Six campgrounds in six nights

Six nights, six different campgrounds, two national parks. On our 2025 camper trip through the American West, it is the stretch that looks busiest in the trip log.

It was not. We were not moving on: we were changing pitch.

Two counts of the same log

The 2025 log counts twenty-seven nights and seventeen lodgings, or 1.59 nights per lodging. Recounted by zone visited, the same nights give 2.08 nights per zone, 31% more. The zone for those six nights is called “Arches and Canyonlands (base: Moab)”: one place to sleep, two parks to visit.

Both figures are correct. They do not measure the same thing. The first counts beds; the second counts the places where we came to do something. It is the distinction set out in stage or lodging, and it changes the diagnosis: counted in beds, the trip seems to move on every day and a half; counted in zones, it stays put a little over two nights at a time, on average.

The figure does not say who chose

We planned this trip ourselves. No operator billed a stage as a line item. Counted in beds, it still gives a figure of the same order as on our trips sold by operators: twenty nights and eleven lodgings in the Baltics in 2026, for example.

The same figure therefore covers three causes that have nothing in common, all of which we met across our trips:

• a quotation in which every stage is a billable line, the subject of eleven hotels in twenty nights;
• a map that dictates the distance, like Iceland's ring road, in the same study;
• a stock of campgrounds that dictates the pitch, as here.

Only the first can be corrected by discussing the quotation. Base-change tolerance gives the question to ask before every move: imposed, or chosen?

What it changes when you prepare

Four moves, in this order.

1. Count by zone before judging. A run of different campgrounds around two parks is not a fragmented trip.
2. Read the reservation rule of the zone's campground before fixing the route: reservation season, when the booking window opens, number of sites. It tells you how many nights you will be able to put in the same place.
3. Book the scarcest first, then fit the rest around it. A park campground with about fifty sites comes before a private campground nearby.
4. Put the day with no plan on a two-night base, not on a pass-through pitch. The criterion stays the one from where to put the day with no plan: being able to get out on foot without taking the vehicle.

What we do not know

One trip of this kind. Counting by zone depends on how the zones are cut; that cut is ours.

We do not know whether a booking made when the window opened would have reduced the number of changes. We did not test it, and the booking order suggested above is a rule of thumb, not a result.

The gap between the two counts only exists where inventory constrains: campers, mountain huts, high season. In ordinary hotel travel the two counts converge.

Count from the log of our 2025 trip through the American West, planned by ourselves.

A figure looks wrong to you, or your own log says something else? Write to us — corrections are published.