About Us: A Family of Six, One Lost Wheel, and the App That Came Out of It

Hi. I’m Jed. I’m a solo developer, a dad of four, and the guy who built RVRoutePlan. This is the short version of how a family weekend habit turned into a several-week trip, and how that trip turned into software.

We had the trailer. We just weren’t using it.

For a long time we were weekend people. We owned a 35-foot travel trailer, and it mostly sat. We’d take it out Friday, come back Sunday, and park it until the next window opened up. Six of us, a whole lot of gear, and a rig capable of going anywhere — used almost exclusively for two nights at a time within an hour or two of home.

Then my wife pointed out the obvious thing I had somehow missed: I work remotely. Not “remote if the office is fine with it” remote — actually remote. If I have a laptop and a signal, I have a job. So why were we coming home on Sunday?

That was the whole pitch. Let’s just go, and I’ll work from the road.

The trip that broke our assumptions

We left Spanish Fork and pointed west.

First stop was Wendover, where we boondocked out in the desert. No hookups, no neighbors, just salt flats and quiet. It was the first time it really clicked that this rig could be a house and not just a weekend toy.

From there we went to Carson City and pulled into our first honest-to-goodness trailer park campsite. The spot was tight. Tight enough that I may or may not have introduced the trailer’s bumper to a wall on the way in. We don’t need to talk about it. (Fine — we do need to talk about it, and I’m going to write that one up on its own.)

Then over to San Mateo. My mom is on her own traveling journey, so we caught up with her there. We did Alcatraz. We rode Caltrain, which had been sitting on my son’s bucket list for longer than I want to admit and which he still brings up. After that we stayed at a horse ranch with my sister and her fiancé, and then finally spent a week in Yosemite before turning for home.

Somewhere outside Ely, Nevada, we lost a wheel. Not a flat. The whole wheel.

I ended up leaving the trailer sitting on the shoulder in the middle of Nevada, driving four hours home to drop off the kids and buy parts, and coming back the next day to rescue it. It worked out. Everyone was fine. But it is the single most memorable thing that happened on that trip, and it also gets its own post.

What actually wore us out wasn’t the driving

Here’s the part I didn’t expect. The breakdown was dramatic, but it wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was the management.

Where are we staying next? How long are we here? Is there anything between here and there, or is this a ten-hour day? What does this park cost, and does our membership cover it, and is that membership the one that blacks out weekends? I was spending my evenings — after work, after the kids were down — with four browser tabs open, cross-referencing campground websites against Google Maps and trying to guess whether a leg was drivable in a day.

By the time we got home, two things were settled. We were going to need a bigger trailer. And I was going to have to build something, because doing this by hand was not sustainable for a trip longer than the one we’d just finished.

Enter RVRoutePlan

We upgraded to a fifth wheel — new to us, not new — and immediately started planning something much more ambitious: Utah to Orlando.

I built the app while we planned that trip. Not before it, not after it. The route we were plotting was the test case, and it’s still up on the site: The Route That Started It All.

Three problems drove basically everything in the first version.

1. How do you break up a trip that takes weeks?

We knew where we were starting and we knew the goal was Orlando. Everything in between was a blank. We didn’t know which nights needed a stop, whether we could get from A to B in a single day, or whether there was anything worth stopping for along the way. Planning a weekend trip is picking a destination. Planning a multi-week trip is chopping a line on a map into drivable, sleepable pieces — and that’s a different problem.

2. Where the heck are our member sites?

We pay for memberships. Multiple ones. And the only way to find out whether any of them had a spot near tonight’s stopping point was to log into four different websites, search each one, and manually plot the results against the route. Every time the route changed, I got to do it again. This is the thing that made me actually open an editor.

3. Is this route safe for my rig?

A car route and a fifth-wheel route are not the same route. Bridge clearances, grades, roads that a 60-foot combination has no business being on. “The GPS said to go this way” is how people end up backing off a mountain pass. There’s a lot to say here, and it’s getting its own post too.

Where we’re at now

I’m still a solo dev. RVRoutePlan is something I build in the margins — evenings, early mornings, and the occasional campsite with good signal.

We’re not full-timers yet. That’s the goal, and I’d like it to be sooner rather than later. For now we do long trips when we can and weekends when we can’t, and every trip surfaces something the app should have done better. That’s most of the roadmap, honestly: things that annoyed me at a picnic table somewhere in Nevada.

If you’re planning something longer than a weekend and you’ve got the four-tabs- and-a-map problem, that’s exactly who I built this for. Go plan a route and tell me what breaks.