So, we finally did it again. We took another family RV trip. After our 5 week, 8,476 mile, 22 state, 16 National Park RV trip we took in the Summer of 2019, we weren’t sure we could ever do it again. But slowly, we added the letters R and V back into our vocabulary and then after that, we finally stopped gagging when we saw an RV driving down the road. Those were the signs we needed to know that we were ready to tackle that beast again. This time, since we’re currently living in Texas for several months, it was an easy decision of where to visit. We hadn’t checked out either of the Texas National Parks (Big Bend NP and Guadalupe Mountains NP) yet, so it was a no-brainer. We also added White Sands National Park, which at the time (December 2020), was the newest National Park. We can give Trent credit for advising us to add that one to the itinerary; he is always up to date on the newest National Parks and he has amazing map skills so he knew it was close to Texas and would be the perfect addition to our trip.
In the past, we have rented an RV from one of the big companies – Cruise America (never again), El Monte, and Road Bear. We are currently living in Houston, and believe it or not, the only option in the area is Cruise America. Since that is a “never again” (trust me, there are MUCH better options), we decided to look into RVShare.com and Outdoorsy.com. These are the “AirBnb’s” of RV rental, as in, you are renting an RV directly from the owner. I’m not sure if it was because it was close to the holidays or because of the pandemic, but most of the hosts I messaged didn’t message me back. We needed a pet-friendly RV, and luckily, Mike in San Antonio came through for us. He had a 24-foot (smaller than we would have liked), pet-friendly RV available for the dates we needed. Sold! Rather than renting an RV in Houston, we realized we had to travel through San Antonio on our way out and again on our way back, so we decided to save some miles ($$$) and rent in San Antonio.
Honestly, the process of renting through Outdoorsy.com was easier than renting through one of the big companies. Prior to the trip, we had to submit our licenses and information, we were offered extra insurance (which Mike advised us to get), and all the paperwork was emailed to us. When we pulled up to Mike’s house, he gave us an overview of the RV, a refresher on how everything worked, answered our questions, we signed a couple of papers, and we were off. Mike had the RV stocked with clean linens, towels, kitchen supplies, camping supplies and more which made it super simple for us. We needed a wine opener and some hangars (which he gave us), and we were ready to go!
Once we were on the road, we realized that this RV drove better than any of the others we had rented. It was smaller, yes, but it had more power, more features, and was more comfortable to drive. Great experience so far! Oh, and since we name all of the RV’s we rent, this one needed a name too. We decided on aRVadillo (get it? We’re in Texas, LOTS of armadillos here!)
As many of you know, Texas is a HUGE state and we were headed all the way to New Mexico, so we had A LOT of driving ahead of us. We wanted to make it to White Sands National Park in New Mexico by late morning the next day which would leave us plenty of time to enjoy the park. We left Houston around 8am, drove 3.5 hours to San Antonio to pick up the RV, then drove 5 or 6 more hours to Balmorhea, Texas and stopped for the night at Saddleback Mountain RV Park, just off I-10.
Day 1 of our Christmas vacation trip was long, but everyone did great with no major incidents. We would only have 4.5 hours of driving the next day to reach our first National Park of the trip, White Sands National Park in New Mexico! We were excited!
