How to plan a campervan trip when you have no idea where to go

You've had the week off booked since January. The van's ready. You've told yourself this is the year you get out properly, not just weekends within an hour of home.

Then you sit down to plan it and your mind goes blank.

Not because there's nowhere to go. Because there's everywhere to go, and no particular reason to pick one over another.

The paralysis is the actual problem

Most campervan planning advice assumes you've already decided where you're heading. Pick a route, book the sites, pack the van. Useful if you know you're going to Scotland. Useless if you don't know whether you want Scotland, Wales, France, or a slow week in the Dales.

This is the bit nobody writes about. The stage before planning. The stage where you open Google Maps, scroll around for twenty minutes, close the tab, and make a cup of tea instead. Then you open it again the next evening and do the same thing.

The options are all equally plausible. There's no obvious one to start with. Which means nothing feels decided, which means you don't book anything, which means the week off creeps closer with no plan attached.

Pick the shape of the week first

Stop trying to pick a destination first. Pick the shape of the week.

A few questions, asked in the right order, narrow the field faster than staring at a map.

How far are you willing to drive to get started? Two hours means a different set of regions than eight. With one week, the drive down plus the drive back eats into the trip. A closer starting point buys you more time in the good bit.

What kind of week do you want? Coastal or inland. Busy villages or empty valleys. A loop or a there-and-back. One base or a different stop every night. Most people skip these and jump straight to "where" without answering them first.

What's the weather likely doing? In April, the south of England and France are a better bet than the Scottish Highlands. In August, the Highlands are fine and the south is heaving. Time of year should shape the region, not the other way round.

What are you in the van for? Walking, cooking, reading, watching the weather change, getting the kids outside, meeting up with friends you haven't seen in a year. The honest answer narrows the region faster than any list of "best places" ever will.

Answer those four and the map shrinks from infinite to a handful of sensible options. Now picking feels possible.

A worked example

Say you've got six nights, you're starting in the North West, you want coast rather than inland, you want quiet rather than busy, and you're going in late May.

That's not "pick anywhere in the UK". That's Galloway, Pembrokeshire, the Yorkshire coast, or the quieter bits of North Wales. Four real options instead of forty plausible ones.

Now the decision is tractable. You can flip a coin, ask your partner, or just pick the one closest. The paralysis breaks once the field is small enough to hold in your head.

Picking from the shortlist

You've narrowed the map. The hard work hasn't really started.

First there's the choice between the four. Some questions tilt one region over another. If three of them are five hours from your start and one is two hours, that's a tilt. If one has an obvious place to base out of and the others need more digging, that's a tilt. If you've been to one of them and not the others, the new one tends to have the edge.

None of those tilts is decisive on its own. They add up.

Then once you've picked, the same set of questions starts again at a smaller scale. Where do you start within the region? Which loop, which there-and-back, which two nights up north and three nights down south? Which sites book up, which take vans without fuss, which lay-bys are tolerated and which aren't? Where do you fill water, where do you empty grey waste, where do you fuel up before the long stretch where you can't?

Then there's the soft questions. What's open in late May. What's busy in school holidays. What the weather usually does on that coast in that month. Where the wind comes from when it picks up. Where you'd go on the day the forecast turns and the planned walk isn't on.

Most of those questions have answers. The answers are scattered across forum threads, Google reviews from 2019, a guidebook you don't own, and four browser tabs you keep meaning to close. They don't agree on much.

This is where most of the time goes.

That's the bit between picking and going. A couple of evenings if you're efficient. More if you're not.

The week off is already booked. The van is already ready. The only thing standing between you and a good trip is deciding to stop deciding.