About Milepost,
and me

I'm John Waters. I built Milepost.

The first time I planned an RV trip for my family, I had a kitchen-table laptop and a dozen browser tabs open. National park calendars in one. State park reservation sites in another. KOA on the next. A driving-time tool. A spreadsheet I kept patching every time we changed the order of the stops. By the end of two evenings, I had a route. I also had a printout I'd already lost faith in.

The trip went well. The planning didn't.

Milepost is the tool I wished I'd had open as a thirteenth tab. It puts the route on a map, holds your reservations in one place, and sends you a copy you can print before you leave. It doesn't try to do everything. It tries to do the parts that turn an evening into a weekend.

It works on a phone. The planners I tried first really wanted a laptop, which is a problem when a campground change comes in at 8 a.m. and you are about to roll out. Milepost handles the change from the cab of the truck.

I live in Montana with my wife. We use Milepost to plan our own trips, sometimes a few weeks ahead, sometimes a few days. We've stayed in national parks, state parks, KOAs, and the occasional gravel pull-off behind a brewery. Most of those trips have gone fine. The ones that didn't usually shared the same handful of mistakes, and I think about those when I'm deciding what Milepost should do next.

I built this on my own, and I plan to keep it that way for a while. There are bigger trip-planning tools out there, owned by larger companies. Most of them are good at one thing and busy at others. Staying solo means I get to read every email, fix the bug a real person reported this morning, and decide what ships next based on what helps the trip, not what moves the quarter.

Reach out

If you have a question about Milepost, you can email me directly at hello@milepostplanner.com. I read it.