When I was a kid and travelled with my family in the truck camper we made a trip to Yellowstone National Park. I was fascinated but what I saw there and remembered it vividly.
Since then I have wanted to go with Kory and show him all of Yellowstone’s coolness, uhhh I mean hotness.
For those of you who have been I’m confident our video will bring back great memories, and for those of you who have not, I think you will put Yellowstone on your bucket list, if you haven’t already.
Now, everybody travels a little differently and that is the glorious thing about RVing, but this video talks about a few BIG MISTAKES we made on our Yellowstone Tour.
Our RV Sometimer Lifestyle has us coming and going on pretty flexible terms. It suits us to not make really detailed or committed plans. Until our way doesn’t match up with the destination’s way.
Yellowstone National Park is one of the country’s most unique and popular National Parks. According to their stats website, they received 4,114,999 visitors in 2018. Most of those visitors are coming in the summer months (May-Sept). We were there in Oct 2018 and they logged 218,076 visitors that month. We for sure saw the difference because we were able to drive the Beaver all over and park almost everywhere. That is about the only smart thing we did!
Like I said we aren’t the best at Pre-Planning so I wanted to give you some pointers that would have made our tour go much more smoothly.
- Make sure you give yourself 4-5 days minimum, if you actually want to see the whole park. You could easily stay longer.
- If you plan to stay inside the Park you will need to go during the busiest season to have the most options but because there are so many people there it will be hard to secure a spot so you will need to book waaay in advance. In the off season the same applies because there may be less people but there are also less sites open. So the point is, book waaay in advance.
- You could plan to stay outside of the park but, from what we saw, you should plan to book something outside of the West Entrance to cut your driving time down each day and we suspect the same applies to availability.
- Be prepared to drive far each day to see different parts of the park.
- Have a regular vehicle (other then your RV) to drive around. We wish we would have rented a car like we normally do at a destination.
- Spend the time doing the research to get the most out of your Yellowstone time and to be sure you are prepared to handle whatever trade-offs you choose.
HERE’S THE BIG QUESTION!
What are you willing to give up in order to get something else at Yellowstone?
- Masses of people OR small/next to no people
- Warm weather OR cold possibly snowy weather
- Seeing all of the sites OR maybe just a few and coming back again
Unfortunately, we can’t have it all! Sorry folks! So plan better than we did. I know you can do it. There’s lots of resources out there and here is one from a super reliable source, The American Field Trip. I have been following them for a long time now and besides being great photographers and having the cutest kids, they are experts on National Parks so check out their Guide to Yellowstone.
We’d love to hear of your experiences or mistakes if you have been to Yellowstone and if nothing else I hope you enjoy our views.
