I was wrong about Thousand Trails. I hadn’t clicked enough on their website to get to the full details of their expanded plan. While it is indeed $134 a month for the Elite Basic plan that would give us full range of the United States, what I didn’t realize is that it requires a $600 down payment to even get into that spot. So now it becomes $600 initial, plus $134 a month for 72 months. I’m not sure what happens after that, but that does not work for us.
Tiffany was in a chat with a customer service rep at Thousand Trails, and she said she’d pass our info on to the person who was in charge of upgrades. I told him three times I didn’t have $600 to put down and that I’d have to discuss it with Tiffany. Three times I said, let me talk to my wife, before I finally hung up on him.
My first experience with Thousand Trails was pleasant and the saleswoman was not pushy at all. This guy that called me though said he was leaving in 18 minutes and then I wouldn’t have access to the special they were offering at the moment. Had this info been on their website clearly, I never would have even considered it.
So now we are looking at other options to fill out our time between Thousand Trails campgrounds. We looked at Good Sam Club and Passport America, both of which cost under $50 a year. They give us about half off at their campgrounds, so we’d still have to pay on the road, but it would only be about $12.50 to $15 a night, which is much cheaper than staying there without. Maybe we’ll get both, I’m not sure at this time, but when I get paid in October, we are definitely picking up one of them for the time in between.
Staying at Thousand Trails nonstop, while it would be nice, is simply not affordable for us right now. Tomorrow we leave our campground and have to figure out where to stay for a week. We are meeting with Tiffany’s aunt before we go to the next campground, but that still leaves us 7 nights to find somewhere to stay. We’ll probably be at Walmarts for the most part, maybe a truck stop or something in there as well.
I also tried Boondocker’s Welcome, a great site for finding places to stay, but unfortunately most of them are either not available when we need a place to stay, or they don’t have room for an RV our size. Some of them don’t have electric or water, which would be nice to have at least one of those things, so we are running out of options. We would like to have a campground to stay at, but at this time, it looks like we’ll have to stay where we can until we can afford better next month.