First, riding a motorcycle with minimum planning, only the route, is not conducive to camping. So I ended up making good time and sleeping in hotels. Future motorcycle rides will require more planning with identified camping spots, maybe even reservations. One thing I can guarantee is that I won't be camping in RV Parks.
That isn't to say they were all bad. In fact, a few were truly great: West Lake Park, Iowa; Spearfish, South Dakota; Denali National Park, Alaska... The good ones all had a few things in common, quiet, clean restrooms and showers, and a nice place for pitching a tent. The bad ones also had a few things in common, mainly road noise and unmitigated dirt and gravel.
Unfortunately, being that far north, both the good and bad had one thing in common: light. I came to realize that I slept well in my first two years of college not just because I was young but because I "dormed" in a sensory deprivation chamber. Being an interior room with thick dark curtains over the window that only led to the hall anyway under tons of concrete, a stadium, was very much like living in a cave. Of course, comparing my fellow "dormies" to cavemen wouldn't stretch the analogy too far either. Needless to say, I was awake until late and awake again early. At least I got some good walking in.
With all the light around the Summer Solstice, I would be irritable in the summer and with all the lack of light around the Winter Solstice, I would be depressed in the winter. I guess I understand better the "unique" personalities of certain northern politicians. (One of whom was in Fairbanks the weekend after we left to quit her first term governorship with a picnic at Pioneer Park. It looked like the whole town was celebrating, maybe the whole state was.)
The real problem with all the light wasn't that the light solely caused the lack of sleep, it was that there was good light for driving at all hours. This was aggravated by the placement of most of the RV Parks close to the road that had the traffic. (If they hadn't been placed there, we probably wouldn't have noticed them and not stopped.) My parents did have a truly big book of RV Parks with a lot of information. This was used as the first filter. We selected the best of the ones both on our way and in a window of when we wanted to stop. Sometimes the choices were few and our first selections were inadequate or unavailable. When this happened, we drove on to the next. At least we didn't need to worry about driving in the dark.
Every once in a while we would stay at a hotel. If I had an unlimited amount of money, I'd probably do this all the time but hotels/motels were definitely a big plus every once in a while. The one plus was not having to put shoes on and walk for a mile to go to the bathroom. (I guess the light helping me get less sleep was a plus when tenting.) One other plus that I'll mention was the air conditioning. When tenting, in addition to being light, it was hot right up until the time it wasn't. This meant that if I were fortunate enough to fall asleep on top of my sleeping bag in spite of the jake brakes and light, I would be awakened in the middle of that sleep, right about when the darkness was as good as it was going to get for sleeping, and have to crawl into my sleeping bag wasting precious minutes of sleeping time. Invariably, the cold would often trigger a hike to the restroom as well.
Sometimes the better RV Parks would have campers that loved their campfire. We didn't have any but I still had all the advantages of our fellow campers' fires. Yes, I am still a smoke magnet. Unfortunately, I found that I don't sleep so well in smoke either. My sinuses clog up.
Unfortunately, Alaska was on fire. After one night of camping, we decided to stay at a hotel in Fairbanks and took the advice of a Northpole, Alaska, visitor center attendant as to where. As we found later but didn't know at the time, this was probably the one hotel that didn't have air conditioning. Instead we had fans that sucked all the smoky air we were trying to avoid into the room to cool it off.
Disclaimer: While it may not be obvious that the trip was fun in spite of the above, there were no exaggerations needed to make this story.
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