RV Info
Meet our new-to-us 40 foot Grand Design Solitude 3550BH fifth wheel. We bought it used in May 2022. It was gently broken in when we bought it, but since we’d be using it fulltime to travel, we needed to upgrade it in a few areas so that we would be able to boondock, do laundry, and make it easier for my husband to work while on the road.
The kids love having their own space they can call their own in the bunkhouse. They’ve been able to decorate their bunks and bring along some of their toys to play with on home days.
Route Planning
This journey has been more than a year in the making. I had several criteria that I had to follow in order to make this work. Since my husband works from home, he needed to have a solid internet connection wherever we went. So the first consideration was to choose campsites that have a good cell signal.
I used a combination of RV Trip Wizard and Campendium to choose both campgrounds and boondocking sites. RV Trip Wizard allows me to add campsites, traces the route, calculate the miles and travel times, helps me avoid toll roads, tunnels, and ferries, warns me if we will be going onto a dirt road, and gives me reviews and prices of campgrounds.
Campendium was a second campground planning software that I used to help find free campsites and more obscure campgrounds that may not have been listed on RV Trip Wizard. It also gave me the cell signal strength at each location.
Find out more about the advantages and disadvantages of both.
