How to Road Trip Through the PNW

Winding our home on wheels around impossibly high mountain roads through national parks and beach towns in the Pacific Northwest was one of the most magical and memorable vacations I’ve ever had in my life. Partly because, duh, reread the first sentence. But partly because it contained a lot of “firsts.” It was my first vacation with the love of my life. It was our first time driving and functioning in an RV. It was our first time in the Pacific Northwest. It was our first time independently planning a vacation to somewhere we’d never been. Encountering all of these “firsts” as a team is a huge part of what made our vacation feel so special.

But it also proved to be a major learning experience. This trip did not just happen at the purchase of a plane ticket. Joel and I went through some long hours of tedious planning to arrive at our “perfect vacation” to the PNW. I mean we had a nine-page shared Google doc and an Excel sheet detailing our itinerary, food options, campsite locations, budget, and other important information. In this blog, I will discuss some of the questions I’ve been getting about how we planned our trip, including details about RV life, financial logistics, hiking ideas, and overall pros and cons of how, in 13 days, we took on what we deemed “Oregashington.”

Trip Route

I guess before I start on any tips and tricks, I should tell you what our trip looked like. Go ahead and visualize a little map of Oregon and Washington in your head and I’ll tell you about the cute little circle we made around the PNW. First, we flew into Portland, OR, where we stayed the night in an Air B&B, bought groceries, and picked up our RV. From there we drove north to Mount Rainier National Park in Washington, where we spent two days. Then we drove northwest through Tacoma and into Seattle, WA, where we spent two days. Then we drove west to The Brother’s Greenhouses (The Hobbit Home) and continued westward to the Olympic National Forest. We spent two days there, then proceeded southwest down the pacific coast, where we stopped at Cannon Beach for a day. Then we drove southeast, all the way across to Mount Hood National Park in Oregon, where we spent two days. Then we started back to Portland and spent a day stopping at viewpoints and waterfalls on highway 30. We spent two days exploring Portland, then returned our RV, threw away an entire pack of bacon, and flew home. Are you tired yet? I’m mostly just really sad about the bacon.

Why an RV?

In order to get the “full experience” of hiking our way through the PNW, we decided it would be the most fun and appropriate to rent an RV through RV Share. Given the alternate cost of an Air B&B and a rental car, plus cleaning fees each day, it shook out to be almost the same price. The RV was still a little bit more expensive ($150 a day), but given the mobile nature of our trip route, we thought the convenience, freedom, and fun of having our life on wheels would be worth the extra money. (What we did not take into account was the cost of city transportation and campsite parking, but I will get to this later).

I can say in hindsight that I definitely don’t regret this decision. We are officially hooked on RV life. Getting to wake up in the woods, drink coffee on a tree stump, and fall asleep moments after having a campfire in the middle of nowhere was severely worth it. The smallness and simplicity of our quarters made the trip feel extra intimate and cozy. It was just me, my love, and everything we needed to eat, sleep, and shower, in the woods! What could be a better way to relax?

RV Life

Speaking of relaxing. It was not all fun and games. Living in an RV comes with a whole new set of chores. You have to relearn how to cook, shower, and use the bathroom. And suddenly you become a whole lot more sparing with water, gas, and electricity. You have to learn how to hook up and unhook your sewage and water, how to consistently test the levels of propane, fresh water, black water, and battery, what appliances you can use when the RV is turned off, and what you have to turn on the generator to use – because I learned that things in an RV all run off different energy sources: either the battery, propane, or the generator. (I think? I’m still learning).

Also, you always have to clean. Because you literally cannot move the RV until the sink and stove are covered, and the slides are pulled in. But in order to do that, any loose items must be stowed tightly in their locking cabinets and drawers. And in order to do that, all your dishes have to be clean, trash thrown out, and clothes put away. Besides there are not enough square inches of space to tolerate clutter in a tiny RV anyways.

I know it all sounds like a lot, but the learning curve was not that steep. Our RV Share renter gave us a quick little hour-long crash course before we took off, and Joel had watched some YouTube videos prior. We were both total rookies and by the third or fourth day, we were camping like pros. And believe it or not, doing all the chores together made for some fun bonding time and teamwork!

Campsites vs. Boondocking

Living in an RV changes in ease depending on if you are hooked up (to sewage and water) at a campsite or if you are dry camping or “boondocking” (parked in the middle of literally nowhere). Each has their pros and cons.

Campsites are more populated (ew, people), and they also cost money (which we kind of forgot to budget for when we were deciding between Air B&Bs or RVs). However, being hooked up at a campsite is nice because you can take long showers, turn on the AC, use the microwave freely, and poop to your heart’s content.

Some campsites are quite affordable ($25-$30 a night), but some can be really bougie and expensive ($60-$65 a night). We accidentally got one of those bougie ones when we were camping in Portland, and I really didn’t like it. The lady was really persnickety, and all those shiny crisp RVs lined up in rows just looked a little too civilized for “camping” in my opinion. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought we were in one of those fancy HOA subdivisions that don’t let you put up colored Christmas lights and force you to landscape your yard. I didn’t like how many people were there, and that I couldn’t feel comfortable walking out of the camper in my PJs in the morning. I guess I’m a boondocking kind of girl.

Boondocking is not so bad if you are only doing it for one or two nights. But if you go too long without hookups, eventually you will run out of fresh water and fill up your sewage tank, and you will have to stop at a random pull off on the side of the road with a solitary water spicket at 1:00 in the morning, which I’m pretty sure was put there by God himself as the modern day water spewing from the spring in Lehi. However, you do get to wake up to a picturesque landscape where there is much more privacy. Being in the middle of nowhere is a special kind of freedom that is 100% worth holding in your poop for. It was so nice to just crank open the windows and let nature’s night air do the cooling, all for the price of zero dollars!

If you want some help finding both dry and hookup campsites near your destinations, we had great luck with Freecampsites.net, Campendium, Park Advisor, and Freeroam.

RV Driving

I can’t speak much for the technique of driving the thing because Joel did all the driving (I was master “go-get-this-from-the-back-associate”). But the driving seemed to go pretty smoothly for the most part. I mean, when you trade out your 4-door compact car for a 28-foot camper, you suddenly realize there are roads you can no longer drive on, bumps you can’t get over, and small spaces you can’t fit into. These were never issues we couldn’t overcome, but they nonetheless got some sweat, a broken antenna, and two replaced tires out of us (cha-ching cha-ching). Here’s a good tip: if the road looks like bad news, chances are it is, and you shouldn’t try it.

Also, when you’re driving, be prepared for everything to squeak. This probably wouldn’t be the case with newer RV’s, but in our little 2006 B Touring Cruiser, it sounded like we were traveling with an entire host of mice. Eventually you get so used to it you forget it’s there, especially if you crank the music loud enough to cover it up, which I’m sure your ear drums would not be mad at you for at all.

RV Parking

Parking really isn’t so bad in the national parks, because most of those areas are constructed with camping in mind. There was usually enough open space to take up a few regular parking spaces, and some of the lots had designated RV spots. Parking was never an issue on the days we were in nature. The city, however, was a different story.

A commonsense word of advice would be: do not take your RV into a downtown area. There is zero parking for anything other than a compact car. Unfortunately, our itinerary included four total days in the city, which left us a little at a loss with what to do about transportation. There was no cost-effective way to get around it. Either we rented a car for those days or racked up a bunch of money in Ubers and Lime Scooters.

For any of you reading that want to road trip in an RV, the best way to do it is to tow a car behind you, so you have easy mobility. But since we flew to the PNW that was not a cost-effective option for us. Believe it or not, it was actually cheaper to rent a car off Priceline at $40 a day, than it was to Uber and Lime around at about $100 a day for the days we were in Seattle and Portland. These ended up being pricey add-on’s that we had not originally budgeted for. Now we know, and so do you!

Expenses

Overall, the things the proved to be unexpectedly expensive/unbudgeted for were overpriced campsites, city transportation, overpriced food in the cities, unexpected RV repairs, and filling up our gas guzzling tank at about $75 per stop (well we did expect this one, but that did not change the anxiety we felt each time the numbers on the gas pump escalated at an alarming rate). However, where we saved money was in having our car and hotel in one, having the ability to store and cook our own food, boondocking at free campsites, and not having to pay any cleaning fees.

I don’t think we necessarily saved money by choosing to rent an RV instead of Air B&Bs. But I also don’t think we spent much more money than we would have getting a new Air B&B in a new location every other night, plus renting a car for 13 days, with a bunch of cleaning fees. Besides, the convenience of being able to camp inside the national parks saved us a ton of time, and time is money. It was also just overall way more fun and adventurous feeling! Given the mobile nature of our trip route, it wasn’t going to be cheap vacation. Perhaps in the future when we own an RV and can tow a car, then it will be more cost effective. But there is a first time for everything, and this was an amazing learning experience to prelude many more trips like this one!

Planning Strategies

How do you even begin making a bucket list for two states you’ve never even gone near? Well, Google is our friend here. But beyond that, featuring itemized lists of best things to do in any given city you search, Atlas Obscura was an incredibly useful tool. Instagram was also useful, though it required more active digging. On Instagram, I would search various locations and hashtags like #seattle #portland #seattlefood #portlandfood #pnw #pnwtourist, etc, etc, etc. From there I would find pictures that looked interesting. Usually the pictures had a location tag, hashtag, or comment noting where they were taken. It was pretty involved and time-consuming research – think of all the rabbit holes that can happen on Instagram. But it paid off with some nice little gems on our trip, like BAES Fried Chicken, Rowena Crest, Ophelia’s Books, and The Seattle Selfie Museum.

How to Find Hiking Spots

I don’t even want to talk about how small of a percentage of the state parks we actually got to hike. Though more than half our trip was hiking, we hit up three separate national parks, and two beaches, which equals endless miles of exploring potential. In a perfect world we would have spent a week in each state park. But we knew we needed settle for “highlight” trails that would help us sample enough of each state park to leave us semi-content.

For this we used two resources: Travel blogs and All Trails. First, in order to narrow down our options and get a general idea of what areas we wanted to hike in, we searched “Best places to hike in … Mount Rainier/Olympic National Forest/Mount Hood/What Have You.” This would pull up a series of travel blogs that we spent a few hours combing through and writing down places we thought looked cool.

Once we had a general idea of where in the parks we wanted to hike, we used detailed paper maps and the All Trails app to actually find trail heads and calculate mileage. Both the travel blogs and All Trails noted the time each trail took to hike, so that was very useful in planning how much hiking we could do in a day.

We found the best way to make use of our hiking time was to only drive when it was dark. For the most part we would hike all day, then get back to the RV and drive a few hours to our next destination. The next morning, we would wake up to a surprising new landscape and start a new day of hiking! This plan conserved prime daylight pretty well and allowed us to see a lot in 13 days.

Mapping and Ordering Your Itinerary

The most daunting part of planning the trip was definitely figuring out how we were going to do all the things we had found in our research. It was obvious that if we wanted to do everything on our list, we would need at least a month in the PNW, and we had 13 days. So we started a “saved places” list on Google maps, and pinned the locations of every single thing on our bucket list. Once we had a visual of where everything was in relation to each other, it was easier to draft an imaginary route through the PNW, and to cut out random things that were too far off that route.

Bear in mind, we also had to take into account when we could hit certain areas based on their hours of operation and the time we would be arriving, which means we had to calculate mileage and driving time in advance. It was incredibly tedious, and there really was no good place to start, because the whole itinerary was completely up to us.

The realm of possibility was incredibly daunting, but we just had to jump in and start picking away. It took many long hours in my bedroom to get it right and we spent some serious grief over how much we had to cut. But to the light of my earth, cilantro, and hops candle, and with enough helpings of apple slices and peanut butter, we finally got a plan in order that we were content with. In hindsight, I can say that hard work pays off, because that hard-earned plan proved to be nothing short of awesome.

Change vs. Wouldn’t Change

Looking back on the trip, something I would change would be spending less time in the city and more time hiking. We only spent a total of four days in the two cities, but I think one day in each would have been enough to satisfy our need for culture and food. The nature was just so amazing that it was hard to be wowed by any city after that. I would also make sure we either towed or rented a car for times we were in the city.

I would not change the decision to rent an RV, or the decision to travel to multiple national parks (as opposed to spending all our time in one). I liked that we got to see such a variety of natural wonders. I was also glad that as two type perfectionistic type 1’s, we uncharacteristically found the value in choosing to do what we wanted to do over what we should do, or what someone else had done. Because it was nobody’s vacation but ours. I was glad we permitted ourselves to create the trip we wanted to take, and not the trip we saw on Instagram. So make sure you take the trip you want to take and not the trip we took!

Closing Thoughts

Overall, I can say this is not a trip for the faint-hearted or the lazy. A trip this full of awesome stuff doesn’t just happen by itself (unless you are rolling enough to pay for a vacation planner). It definitely isn’t as easy as sitting on the beach for a week or taking a chill weekend trip to Gatlinburg. It takes a lot of thorough research and diligent planning.

We had to think of everything from mapping an efficient, yet flexible route around the PNW, to learning how to dump, fill, drive, and function in an RV, and everything in between. It really was the whole shebang, and we could not have done it without each other bringing different strengths to the table in our research (You can call us “Jaley’s Travel Agency!”) But we knew the more work we put in ahead of time, the more fun, smooth, and relaxing our vacation would go once we were finally there. And I can definitely say it was 110% worth the effort.

Thanks to our hard work and tedious planning, we really did have the trip of a lifetime. It was so special, so adventurous, so wonderous, and so magical. And to think, that is only the first of many! I can only imagine what sorts of trips we shall take as we sharpen our travel experience, build our budget, and improve our planning skills.

We truly could not have done it without all the wonderful technology we are so fortunate to have at our fingertips. This trip happened all thanks to Google, Youtube, Instagram, Uber, Lime, Lyft, RV Share, Atlas Obscura, All Trails, Freecampsites.net, Campendium, Park Advisor, Freeroam, Kayak, Air B&B, and Priceline. This is not an ad, I’m just truly grateful for how many possibilities technology propagates, that two twenty-five-year-olds could plan a full two-week trip to a stranger destination so thoroughly and independently.

If you have gotten to the end of this blog, it shows that you are already on the diligent path to planning your own RV trip! Thanks so much for reading, and let me know in the comments if you have any other questions!

And if you want to check out our trip in real time, check out the vlog here!

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