This is our story of how we got into RVing, found out about Thousand Trails, and why I’ve built this website.
In the beginning….
In the Spring of 2021 my wife, like many, was working from home due to COVID-19. At that time and after her working remotely for nearly a year, we thought that this arrangement may be coming to an end soon. She liked the flexibility that working from home allowed her as well as the time savings of not having to commute 20-30 minutes to her office. She requested to work permanently remote and after a little back and forth negotiation on a few items, she was granted the request.
We have long talked about how if we were to win the lottery, and money was no object, we’d love to travel the country in an RV and rather than having the kids read about history in books, we could live it! Visit Washington D.C., Gettysburg battlefield, etc. Then one day shortly after her getting approval to work permanently remote, it dawned on me. WE CAN DO THIS.
The Talk
The next day I approached the subject. We talked about how we could make it work, what we’d do with our house, etc. At this point we didn’t even own an RV. We came up with the idea to rent an RV for our two week summer vacation to kind of test it out. We started doing some brainstorming and decided we wanted to make our way from Kansas to Yellowstone for vacation.
I had a 1/2 ton pickup that was lowered and not set up for towing, so I began looking at motorhomes to rent. After a bit of searching and calculating I figured that renting a motorhome was going to cost around $3000 for the 2 week vacation, taking into account the additional mileage fees that we would incur. After some discussion, we got the idea that we could probably buy an used camper, take it on our summer vacation, and if we didn’t like RVing we could sell the camper and probably not lose more than $3000.
Finding The RV
We decided to dip our toe into the RVing world with a stop at the local Camper World just to see what our options were. We looked at Class A, Class C, Super Cs, 5th wheels and Travel Trailers. Accommodating our 2 kids and 2 large dogs were the main factors we took into account. We quickly found that bunkhouse models were checking most of the boxes. The motorhomes were SUPER expensive and, having previously owned a motorhome some 15 years ago, I was pretty sure I didn’t want to maintain a separate vehicle.
We left Camping World with a much better idea of what we wanted (and what we didn’t) as well as an idea of the price range we were looking at for something new. When we got home, my wife was browsing through Facebook and up popped an ad for an RV right in the little town we live in (I swear Facebook and Amazon are listening to us). We read through the ad, and sure enough it was a bunkhouse travel trailer! We contacted the owners and met them about 30 minutes later and looked over the trailer and made a deal to purchase it. They even delivered it to us since my truck wasn’t going to be able to tow it.
Initial RV Trip
Later that week I bought a newer truck, a 2013 Ram 2500. I had been thinking of upgrading trucks anyways since my old truck had nearly 200k miles on it. Over the next few weeks we did some work on the trailer and on Father’s Day weekend we took our first trip to the lake with it. It was 103 degrees that day but we made it the 45 miles to the lake and had a good time. We stayed nearby incase we forgot something and made a couple of trips to Walmart to get some supplies that we had overlooked. The camper only had 1 AC unit, but that was able to cool off the camper in an acceptable amount of time. We learned quite a few things on this first trip that prepared us for our summer vacation.
In the time leading up to our vacation I continued to do research on all things RVing. I got new sewer hoses, water hoses, tire pressure monitoring system, battery, a new grill, an extra spare tire (for a total of 2), a topper for the pickup, a generator and a lot more.
Research Research Research
As you can see, we kind of jumped into this whole RV thing head first. However, we also immediately started doing research on how to make this work. We joined several Full Time RVing groups on Facebook. Watched numerous Youtube videos about pretty much everything RV related. During this research, it became apparent that finding camping spots in parks can get expensive real fast. That’s when I heard about and started looking into Thousand Trails. I joined a few more Thousand Trails Facebook groups. It sounds like there is good and bad with Thousand Trails, just like there is with everything in life.
The other BIG concern with our plan is internet. In order for my wife to work remotely we have to have internet. For the kids to do school online, we need internet. And for a lot of our entertainment, internet is nice. So internet is not optional for this whole thing to work. I began looking at the options and there are 3 general options: 1) Park wifi, 2)Starlink 3)Cellular mobile data.
Park wifi
Based on my research, park wifi sucks most of the time. It might be OK to check email and surf a few websites, but not good enough to stream video-conference calls, play video gams, and watch streaming movies.
Starlink
Starlink sounds like it will be a great internet solution in the future. There are some RVers that are using it now, but it sounds a little cumbersome. You have to tell the system where you are every time you move. Then you may or may not be able to get on the system depending if they have “open spots”. Plus you have to have clear line of site to where ever the satellite is overhead. In the future, I’m sure this will be THE way to go, but for now I don’t think it’s quite there yet.
Cell data
Finally, that leads us the final solution: Cellular mobile data. Basically using the same towers/system that provides service to your cell phone. You can do this in several ways: just use your cell phone, use the “mobile hotspot” feature on many phones, get a mobile hotspot, or get a mobile router.
Our Solution
Our internet solution we’re going to try first is using cell data. I’ve ordered a mobile hotspot and a new sim card for it. I’ll be testing it out over the next couple of months to see how it performs before we go full time. The mobile hotspot I chose is the Netgear Nighthawk M1 Mobile Hotspot. This modem had external antenna ports which, I’m told, is a key to getting better signal.
Network
I’ll be using this on the Verizon network. Looking at the 3 major carriers networks (AT&T, Verizon, and T-mobile) Verizon seems to provide the best nationwide coverage and hope that it will allow us to have good internet as we travel. Some folks will have sim cards from all 3 carriers so that if one carrier isn’t performing well, they can switch networks and carry on.
The other concern with Cell Data is how much data you use. Most cellular data plans have caps on them and/or get very expensive. I’m working on a solution to that and will update you with my findings.
Putting it all together
Based on all this research, our plan is to travel the country staying, primarily, at Thousand Trails parks and use cellular data for internet. This is where this website was born from. I wanted to know what the cell coverage was for all of the Thousand Trails parks. Some people on Facebook reported that it wasn’t good at some parks. Others had good success at other parks. I didn’t want to drive several hundred miles and arrive at a park that won’t work and have to scramble to find a place that has availability and has cell coverage.
Rather than doing the research on cell coverage at all of the Thousand Trails campgrounds and keeping it all to myself, I decided to post it on this website. You can see the coverage at each park here.