How AI Finds Our Campsites (and Why I Still Double-Check)

This summer, we were headed to a campground in Colorado that, according to our plan, had full hookups. We discovered right before we arrived that it had none. The AI had read a review somewhere, someone had mentioned hookups, and it ran with it. It never checked Recreation.gov. It just assumed.

We were able to get fresh water, at least, and we worked around the rest. But it was the perfect example of something I already knew. I always have to double-check everything and every plan. And now I make the AI double-check too.

So we gave it a standing rule. Whenever it researches a campground or a campsite, it goes to the actual source, whether that’s Recreation.gov or Reserve America for a lot of the state parks. A stranger’s review is not the source. That being said, strangers’ reviews can be extremely helpful in picking out particular campsites. And AI can still mess up, which is exactly why I check.

That one rule has made a huge difference, because now we’re working with real information, always.

What a campsite has to do

When we’re out in the Brinkley, a campsite has three jobs, in no particular order, because each one’s important:

• Privacy. We don’t need to be out in the middle of nowhere, but it’s nice not staring at strangers’ campers.
• The view. Of course. The view is what makes the entire experience feel special.
• Room. There has to be enough room to roll out the mat and film some yoga. Is there room to spread out?

Once the AI knows a site is actually there and actually open, it keeps going. It pulls up the satellite view and looks at each site the way we would if we were standing on it. Where does the sun hit? Is there shade? It checks each one against our priorities. Honestly, it’s pretty neat, and it really isn’t that hard.

I have three non-negotiables for every AI that helps us. You can never guess. You can never assume. And you can never make anything up.

Do we trust a campsite we’ve only seen in the plan? Typically, yes, we do. But we don’t pretend not to care. We absolutely go looking for photos. We’re constantly in Google Maps on the satellite view, checking how a campground is laid out. We go to RV Trip Wizard and all the different review sites. (Yes, those same review sites. They’re great for picking out a site. The facts still come from the source.) Very rarely can we actually see the specific site we’re trying to find, but we get close.

Of course, the real world doesn’t always cooperate. At Navajo State Park we were reading review after review, trying to figure out which site was which, and it was a little confusing. It turns out the park had renumbered everything, so the site numbers in all those reviews no longer matched anything. Thankfully, or unthankfully (whatever you want to call it), the park was pretty crowded, so there weren’t many choices anyway. We just picked one of the sites that was open, no research and no satellite view. Sometimes that’s how it goes.

Shade, sky and Starlink

You’d think shade and Starlink would fight all the time, since the dish needs open sky. Honestly, it’s rarely been an issue. The one real exception was Pine Flat Campground, up in Oak Creek Canyon just north of Sedona. It was so wooded that getting a signal was quite the challenge.

A few times we’ve had to set the dish so far from the trailer to find open sky that we lost the connection inside. So for those days we put a router inside the trailer, and we’re back in business.

We do lean toward shade a little, especially somewhere hot. Shade saves battery. It keeps us cool, and it keeps our dog Rindo comfortable. But we don’t need it. The Brinkley is a pretty self-sufficient machine.

Sky still matters, though, and not only for the internet. Escalante Canyon was on our list for one trip, and it got cut for a handful of reasons. First, I’ll admit we didn’t get to research it very much. But it sounded very narrow, and unless a canyon happens to run perfectly east and west, a narrow one doesn’t get a whole lot of light. It was going to be chilly too. Not freezing, but cold enough that going most of the day without sunshine would really hurt.

Then, looking at the maps, it seemed like a lot of the campsites sat right along the main road. We never went, so I can’t say for sure. But road noise is exactly the kind of thing we work hard to stay away from.

So we figured, you know what, we can come back to Escalante Canyon some other time when it’s a little warmer. For now, let’s go find someplace with a dome sky instead of a slot sky.

When the plan breaks in the driveway

Our big trip at the end of August broke before we ever left home.

We’d just put new solar and a new 460 amp hour battery on the Brinkley with Steve from RV Fix It, who is absolutely wonderful (I’d highly recommend him). When we went to pick up the trailer, we couldn’t get the batteries to turn on. So I hooked it up to the truck, just to get the tongue jack working, and brought it home to the driveway. Then I called Steve.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and he was out in his own RV, but he came in anyway. We couldn’t figure it out. We were supposed to leave first thing Monday morning, so he came back Monday, and we still couldn’t figure it out. It just didn’t make any sense. He tried calling Brinkley, but they were in a staff development meeting.

On Tuesday Steve came back a third time, and this time he got through to the Brinkley service team. They were extremely helpful, and we solved it right away. It was a small grounding issue. That was it.

That little ground cost us two days, and something had to go. We really wanted to start at the Great Sand Dunes. But we had to cut something, so we cut the beginning and drove straight through to our first stop, Penitente Canyon.

That’s where the AI really earned its keep. We did a lot of back and forth with it on how to save the trip, and it came back with five or six different versions of the route. We researched all of them, and going straight to Penitente made the most sense.

Places nobody has heard of

And honestly, that’s one of my favorite things about planning this way. We keep finding places we’d never heard of, and almost everybody we talk to has never heard of them either. Phenomenal diamonds in the rough. Little gems sitting in the middle of pure gloriousness.

The AI knows what we love, and it really takes its time looking for somewhere we’re going to love too. It’s really impressive.

I can’t say nobody has heard of them, obviously. But a lot of people have never heard of Penitente Canyon, and it was just phenomenal. Same with Hovenweep National Monument, which was unbelievably cool. And those are just the two off the top of my head. The list goes on.

Sometimes the gem isn’t hidden at all. It’s just one we somehow never got around to. Erin and I both grew up in Colorado, and neither of us had ever been to Mesa Verde. Not once.

We were camped at Mancos State Park on that same trip when the AI piped up. Hey, Mesa Verde is less than an hour from here. Do you want to go? Erin and I were like, yeah, let’s do it. We jumped online, found tickets and went on over.

It was awesome. Really, really amazing, and very humbling to stand there and witness it. If you’re anywhere in that corner of Colorado, I highly recommend it.

That moment is one of the things I particularly like about Claude, the AI we use. (I can’t speak for the others. Maybe they do this too.) It’s proactive. It does exactly what I ask, but then it thinks a little bit for itself. Hey, if you’re doing that, what about this?

I really appreciate that, because a lot of the time I don’t even know what to ask. So if it has a suggestion, I’m all on board.

Planning around a senior dog

Then there’s Rindo. She’s 13 now, and planning around a senior dog changes a lot, to be honest.

First, the trailer has to stay comfortable for her all the time. It doesn’t have to be cold, but we keep it somewhere around 80 degrees, which means we need shade or electricity to make that happen.

When she was younger, she came on the hikes with us. Now the middle of the day gets hot and she gets sore, so she’d rather skip it. We take her out in the morning and again in the evening, and that shapes everything in between.

If nothing tied us to the trailer, we could park it for a week and wagon wheel out from there, seeing the sights and doing all the neat hikes. With Rindo, we rarely venture out much more than an hour before we head back. And we can’t really do the long hikes we’d love to do.

Thankfully, we have a SwitchBot inside that keeps an eye on the temperature and the power. As long as my phone has service and the Starlink is hooked up, we know exactly what’s going on inside the RV. That’s a huge plus.

So Rindo is right in the middle of all our planning. She’s written into the notes our AI plans from, so she’s part of every plan from the very start.

Truth be told, until recently Erin couldn’t do the long hikes either. Before her surgery this fall, we were all kind of in the same boat, all of us hurting. (She’s been writing about the whole road back in Erin’s Corner.) Erin is well on her way now, which is awesome.

We built an app just for our traveling

This one’s a huge piece of how we use AI, and honestly, it’s freaking amazing.

This spring, out on the road, I built an app called Five Parks Scout. I’m not a programmer. I built it just by talking, out loud, until it was what we wanted. When my nephew asked what programming language I used, I told him, “Human.” (I guess that’s my OG version of Vibe Coding)

It’s the ultimate location scout. It tells us exactly where we are and exactly what we can do there. And it tells us what to expect, anywhere we are, at any time, with the click of a button.

When we pull into a new place, I either tell it where we are or just say, “Run a report from where we are,” and it uses the GPS on my phone. Either way, it writes us a full report built around us, and it saves every one so we can go back to them later. It started life as a plain document. I told it that was boring and asked for an app, and we went back and forth until it was exactly right.

It knows our trailer and how big it is. It knows how we like to camp, and it finds places to empty our tanks when we’re camping off-grid. It even warns us when a sunny day means the trailer is going to heat up. Then every report gives us:

• The history and geology, written for us, with places to film and ride
• The e-bike rules, and who’s actually in charge of which land
• Nearby e-bike trails and which ones allow dogs
• The must-do experience, the one you’d kick yourself for skipping
• Any truly great food (it’s honest when there isn’t any)
• Campgrounds our rig fits in, in case we need a backup
• Yoga filming spots with GPS and the best time to shoot
• Hot yoga studios for Erin
• Weather for our dates, with the best filming windows plus sunrise and sunset times

It has never changed where we park, because we usually have that planned. But it changes what we do every single day.

And then there’s my favorite part of every report, a section called Rindo’s Corner. It’s all about her. It finds the dog parks and the restaurants with a pet patio, so she can come to lunch with us. It finds the closest vets too, and with a 13-year-old dog, knowing where that vet is matters more every year. (There’s plenty more on how we travel with her in RV travel with a senior dog.)

This winter, weather wins

Last winter in Texas, a cold front came through and it was painfully cold. So for this coming winter, we gave the AI one rule, and only one. Weather is the only priority.

Obviously we can’t control the weather. But if we can hedge our bets a little, we’re going to. From the middle of January to the middle of March, that means we’re heading south, across Arizona and all the way to Florida.

What I can and can’t measure

If you made me put a number on all of this, I’d say it saves me an hour or two per stop, at minimum.

But that’s not what I’d tell you about. I’d tell you about Hovenweep. I’d tell you about two people who grew up in Colorado, standing at Mesa Verde for the very first time, because Claude noticed we were less than an hour away and asked.

This is the second of four pieces on how we actually use AI when we travel. The first was how it changed the way we run our retreats, the third is what I actually say to it, and the last is the notes every AI reads first. They all pick up from The Month AI Stopped Helping and Started Doing. It’s not just yoga, and it’s not just travel. It’s about how we live, and this is a big part of it now.