Going on a girl camper trip and have a friend or someone you can meet up with to caravan with?  Do it!  It’s a fun start to the trip meeting your fellow campers and has a few perks too! You will feel safe following each other and if someone has car trouble or a flat, you’re there for emotional support for another person. 

Here are a few ways to make the caravan run smoothly:

Top speed should be 60 mph, especially with old campers. The wheels are small and many more rotations than a normal tire, they will heat up. Remember when caravanning, no more than 3-5 trailers in a row and leave plenty of space between each other, so cars and trucks have room to pull in between you all while getting on and off the highway. Don’t get jammed up and make sure there’s space for the person behind you to stop.

I like to meet in a large parking lot, like Wal-Mart or a department store, so we can line up and decide who will lead and who will follow up the back.  Don’t put the slowest driver in the tail end, you’ll lose her, put her in the middle. I’ve used CB’s but with not very good luck, fortunately almost everyone has a cell phone and we make a chain call; I call the person behind me and she calls the next and so on.  We decide in the beginning about when we will stop for gas or potty breaks and usually have a place picked out for lunch on the way.  Google map is helpful with the terrain map and looking up parking lots to see if there’s room to negotiate parking.   

Caravanning has helped me personally several times. I forgot to turn my lights on and the person behind me gave me a call, “you have no lights!”  Another time the girl camper I was following had her sewer hose came loose and was dragging it behind, I was lucky it was empty! There have been calls for, “your vent is open”, or “your step is half down”.

It makes the day getting there fun – Lunch and little shopping can break up the day!