Editor's Note: Mel and Susan Chaney have authored the outstanding "Computing on the Road" series found elsewhere in our articles, and now offer some observations on other topics as they begin their full time travels.
Susan is busying herself with something more useful than my shenanigans. She has an Atlas of the US States and is marking all the Coast to Coast RV parks with one color marker and using another color for US Military bases with RV parks. Another color is for military bases that have a base exchange or commissary and still another for Escapees parks. We already have maps that include all the other type parks we stay at. What Susan is doing will probably take about 8 hours to complete. Once she is finished we will have everything available on maps to decide where to stay at or visit. All the information was on-board but was in many books, references and other maps. What we actually had was what I like to call data verses useable information. Although all the data was on-board just how were we to assimilate and look it all up to decide where we want to stay next or what route we want to take?
I decided to make an attempt at categorizing the various park types. The first listing will be by overall park ambience, facilities, internal access roads and general worth. The first on the list will be the most preferred in that category. The next list will be in order of price desirability with the least cost type at the top. Admittedly, these are generalizations. Also, prices go out the window when monthly rates are used. As an example, we have reservations for January through March in a Florida campground. The daily rate is $13.00, weekly is $85.00 and the monthly rate is $195.00, which is a paltry $6.50 a day. Also, if you are 65 years or better and/or are disabled, you qualify for a 50% discount at Federal, State, and most County or Municipal parks.
Parks rated by atmosphere, ambience, access roads & facilities (all have full hookups unless stated otherwise) although many of the finest parks in the Northern States don't have sewer on site. The rating order should be considered generalizations and represent our personal experiences only.
Parks rated by "cost": Please be advised, All Federal parks (not military), including Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management (BLM), most State, County and Municipal parks have senior (65 or disabled) discounts of 50%. That would throw this listing order off considerably. If that is your case, revise the order.
After all things are considered, these are our general priorities, besides our own home park system in S.W. Alabama and S.E. Georgia, which is free to members. Members stay free at their home park resort for 2 weeks, then must either leave for a week or pay for that week (at between $15.00 to $25.00 a day). They can then return for 2 more free weeks. That schedule can go on forever, if you wish. Membership in a CTC affiliated home RV resort park gives you the right to stay at all other CTC affiliated resort parks for a $4.00 per day fee. This reciprocal agreement benefits all CTC home resort park members. We pay our yearly home park maintenance fee, other RVers pay their own home park fee and we jointly share all the best RV resort parks there are in the US and Canada. Nice!!!
There is something else to keep in mind. Many resort membership type parks belong to plans other than CTC. Often they overlap each other. For example, our CTC home park also belongs to Passport America. They offer up to 50% discount at parks that have that affiliation, often during non-holiday or off season dates only. There are many other organizations RVers can join to reduce their camping fees. If you're not careful, you can find yourself belonging to entirely too many of these competing clubs or organizations. The first time you pull into a resort park and find you have three of the membership types they accept for discounts, it causes you to review just how much each membership costs annually and begin trimming them down. Especially if you find the weekly rate beats the cost offered by your membership clubs. Coast to Coast is $59.00 a year after you join and pay annual maintenance to a CTC affiliated park. That's a very big commitment for the part time, casual RVer, but one that extended or fulltime RVers can save considerable money with and get to stay in the best parks. Some of these organizations cost as little as $49.00 a year. Still, you tend to get what you pay for.
There's another twist to the above. Membership parks usually only allow entrance to those RVers that are either direct members of the park or organizations the park is affiliated with. Their listings in books are only posted by the documentation those organizations publish to their members. Park members do not own the park any more than a time share condo owner owns the condo. However, members are not restricted to when they can visit and can generally stay two weeks anytime they want, as often as they want, although some seasonal parks have rates for the entire season. Seasonal rates often allow you first rights to the same site each year, thus you can enjoy any improvements you make each year. RV park resort members are a tight knit group and have much more to say about how the park is run than time share condo owners do. RVers often join a park for its affiliation with CTC or other organizations. They want to make sure the park treats visiting CTC members well because they want to be treated well at other CTC parks. As an example, the CTC resort park we are currently visiting is well North and only open from May through September. These home park members want to visit Florida, Texas or Southern California in the winter. Florida and Texas RVers generally don't want to be visiting their home parks in the heat of the summer and come to parks like this to enjoy a nice cool summer.
It pays for park management to respect the wishes of their membership otherwise they loose them. It is not that hard to end "most" park memberships, unlike time share condo memberships. Some parks go so far as to keep listings of how their members are treated at other parks and mirror it. For example, if your home park doesn't take reservations for visitors you're not likely to get reservations to visit another park. Similarly, if your home resort regularly puts visiting affiliated members in their worst campsites you can often expect to be treated the same when you visit their park. If you think you've been treated poorly in a park the easiest way to get it corrected is to tell a member of that park. He or she has a vested financial interest in how visitors are treated. That is seldom necessary and most parks treat affiliated visiting RVers as good as their own members. There also seems to me to be a pecking order of how you can expect to be greeted, accepted or treated at parks with other affiliations. It's our experience that the order goes something like this: home park members first, CTC second, Passport America next, followed by others. Why? That is the way the park members want it. That's about the order of their own membership affiliation and thus is their priority. There are about 450 to 500 CTC resort parks and it doesn't take long for the best and worst 10% or so to get a widespread reputation.
We also belong to Good Sam's for about $20.00 a year, giving us 10% discount at their very, very many private but affiliated campgrounds which they evaluate, rate and post in a massive manual the size of a New York City telephone book. We also have a KOA discount membership card at about the same price per year. You don't need membership cards to stay in these parks but we seem to be treated a little better, get a 10% discount and our experience is we get better pick of campsites. Also reservations are never in question if you hold their minimal costing membership cards. Escapees has a park system of their own. The most lavish is the original one in Livingstion, Texas. We most definitely belong to Escapees. They are wonderful for the extended or fulltime RVer. They offer a great mail forwarding service, which is our address and they offer many other RVer services. We didn't originally join them for their park system, but now enjoy them fully, if we are going to be in an area where one is. We originally joined them for their other great services and to thus belong to a group of fantastic RVers.
We have trimmed back on our camping club memberships. In all we now belong to and carry manuals, books and maps from: Coast to Coast, Escapees, Good Sam's, and KOA. Other books and maps produced by organizations and carried on-board are: Corps of Engineers campgrounds, Bureau of Land Management campgrounds, the Federal Park system, Military RV campgrounds and resort system and a Military US atlas clearly showing all the Federal, State, County and Municipal parks and campgrounds in each State. Since our campground priorities are CTC, Escapees and Military parks, those are the ones we color coded on our main atlas. If they don't work out then we get out the Good Sam's Trailer Life book and Escapees Rainbow park listings, the KOA listings and the Corps of Engineers, BLM maps/listings. Finally notes of privately owned, State, County and Municipal parks recommended by other RVers are referenced. All this takes up a cabinet of it's own and probably weighs about 40 to 50 pounds. This doesn't include another 20 to 30 pounds of books and references about things to see and do in an area. All of these are needed to decide upon a campground to stay at and what to do while we are there. Often it is the other way around. We look at what there is to do and see and then revert to the campground references to decide where home is going to be for a week or two. I think our printed reference library is between from typical to small compared to other fulltime RVers. Our computer reference library probably contains as much additional information but does not duplicate much of the hard copy library.
I hope you can see travelling in an RV home is not anything like moving from one Howard Johnson motel to another. To enjoy it the most, one must fully research where home is going to be for awhile and what there is to do and see after setting up camp. Where to stock up on groceries and supplies, without getting taken by a tourist trap also needs to be considered, all the while keeping in mind we don't want to spend two or three days a week travelling in the RV. This means finding a park central to what there is to do and see while determining in advance how long we want to stay there to take it all in with the Tracker toad. In general, we have the next campground reserved in advance for a week or better before we move the RV. We have loose plans for the next two or three campgrounds and areas under consideration but no reservations. We don't want to get locked in that far in advance because deciding to stay on longer or shorter causes just too many things to reverse and rearrange. Then again, we have 3 months of reservations in Florida for the winter. Those are harder to come by and early commitment is a necessity unless you intend to get stuck paying through the nose at the last minute (more like month).
Chances are we'll also have reservations, backed up with a non returnable check card charge, at least a month in advance for Labor Day, and Thanksgiving weekends. Come to think of it, Labor Day is just a month away. Telling Susan that just started a flurry of books coming out of the storage cabinet. She's mumbling something about Iowa, Escapees park and "firm reservations" . I know what she's going to be doing for the next few hours, since Iowa is well South of us and we are going North to the Minnesota, Lake Superior peninsula from here for two weeks. We depart here in the morning, our CTC, 7 day limitation being over. Staying on here would mean going from $4.00 a day to $25.00 a day and we've already enjoyed seeing and doing everything there is around here.
If you would like to respond to the author of this article or to comment on it please send an Email to LMCHANEY@concentric.net