West Quest Part Deux - Day 24
Garyowen, Montana to Anaconda, Montana
Friday, 2 September 2022
This morning we departed Garyowen, Montana for Anaconda, Montana, which makes me think of something I’ve been meaning to explain to my readers. Some of you might be wondering how we pick the towns were stay in and why?
Traveling in a car from hotel to hotel is a totally different beast than travel in an RV. With a car, it’s easy to know how many miles you typically like to do in a day, find a hotel you can live with, and stop. Other than unanticipated traffic or weather, there aren’t that many variables.
With an RV, there is a bit more travel planning to consider and this is where modern RV travel planning software is a game-changer. It’s still complicated and time-consuming though.
I use RV Life Pro Trip Wizard and swear by it. First, you establish some key trip settings such as average hours per day or distance you wish to drive each day. We prefer the average hours per day as we do not like more than about four hours of actual driving in one day. With sightseeing and meal stops, this means about six hours on the road. For me, mileage can be apples and oranges depending on if you are on long straight flat roads in Iowa or curvy mountain roads in Montana.
With average hours set in the software, it then shows you, based on speed limits, terrain, etc, a “blob” radius for how far that will get you. For example, here were my campsite options for today’s trip starting from 7th Ranch RV Park in Garyowen, Montana (I added a pink hexacon to the screen shot to aid your eye in finding the middle) to wherever based on an average of four hours of driving:
The green icons are campgrounds, and you can filter those further based on type of amenities they have, star ratings, etc. Then it’s a matter of selecting one near the edge of the blob along the route you are traveling, then going to their web site and seeing if they even have availability. Sometimes they do not, or in the case of state and national parks, may not allow reservations. We typically avoid those as we don’t want to take the chance on no availability. That said, on Sunday night we are going to take our chances on a park in Idaho that I really want to stay at. We’ll see what happens.
Once I figure out our overnight stays and sightseeing stops, I can display the map like this:
Here’s what you are looking at: On the far right is Badlands Interior Campground where we stayed on from Day 18 and Day 19. The second campground from the right is our stay the Rapid City / Black Hills KOA Holiday on Day 20, Day 21 and Day 22. The red circle with the D is for Devils Tower — a manual sightseeing stop I added for Day 23. By adding that manual stop, the planning software accounted for the slight detour off of I-90 that it took to get there. This then become part of “the blob” calculation on total distance we could travel without busting our desired four hour maximum on that day. On today’s trip, our destination is not a campground, so it shows up as the red manual sightseeing stop on the left. Old Works is one of only two Jack Nicklaus-designed public golf courses in the world and they encourage RV camping in their parking lot for free. We discovered this opportunity through our Harvest Hosts membership and wow is it a gem of a place to stay! The other red dot, in Billings, is Magic City Gun Dogs, a breeder of German Shorthair Pointers we wanted to check out today. The final green dot on the far left is tomorrow’s destination, Yellowrock Campground in Lolo, Montana. More on why just the short travel tomorrow in tomorrow’s post.
That’s a short summary of how we select campgrounds. We know how many hours we want to travel, we add sightseeing stops, then try and find a campground that looks like it will be nice and has availability. the software is invaluable for that.
As we passed Butte, Montana today, we were shocked at the enormous amount of obvious strip mining that has taken place there.
A little quick research revealed that what we were looking at is known as “The Richest Hill on Earth.” It is also one of the largest ecological disasters in our nation’s history.
As we approached Anaconda, we could very clearly see one of the tallest free-standing brick structures in the world, the Anaconda smelter smoke stack, a legacy of the legendary Anaconda Copper Company where the copper ore from Butte was processed. The fact that all of this history came together for us here was just luck based on what I had calculated with the trip planning software.
That’s it for today. See you tomorrow!
This was awesome today Scott…thanks. I just mentioned to Em the other day that I wondered how you find and pick your campgrounds!