Introduction

This is the tale of my three-month visit to North America, with a brief stay in the Caribbean. It was a trip of a lifetime, covering 24 US states, 7 Canadian Provinces, driving 9,500 miles (15,000km) in a campervan, taking 17 flights, and staying in over 40 different places. I was blessed to be able to spend time with family and friends scattered across the countries, and visited many amazing national parks and other scenic spots.

It was about five months in the planning, first mapping out a route that took in the people and places I wanted to visit, deciding on appropriate transport, working out how far I would be able to get each day, then finding (and booking) places that had good reviews to stay at each night, and investigating scenic stops and hikes throughout the route. Being someone who likes things to be planned, I compiled a 42 page document with all this information in it!

I had considered flying to different places and hiring a car at each place to get to see some of the national parks, but some were not very close to airports, and it would have been a lot of getting and returning cars. In the end I decided on hiring a campervan to do a large part of the trip, starting a few days in, and going for about seven and a half weeks, mainly in the US, but also in parts of Canada. I had never travelled in a campervan before, but it proved to be an excellent experience.

Many places in the US are crowded, and booking some campsites, especially in national parks, had to be done many months in advance, sometimes at exact times, as some sold out in minutes or even seconds after bookings opened several months ahead. In the end I booked most campsites a long time before I left, which proved to be a good plan, as many were fully booked when I arrived. There were a few I tried to book in advance five or six months ahead, which I found I’d already missed out on, as they were booked out perhaps even a year in advance.

Even spending three months over there, I didn’t have time to drive everywhere in the van, and in a lot of the later part of the trip I was staying with family, so didn’t need the accommodation of the campervan any more. Also driving to the Caribbean would have involved getting wet! So I booked flights for the remainder of the trip, and arranged for hire of four cars in different places.

I had made a list of all the things that I would need while camping, and bought a few smaller items to take with me, planning on buying all the other things when I got there. The van I’d hired didn’t have a backing camera, and I didn’t fancy the idea of backing into campsites without one.

So I got a second hand GoPro on eBay (after one false start getting and returning a broken one), which could interface with my phone, and a magnetic holder so I could put it on the van when I was backing into a campsite or some tricky spot, and see what was going on via the phone. I also got a magnetic light to help with backing in the dark.

Departure date came, arriving very quickly toward the end, and my story starts from there.