Season 9 Recap

The Season Recap videos are highly requested and for good reason. It’s a great opportunity for us to share some of the highlights and our favorite moments from the season’s travels.

We hope that these recap videos help you get ideas when making your own itinerary.

This season, we traveled over 20,000 miles visiting 19 states. We were unable to complete our initial goal of Nova Scotia, but thoroughly enjoyed New England in the fall and Route 100.

Below is a list of all the RV parks and campgrounds we stayed at. You can click the link below to open as a PDF. As you can see from the total, we spend $8,235 over 7 months and because of all the moochdocking, our average nightly rate was $46.01. Yet, we know full-time RVers that spend $46 per month proving that RVing can be done on any budget.

Personally, we pick RV parts based on three key factors.

1. Location: Location is key to us so we can have easy access to making a video.
2. Full Hook-ups: We like full hook-ups so the water flows, Trish can cook and we can focus on being productive. Dry camping is fun, but it slows us down and can take the focus away from editing and other tasks.
3. Availability: When traveling for extended periods of time, it’s nearly impossible to have a reservation every night of the month. We like to make reservations in advance at the key places we would like to visit and fill in the rest last minute. This plan usually works out well, but take our list of RV Parks below with a grain of salt. These are not recommendations, but rather a log. The RV parks we really liked have a “YES” in the outstanding column. There are not very many.

SN9 LOG PDF

Open or download the Season 9 log here or click the image below. *There may be some typos in the PDF file. This was a log updated from my phone most of the season.

May 2020 (KYD Cabin to Ouray, CO)

Below is a screenshot of our route for May. It doesn’t include much as were only on the road for 6 days, but the drive from Flagstaff to Ouray was nothing short of spectacular! Four corners can be a bit underwhelming and was closed due to Covid, but we opted to Harvest Hosts at Tec Pos no which is a trading post and gas station. This positioned us well to get into Ouray during the day and enjoy the drive. I would not want to have missed this drive by getting to Ouray in the dark.

June 2020 (Breckenridge, CO to West Glacier, MT)

We took the long way to West Glacier, but having never visiting Sun Valley, we wanted to take the time to see it. We ended up staying at the Meadows RV Park. If we were to go back, we would have preferred to dry camp along the river. There is a lot to do in Idaho and we’ve only scratched the surface. The next time we go back, we’ll be sure to see the Saw Tooth mountains and camp near Red Fish Lake.

July 2020 (West Glacier, MT to Mears State Park, MI)

This is when we learned that Montana is a big state and North Dakota is awfully straight! There are a couple of things to point out in this month. We did enjoy our time in Medero and visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It’s not an iconic National Park, but worth a visit and the badlands are beautiful in their own way.

We really should have done the Pitch Fork Fondue dinner with the Medero Musical, but were reluctant to buy a ticket. As you might have gathered, SN9 was not about tickets and entertainment. A little because of Covid, but mostly because we’ve tapped into other aspects of travel we find equally rewarding. With that being said, all the RVers we’ve talked to about the dinner and music gave it a strong endorsement.

It’s also worth mentioning that we tried to stay at Makoshika State Park in Glendive, MT but all the sites were taken. This is a neat State Park along the way and would have been an ideal place to spend the night.

The map below is not accurate. We actually took the Badger Ferry across Lake Michigan. Mostly to avoid towing a RV through Chicago, but we also wanted to share the experience. Plus, it dropped us just minutes from Mears State Park which makes our top 10 list as the best summer vibe! We do love a Michigan summer!

August 2020

August was a misleading month on the channel. We recorded 75 lessons for E3 Camping Association and Trish flew home to take care of family things while the Airstream got serviced at Woodlands Airstream. We intentionally get the channel a month or two behind “real life” to give us the flexibility to keep family first.

Once we picked up the Airstream from service, we went directly to Petosky State Park, which really deserved an honorable mention in the Best State Park category, but we forgot. In fact, we really enjoyed our time in Traverse City and highly recommend to anyone. It’s also a nice stop on your way to Mackinac Island and then to the Upper Peninsula (UP).

September 2020 (Traverse City, MI to Camden, ME)

Getting to ME was a bit stressful due to the Covid regulation. Each state had its own rules and traveling through the state wasn’t a problem. To navigate these requirements, we decided to travel directly to Maine to get Covid tested and then we’d be free to roam Maine plus travel to NH without restriction.

As we mentioned in the video, we really enjoyed Camden Maine and if we didn’t moochdock with Will & Sue, we would have stayed at Camden Hills State Park. We also stayed at Moorings Campground in Belfast, which is nice with an oceanfront site, but in hindsight, staying closer to Acadia National Park would have been better, for the amount of time we wanted to spend in the park.

October 2020 (Littleton, NH to Murfreesboro, TN)

The fall colors came about 10 days early this year. It was still stunning, but we were a tad bit late. If you have the chance to drive Route 100 when the colors are changing, it will probably make your own top 10 list as an RVer. There are so many charming towns as you travel down Route 100 and plenty of places to explore plus great hiking. We focused mostly on the White Mountains area and could have found great dry camping too!

Once we left Stowe we needed to get to New York quickly and were not planning on staying at Lake George RV Park. In fact, it was Columbus Day weekend and holidays can cause heartburn for fulltime RVers. We had tentative reservations at an RV park near Lake George, but when we passed Lake George RV Park, we thought we’d pull in just to see if there were any open sites. We got lucky and site 222. Little did we know that this RV park was ranked in the top 5 nationwide and during Columbus Day weekend, felt like a party.

We also have never experienced the last weekend of camping (for a seasonal park). This holiday weekend marked the end of the RV season for people who live in the northeast and it was interesting (and a bit sad) to experience.

November 2020 (Little Rock, AR to the KYD Cabin)

This is the second or third time we’ve stayed at Downtown RV Park in Little Rock. It’s just the perfect distance when traveling from TN to TX and an easy RV park to get in and out of. If you’re able to get a riverfront site, the bridge has a nice light show at night. It’s also directly across the street from the Clinton Library.

If you’ve been following KYD since the first flat tire, you know that we usually stop in Texas to visit family on our way home. We have found after several years of RV travel that our route becomes more about people than places and having our own bed only makes it easier to visit friends and family.

This season we spent time in Wimberley, TX and loved it. We found a boutique RV park called Black Canyon with only 8 sites, but family-owned and just up the road from the Blanco River and only 10 min from Jacob’s Well. If you’re traveling from San Antonio to Austin, check it out. Wimberley is a charming Texas town and worth visiting.