this one not only helps in planning future trips but also makes a good conversation piece. We always take it along on our long-distance trips, as well as to RV rallies. It gets people talking about where they’ve RVed and where they might like to go. After all, isn’t that what RVing is all about?
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