America the Beautiful Annual Pass

Planning Pearls for Your Small Travel Trailer Adventures

https://scampgrounds.com/wp-content/themes/osmosis/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 gavin gavin https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/9de79417d52cde759ffedf503509748a?s=96&d=mm&r=g March 2, 2021 October 25, 2021

By: gavin

March 2, 2021

Planning Pearls for Your Small Travel Trailer Adventures

Having a small travel trailer means you are now free to travel the world (or maybe at least your continent)! Interesting side note — although North and South America are treated as separate continents in the seven-continent model, they may also be viewed as a single continent known as America. So, for all of us living in America, we have tremendous travel options for exploring with our small travel trailers…if you dare!

The first thing to do once you get your small travel trailer is to figure out what type of travel you want to do. If you’re like me, you’re probably interested in exploring State and National Parks. Starting in your home state is a good strategy because you won’t be too far from home if something happens and you need to regroup. On our first preliminary “shake down” overnight trip to Palm Desert, just a couple hours drive away from our home in San Diego, we discovered we couldn’t get our hot water heater to work! Fortunately, we were close to home and only had booked one night (which we spent without hot water). I called Scamp when we returned home and we discovered a hidden on/off switch at the hot water heater on our Scamp 13’ which the factory was supposed to turn on! In any case, I highly recommend taking your first few trips close to home so you are prepared in case something happens.

To discover which State and National Parks are in your home state, visit your State Parks website and the National Parks website. The National Parks website has a search function for National Parks by state. Google maps is a good tool once you find some parks you are interested in to get an idea of where the parks are and the drive time to each park. It’s also a good idea to check monthly weather for the location to make sure it won’t be too hot or too cold the month you plan on going. This is especially important for popular parks for which it is generally a good idea to reserve months in advance (5 – 6 months out for National Parks). For strategies on how to secure a popular campground, see my article “Winning Yosemite’s Campground Reservations Online Lottery”. On your first visit to a National Park, make sure to purchase the annual “America The Beautiful” National Park Pass. One of the best values in all of camping, this pass costs only $80 and lets you and your family (not to exceed 4 adults) into the National Parks without paying the entrance fees (typically $35 per car). You can also share the pass with family and friends (each pass can be signed by two main pass owners)!!!

Regional parks can also be great places to camp and explore. These are a bit harder to find because they are generally run by cities and counties with a variety of different types of websites and reservations systems, but online searches of different cities can uncover some of these gems. Additionally, apps like iOverlander, RV Parky, and ParkAdvisor may provide good leads on these campgrounds. Be prepared to set up online accounts for these regional parks and expect different types of online experiences. For example, one such park in California is Calico Ghost Town (a genuine old Western ghost town!). I was able to make reservations for it on the San Bernardino County Regional Parks website. This place was home to one of the largest silver strikes in California which happened in 1881. Another interesting regional park in California is Cachuma Lake which can be reserved through the Santa Barbara County Parks website. Like Calico Ghost Town, this campground requires one to sign up on the specific county website. So, you’ll find that if you do decide to visit lots of regional park campgrounds (which you should plan on!), then you will end up having numerous park website accounts (all free). So, it’s a good idea to have a great password manager that can store all these website URLs with your usernames and passwords.

We try to limit driving to no more than 4 hours to reach each campsite so that our trips are enjoyable. Sometimes we are forced to drive a bit longer, but generally never more than 5 hours (unless there is an unusual circumstance). One such circumstance was our trip last summer to Mammoth Lakes from our home in San Diego. We were forced to drive nonstop over 7 hours because stopping halfway in the desert would have meant staying overnight in our trailer (which does not have AC) in unbearably hot conditions. This is a long trip, but for a stay of a week or longer it was bearable. But, overall, we choose to follow our 4 hour rule. Another thing we like to keep in mind when planning our trips is that, for now, we currently need to Dump (main limitation is the Grey water tank) every third day. With this requirement, we try to schedule trips so that we are staying at a location with hookups or a general Dump station every three days. If that’s not possible, then we Dump during our ride to the next campsite at a service station which has a Dump station (these can be found within the apps like RV Parky or by an online search). Note: I’m currently working on a portable Grey water auxiliary storage system solution which should double our time between Dumps. Stay tuned for a future article on this system.

With the 4 hour drive time rule in mind, it’s good to have some expanded options for mid trip stay over locations between your starting point and destination. These options may include family driveways, Harvest Hosts and Boondockers Welcome locations, free BLM public land areas, and private RV campgrounds. Our favorite midway stays when travelling are either family driveways or Boondockers Welcome locations. Our first choice is staying with family because it gives us a chance to reconnect and visit without being a burden since we are self-sufficient in our Scamp 13’. We have stayed in driveways at my cousin’s in Santa Barbara and my sister’s in Oakland many times while in transit from our home in San Diego to destinations in Northern California and Oregon. We have also had great success in overnights at Boondockers Welcome locations. Please see my article “Free Stayovers with Boondockers Welcome and Harvest Hosts”. These services are available via inexpensive annual subscriptions and allow for some unique experiences like overnights at farms and wineries.

In addition to using your small travel trailer for visiting State and National Parks, another idea is to explore other settings or locations in which you have a strong interest. Of course, these can be fantastic outdoor wilderness locations, such as Lake Tahoe or the Oregon Coast (which we have enjoyed greatly). But, such trips can also include other locations which interest you such as for rock hounding, museums, amusement parks, star gazing, city touring, etc. One trip that I would like to do in the future is to stay at Gilbert Ray Campground in Tucson, AZ and visit the Pima Air & Space Museum since I love aviation. And, because I love star gazing, trips to dark skies parks (like Anza Borrego Desert State Park) are always rewarding. Another fun trip we had was a stay at Hearst San Simeon State Park which provided a great rock hounding experience (searching for moonstones on the beach in Cambria) as well as observing the elephant seals!

There are so many different ways and purposes for using your small travel trailer. And, since everyone is different, there will no doubt be a lot of different viewpoints on the best types of trips. But, however you choose to travel, there is one thing for certain –your small travel trailer will offer you a golden ticket to see the world (or at least your continent … if you dare)!

Disclaimer: You will get the same great Amazon price by clicking on the links here compared to buying directly on Amazon, but by buying here you will also be supporting the continuation of this website as we get a small commission from each sale. These are products and procedures we use for our own Scamp that we selected and developed from our own research and experiences. However, we do not endorse any specific product and cannot guarantee that the products we use are exemplary and the procedures we use are complete, accurate, detail the correct recommended procedures, or apply to your model small travel trailer. It’s always best to double check with your manufacturer or operation manuals to ensure you are doing everything correctly.

Wonder Valley (Twenty Nine Palms)

By: gavin

December 19, 2020

Wonder Valley (Twenty Nine Palms)
December 12^th – 14^th, 2020

About a 3-hour drive from San Diego and close to Palm Springs, Wonder Valley is a desert oasis in Twenty Nine Palms, California boasting wide open views and dark skies filled with billions of stars. It’s located very close to Joshua Tree National Park, which borders the Colorado and Mojave deserts. The main features of the park are the magnificent Joshua Trees which stand over 20 feet tall and the massive boulder formations which take many shapes. This is one of the few, if only, places Joshua Trees are found (some say they are also found in Jerusalem).

Although the overnight campgrounds were closed at the time of our visit due to the mandatory pandemic California shut down, the park was still open for day use. We really wanted to go not only to see Joshua Tree National Park for the first time, but also to witness the peak of the Gemenid meteor showers. Fortunately, there is a Boondockers Welcome location very close to the park entrance in Wonder Valley and the owner was very nice in accommodating us for a couple of nights! The boondocking campsite we stayed at is a very large flat paved 2 acre area butting up to the desert. There was one other travel trailer on this site when we arrived, but the area is large enough to fit 10 rigs, so we had plenty of space!

When we arrived it was very windy, but still clear and sunny. We were careful to position our Scamp 13’ small travel trailer directly into the wind to minimize buffeting of the trailer. The wind was very strong, but just blew right over us from the front of the trailer and we didn’t feel or hear much of it. Since there are no hookups at this location, we made sure to fully charge our Scamp’s batteries the day before leaving, fill our Scamp’s freshwater tank with 12 gallons of fresh water and the hot water heater with 6 gallons of fresh water, bring one full 4 gallon jug of drinking water and 2 x 6 gallon water jugs to refill our freshwater tank, bring our Jackery 500 auxiliary power bank, as well as pack our refrigerator and storage box with enough food for a few days. We found out later there is a free water spigot to supply campers’ water jugs at the Visitor’s Center at the entrance of the park on Utah Trail road. We also made sure to bring our solar panels since we would need a little help from the sun to keep our Scamp 13’ batteries charged.

We had a nice late lunch in the Scamp after arriving (some pasta cooked up on the stove) and decided to check out the Visitor’s Center. We found some really cool Joshua Tree t-shirts and spoke to some park rangers a bit. They told us the park would be closed from 10 p.m. – 5 a.m. in honor of the coronavirus curfew now in effect. Darkness falls early in December in the desert and we decided to wait until the next day (Sunday) to go into the park. It was very cold and windy in the evening (early 30’s at night), so we decided to watch a movie hoping the wind would settle (see how to watch movies in the wild). Our Scamp furnace kept us nice and toasty. The wind did quiet eventually and we were able to see some meteors! The sky at night here is very dark and the stars sparkle! The location feels very remote.

The next morning we took a little walk around our campsite in the desert. There are many interesting dilapidated shacks that dot the landscape – our Boondockers Welcome host explained to us that they are the byproduct of the Small Tract Act of 1938, a federal homestead act that deeded mostly 5-acre plots of land to distribute 457,000 acres of desert that the Bureau of Land Management deemed useless (the act was repealed in 1979). Under the guidelines, homesteaders were granted the land if they built homes no smaller than 12 x 16 feet (192 square feet). Most of these structures are tiny, currently in terrible condition, and many still have original old furnishings – we saw one with an old oven and a tea kettle still on the stove! However, some of these shacks have been renovated and we also saw the new construction of a mini-home (supposedly by a man from Texas building his “dream” home)!

After a decadent pancake breakfast in our Scamp, we headed back to the Visitor’s Center to purchase an America the Beautiful Annual Pass ($80) which allows unlimited entry into National Parks for a year as well as other government lands. We are planning on going to Death Valley National Park, Pinnacles National Park, Lassen Volcanic National Park, as well as other National Parks this year, so having the pass will save a lot on entrance fees (currently $30 per car at Joshua Tree National Park). Driving into the park was easy and there are places to stop along the roads. Based on the time of year and the strict pandemic orders, there were hardly any visitors during our trip. There are a lot of very interesting trails, plants (including Joshua Trees), and rock formations to keep one busy for days. We saw Skull Rock which looks like it sounds and completed an easy 2 mile hike to Split Rock. We really didn’t have enough time to see everything and, in turn, we plan to come back in April with friends and will stay inside the park at Jumbo Rocks campground. Joshua Tree National Park is definitely a must visit if only to see the curiously interesting and one-of-a-kind Joshua trees!